Friday Update #5 (2/6/15) **needs photos

There were some tears after the Superbowl, for sure. It was a pretty rough game that will take a long time to recover from. Unrelated to the Superbowl, though, there were some really hard parts to this week. Some hard but good conversations and a lot of disobedience (on the kid's part, primarily) and frustration (on my part, primarily). I got pretty exasperated pretty quickly all week and had to do a lot of apologizing, as well as a lot of disciplining. It's cyclical, I suppose, and most likely because I start to slack off a bit on consistent discipline and prayer and then this week I let it escalate before I finally caught myself and spent a whole day praying before I said or did anything!

I'm actually pretty pleased with where we are, discipline wise, right now. We have some good things going on. Now to just keep it up!

The original plan was for Seth's brother, Caleb, to fly in for a visit and attend the Superbowl parade. Since that *didn't happen* he was just here for a visit, from Tuesday through Sunday, and then Seth's dad, Jim, drove over Thursday night and left Sunday morning.

We definitely did a lot of just hanging out at our house, but Seth and Caleb went bowling  and maybe even to a movie? and we all went to the YMCA for the boys' classes and plenty of hoops, lots of TBS basketball (two regular season games and an elimination round to determine playoff seeding) and the LeMay Car Museum. The museum was actually a lot bigger than I thought it would be. The website said they had 350 cars on display but it sure seemed like more! I was probably more critical than necessary of the curating, because as a non-car person, I felt pretty lost through most of the museum. The signage was pretty inadequate, with the exception of a small exhibit on British invasion cars that actually presented a coherent and thorough narrative. If someone already knows a lot about cars, however, they would probably enjoy it quite a bit. If anything, perhaps it was good for me to walk through the museum and force myself to pay attention and try to enjoy it because that's more likely the experience that most people have going into most museums (or at least history museums).

Ezra is in this phase where he says rude things in an attempt to be funny. I'm 95% sure he's not trying to be mean, but the things he says when he's trying to joke actually are mean. It's pretty hard to deal with, actually, because he doesn't understand why we're chastising him. We definitely need wisdom for this phase!

It was fun to hang out with Caleb, since we don't get to see him often. Seth and he talk on the phone pretty consistently, and play fantasy sports together, but I almost never talk to him. He always asks about the boys and I while he and Seth are talking, but I need to be better about asking after him when Seth gets off the phone. And texting him. We want to go visit him as our next trip (after visiting Seth's grandma in the LA area), perhaps this winter or next spring.

{photos to come}