June 5th - for Steve

Well, Steve came home from church today and told me he had brought his computer home so I could blog about our day yesterday because he wanted to read about it. Curious for sure, but I won't argue with a chance to blog and regain some sanity. So here you go sweetheart . ..

I knew yesterday was going to be a busy day, but I still didn't get myself up and going like I should have in the morning. I started feeling really yucky Friday night (fighting off mastitis . . . again), so a 6 am start, which would have been wise, just didn't happen. Steve was officiating his first ever "church wedding" and Josh was the ring bearer. They both needed to leave a little after 10 for pictures. We were also having a KASH picnic in the evening that I needed to prepare a few things for.
So basically the morning involved, bathing Josh and Mary and gettting them dressed, making 3 batches of breadsticks and a cake, making and printing a wedding card, finding money to put in the card :), asking the kids to clean the living room, feeding the kids, sewing up a dress Hannah picked out for Ruth to wear, making sure the remaining seven kids were properly attired (modest, matching and clean - harder than you might think), asking the kids to clean the living room - again, loading the van, answering phone calls, packing clothes to change into for the picnic, oh, and getting myself dressed. Finally, we headed out around 11:45. Whew!

The wedding was very nice. I noticed that I'm viewing weddings from the mother of the bride perspective now. :) I'm still trying to figure out how Steve is going to walk the girls down the aisle and officiate the wedding as well, but we probably have a while to figure that out (eight years if Hannah marries at the same age I did)! Of course, I was holding Mary and Ruth decided to be "a pill" (as grandma Alexander would have said), which is usually the job her brothers cover. So, it was a bit high stress trying to keep all eight kids in a good mood for the whole wedding.

After the wedding I took seven of the kids to the reception while Steve and Josh did more pictures. I will admit that by this point in the day I had a few regretable lapses in my gentle and quiet spirit. Kids not understanding directions, fussy due to lack of naps, hovering over and tugging on Mary to give her kisses, and pulling on my arm while I'm holding a baby in the other arm and balancing in heels brought my sin nature to the front! About the time we got our plates, it was time to head out to pick up the chicken for the picnic.

Praise the Lord for a kind husband that kept the boys with him while I took the girls to the picnic. Unfortunately, I took the van that did NOT have the cups for the picnic, but that really was the last thing on my mind at the time. So, we picked up the chicken and headed to the park. We unloaded everything and changed in the bathroom. This is when I realized the one thing I had not done all day was to check the weather report. My how interesting . . . for the third year in a row, weather has been an issue with our end of the year KASH picnic. It has now been renamed the end of the year KASH thunderstorm picnic. We all gathered under the shelter for the first two cells to pass by, but when the third was coming, we invited everyone to our house. It seemed like a really good idea at the time, I just lacked the omniscience to realize our power was going to go out.

Steve brought the kids home as quickly as he could to do some emergency cleaning, and now you understand the foreshadowing in the first paragraph about asking the kids to clean the living room several times before we left! So, we had about 50 people in our house when we heard the siren going off in the heights. Then the power goes off, and doesn't come back on. In fact, it didn't come back on until around 7:00 am, just as Steve was leaving for church.

So that was our day. Understandably, we have five people sleeping right now!