a song in a minor key featuring thomas with the upbeat hook

i posted this entire post on saturday, while i was crying into my protein shake and feeling sorry for myself. then i went to church yesterday and realized i needed to make some serious edits. edits will be in RED. 

note, while i do believe that everyone should be able to cry about their first world problems and feel some validation, i would be utterly remiss if i also did not record the BLESSINGS that occurred with the struggle. 

i have been struggling the past few weeks! mostly over things insignificant in the eternal perspective but nevertheless things that drag you down in the dumps!

i'm still struggling with photo download drama, but here's a list to illustrate my dumps:

 a gym bro was really mean to me last week and i cried. i came home and thomas was the perfect gym therapist and reassured me that i was using good form and i am working hard and that guy was probably intimidated that i know what a zurcher squat is and he didn't. people are threatened by confident, well-educated women. 

i pulled one of my lats and now it's hard to do anything, especially make right hand turns or open the dishwasher. so that's oddly specific and dumb and it makes basic things i enjoy hard to do. thomas has made sure i'm doing exercises to stretch and rest and foam roll at appropriate intervals. 

i hit a car in front of the school. damage was minor but there was still damage and i'm embarrassed because it was such a small mistake that's still going to cost plenty. thomas was super calm and laid back as i laid out the details and offered nothing but support and reassurance. 

i got my hair cut and instead of a following the example photo and explicit instructions to not mess with the length, my stylist chopped off 6 INCHES and made my hair look like a stereotypical mom haircut. i've been going to the same stylist for 4 years and she's now fired. she stopped listening to me two haircuts ago but the color was still good so i stayed with her. thomas is the best though because instead of convincing me the haircut looked good, he and i commiserated about how deeply i was wronged by a stylist who thought she knew what i would like better than me. it is just hair and it will grow back but i still don't want to hear you say that to me. 

look at that hack job! 

mood:

bang bang sauce that fell out of the back of my car as i was unloading  this has become a thing. i need to figure out a system for the back of my car. i had a laundry basket back there for a while but that was simply facilitating the dumping of larger quantities of stuff on my driveway. "you're murdering a lot of liquids these days." thomas

 

the end. the end. 

momtoberfest

the fact of the matter is that i need a new computer. i only have a few pictures from the past month because my phone and computer don't like talking to each other. much happened. hersch did a season of soccer. athena blythe had field day. scarlett did math tutoring, swim team and theater. i got some really great pictures of reagan at his school halloween party and a football game with his crush/pe teacher, coach brenner. let me tell you about the day that i dropped him off at school and reagan almost jumped out of the car shouting, "i love you, coach brenner!" but no one will see the photographic evidence.

 alas, here are the photos that did download:

i made frankenstein guacamole for general conference weekend.

 herschel really wanted a truck cake so i whipped one of those up. 

scarlett and i watched the women's session together on saturday night. i loved it. i'm looking forward to the new program that is starting in january. big stuff is in the works and i'm glad to be part of it.

this is the section of the month where i have pictures on my phone but not on my computer:

scarlett's district honor's chorus festival(not really a festival) in athens where we ate crepes for lunch

our ward's fall festival(also not really a festival) where yet again there was no trunk or treating. i will mention this every year until it changes.

athena blythe staged a fake mini wedding between two teenagers at church. she planned out all the details down to the lacy handkerchief wedding veil and everyone went along with it and it was ridiculous and fun and no one can resist going along with athena blythe's plans. then a few days later i made her a little wedding cake because i'm an enabler. then this week at church she kept pestering this same poor teen bride whether she was pregnant yet. athena blythe knows  a little too much about the biological process and length of gestation for comfortable conversation in the hallways at church. 

i hit some big weightlifting goals:

thomas makes the difference on my big lifts. if your spotter loves you, you can communicate better on what you can handle.

i wore my darth vader shirt to the gym on halloween. 

 athena blythe wore this to school on halloween to help celebrate the day of the dead. it was 74 degrees at 7:15 that morning.

i went to hersch's school for their "book character praise parade" which is the evangelical way of saying halloween without being accused of loving demons(it's a thing, yo). no masks so hersch was just a hairy little boy. 

scarlett and a darling friend were dorothy and the wicked witch. i hate that i didn't get a picture of them together. i bought a pair of fuchsia nike cortez to stand in for the ruby slippers because i've really been wanting a fuchsia pair of nike cortez for a really long time. scarlett and i both wear the same shoes size now so we're in a win win shoe situation. comfort on halloween and i expanded my sneaker collection, on sale no less!

athena blythe wanted to be violet beauregard because of her current willy wonka fascination. however in the past week, she declared that she wanted to be a yodeler instead. i don't know how to create a yodeler costume so i cajoled her into wearing the violet beauregard that i had already put effort into acquiring. we used blue eye shadow for her face. we simply sprinkled her face with a bit of water and used a large blush brush and voila!

 reagan as buzz lightyear. he had the best time again because he loves halloween every year.

pretty much the cutest little chewbacca. he was a trooper. by 6pm,we'd had a day of thunderstorms. when we started trick or treating the weather had dropped down to 50 degrees and he was the toastiest out of all of us.

reagan's teacher lives one street over and we were able to trick or treat to her. reagan pretends he doesn't like her, but he secretly loves her. not like coach brenner but there is plenty of high regard. 

 i made a pathetic costume attempt this year and after i realized that neither reagan's storm trooper nor reagan's darth vader costume could fit over my quads(weightlifter problems), i found this sad little never worn hamburger costume. i hugged it close to my body all night for warmth.

thomas won halloween with his RunDMC costume he wore to work. he missed the costume contest because he was actually doing work that day but the consensus was that he would have won had he been there. he's a winner in my heart.

this most recent saturday, scarlett and i helped with the middle school theater work day, painting sets and noticing that several kids had way nicer phones than i will ever own. note the length of scarlett's mane. it's crazy long now. 

 finally, this is how reagan does fast sunday. he puts the bowl of grapes, his favorite thing to snack on, on top of the cabinets. it's a good game plan.

the end. i hope everything is spelled correctly because i'm not going back to check.