Beginning of the Week Randomness

I wonder, if I were to look back as past posts, if I would find a pattern to my randomness. I'd bet that most of the extremely random ones would have been written on Mondays. I guess as a new week starts I feel almost giddy. Just so excited to have fun things ahead, and bit overwhelmed by it all. Not sure where to start.

First of all, I want to tell you, my house smells AMAZING right now!!! This is the reason why:

There are two great things about this pie. First of all, I worked myself out of my comfort zone by inviting two women from my ward and their kids to come make pie filling with me. I'm trying really hard to release myself from the madhouse, or invite others in every so often. It was very fun! The other thing that makes this pie special is that I have met my Weight Watchers goal, so I can now afford to have a larger piece of this pie if I want to. I still have six weeks of maintenance to go through, but it's nice to know that I can now indulge just a little bit from time to time.

So, here are the things I'm looking forward to this week:

Q has three soccer games this week. Tonight's is against my alma mater. Go Aloha!!!

I'm getting my haircut tomorrow morning. Finally! I'm more than two months overdue. You can tell when money gets a little tighter around here, my needs are the first thing to go.

I get to go visit some of the YW in their homes this week with our YW president. I just LOVE these girls!

T's second birthday is Friday! Wow! That has gone so fast. I even slipped up once and said it was his first birthday. Where has the time gone? We only have big parties every four years, so we will just have a quiet, family cake and ice cream affair this year.

Friday morning we've invited all the women in the ward to drop their kids off at our house, so they can have some time to themselves. It's a teacher workday, and Z won't be home, so I thought it would be a good opportunity for my kids to offer some service. We've recruited a bunch of the youth too. If you have any good, simple craft or game ideas for various ages of kids, I'd love your input.

Friday afternoon, we're going to Studio Max to get our annual family portrait taken. They do the fun old-fashioned (depression era) photos. We actually ran into their representatives at Safeway two weeks ago and made an appointment there. They have a coupon right now in which for $9.99 you get a big 14"x 16" portrait. Sitting fees are waived. I was happy to get this good deal. Of course they'll try to sell us everything under the sun, but that's kind of how the game is played, huh?

Saturday will contain our customary four soccer games.

Other than these calendared things, I'm looking forward to coupon shopping again this week. I'm hoping to learn more of the tricks of the trade form Rebecca sometime soon. So far I feel really good about the shopping I've done. When I got together with Rebecca a couple weeks ago, she Lyndee and I were joking about how we should get to keep the money we save. I brought this idea to Zan, and he surprised me with, "Why shouldn't you? You're doing all the work. All of it might be too much, but how much would you be happy with." I told him that even 10% of it would make me happy. He asked me what I'd do with it, and I told him I'd save it and use it for school. So, I'm working really hard now to save even more.