I'm now a scout leader for the 8-9 year old boys. It's fun at times, but it is so time consuming. This month we're learning about dinosaurs complete with paper mache' dino masks, clay fossil collections, a dinosaur skit for pack meeting, and a trip to the local earth science museum. We have scouts every week, a regional meeting once a month, a local meeting once a month, and a pack meeting once a month. Too much time with obnoxious little boys.
Two weeks ago I had to give a 12 minute speech in front of the congregation. It was not fun. However, two good things came from it:
- 1) I learned a lot about the humanitarian stuff the church is involved in which I hadn't known before. My favorite thing was learning that for many years the LDS church has partnered with the Red Cross and United Nations, sending funding and volunteers all over the world to vaccinate children for measles. In the 90’s when they started, deaths each year were in the millions. Last year in 2008, the number of children who died from measles had fallen to around 190,000 worldwide. When my kids are grown and gone, I would love to live in third world countries and give kids measles shots.
- 2) a lady that lives down the street sent me some hot, fresh homemade bread and a thank you note for sharing my thoughts. As soon as the door closed, Calvin and I sat on the couch, pulled it apart with our hands, and ate the whole thing. It was divine. Too bad for Andy that he's always out of town.
The other day Andy and Calvin were playing on the front lawn. They waved to a man down the street, who didn't wave back and just went inside his garage. Two minutes later he pulled up in front of our house in his golf cart and took Calvin for a ride around the culdesac. I absolutely love our neighborhood.
Andy is teaching the 8 year olds on Sundays. He generally doesn't like it, except that 1) he makes fun projects like construction paper pinwheels and the kids love him, and 2) his partner is a bomb detective and they love to share macho boy stories.
And finally, before I'm done boring you, I will share one last thing that happened last week. For those of you who don't know, we're all assigned a few ladies, and each month we visit each other. It's not my favorite thing. The other night my partner couldn't go, so I went alone with Calvin. The lady I visited was really nice and had three little girls running around. Calvin started wandering around her house, and I was embarrassed, but the lady said, no, just let him go he can play with the girls. Well at some point all of the girls were in the room with us, and there was no Calvin to be seen. I started to get nervous, but I didn't want to be rude and wander through this person's house, so I just called out to him. When he didn't come back, the lady went and looked for him and then screamed. I ran back to see what had happened.
I found them in the bathroom, and my stomach just dropped. Calvin had taken the soggy t.p. from the toilet and thrown it all over her walls, floors and showers. It was disgusting. She was explaining that the toilet hadn't been flushed because her little girl was just learning how to use it and didn't know how to flush yet. I don't know if I was more humiliated that my kid had thrown stinky pee-soaked tissue all over her house, or if she was more mortified because her toilet was un-flushed. It was very awkward. I will never take that boy with me anywhere ever again.
The End.
