Because I'm a Mormon, This is What I Did This Week

1. I went to the dry pack cannery for the very first time. For my two non-Mormon readers, this is a place where you can put dry food like flour, rice, beans etc. in cans and seal 'em up tight with this cool spinny machine so they'll last for 30 years. That way, when the zombies attack (see previous post), you'll at least have some rice to make you feel better. Lots of people can things like hard red wheat, but since I've never made bread from scratch in my entire life, I focused on canning things like dried apples. No cooking required. And yum!


Bring it on, zombies. Bring it on.
(To clarify, of course Mormons don't really believe in zombies. If we did, would I be tauting them like that? Don't think so.)

2. I sent Ethan on his first winter camp for Scouts this weekend. He held his own. I kept thinking about him that night, all huddled up, teeth chattering, but he assured me that he stayed nice and warm in his double sleeping bag. A friend of his apparently "almost" got his toes frost-bit (according to Ethan, of course, so take this with a grain of rice. I have plenty.)


I've gotta admit, there are some things about Boy Scouts that I just don't understand, but I'd better get my head around it because I'm going to have a Boy Scout pretty much continuously for the next 16 years. For my two non-Mormon readers, the Church's youth program for boys from 12-18 is connected with the Boy Scout program. It's a great program. It's also a lot of work and pressure, complete with papers that need signatures and camps that require tinfoil dinners and badges that necessitate sewing. (I accidentally typed "swearing." Freudian?). Did I mention it's a great program?

3. I started marshalling troops for our Relief Society's upcoming production of Women at the Well in March. For my two non-Mormon readers (and my Mormon readers who tend to stay away from Mormon pop/inspirational music), Women at the Well is a production (not really a play) with narration and music about women during the time of Christ. Although Mormon pop/inspirational music has an undeniably high cheese factor, this particular production is actually pretty good. And somehow--miraculously, amazingly--all seven of the women I asked to sing (and SOLOS, no less) said yes. Enthusiastically. A few even thanked me for asking. It's probably going to be a lot of work, but I'm strangely okay with that. Grumpy about merit badge paperwork, okay about organizing slightly cheesy Mormon pop/inspirational productions. There you go.

4. Went out to lunch yesterday with the editors of the Mormon magazines represented at The Red Brick Store, our newborn Mormon Pubs blog. So I headed out with Kathy, my dearest compadre and editor of Segullah (of course!), to Thaifoon and ate Pad Thai and lettuce wraps with the editors of Sunstone and Dialogue. It was a ton of fun . . . except I forgot to turn my phone on vibrate and found after dropping Kathy off (3 minutes from my house) that apparently Wyatt had decided to stage a nap strike, today of all days, and my kids (happy MLK Day kids! It's babysitting time!) were calling me every twenty minutes wailing, "He won't go to sleep! Please come home! Pleeeaaaaaassse!" Everyone survived, though, even if Wyatt's diaper was on all skiwompus. It's good for the older kids to deal with stressful situations without mom around, right? Builds character? Thought so!

Now it's time to get the kids out the door for school. Jonas just said, "Hey Mom, aren't you going to do something for me?" "Like what?" I asked. (He's already been breakfasted up.) "I don't know," he replied. "Tell me to go upstairs and put on my socks."

See? A little character building is entirely appropriate.