Moran Family Fun

Today was the big performance, the day the we'd finally get to see the results of all Samantha's efforts on this play. She was excited and nervous and scared and happy. We were too! The Drama Club performed E xposé: Holiday Celebrities Tell All!, which was a really funny production and without a doubt, the best middle school play I've ever seen. Here's a brief synopsis I found online:       Every month many look to their calendars and start counting down the days until the next holiday. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving -- like little presents lined up throughout the year, giving us a chance to relax. But what about those who are working behind the scenes to make these holidays great? What  about  the everyday problems on Cupid,  leprechauns , and the New Year's Baby? Do we ever stop to think about their needs? Their wants? No! And that's why they're on strike.      Journey through the bizarre, strange, and riotously funny underbelly ...

I just couldn't decide what to write about today. It's been a pretty basic day without much exciting happening. When I asked the girls what I could write about I got four different responses. So I'm going to go with it and write about a little bit of everything today. It was another happy mail day around here. There were letters (not bills or catalogs or credit card offers) in our mailbox AND there were two packages to be collected. One package was an enormous box containing Jared's bicycle that he shipped to Sicily and I'm pretty sure never used because he has a company car. So he boxed it up and mailed it back home. Box number two was a Christmas gift from the Kennedys! Because I have no self control (remember yesterday's post?) I opened that package while sitting in the car in the parking lot of the post office. Inside I found  Stories from Home 2017: an Advent Book  and as soon as I read the title I started to weep. A little backstory here. Larisa is an ...

Oh man, we're getting so close to the end of the month and I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the first year EVER I've actually written a post every. single. day. Yay me! In the past, I've either skipped days and just let it slide or I've skipped days and then tried to make up for it by posting multiple times in one day. This year we're three posts away from perfection in my November challenge. Maybe I can take that perfection and success and use it as motivation to be as perfect as possible with other goals I've set? Yesterday Emily and Abigail came home from working out with their soccer friends and told me that they've decided they need to go on a diet. We had a little discussion about the purpose of diets (to lose weight) and the fact that neither one of those skinny girls needs to lose any weight. They explained that it wasn't a diet really, but just a goal to eat more healthfully. Which is an admirable goal, right? Pretty much every me...

Because of a handy dandy email notification service, I always know when there's a package waiting for us at the post office. In the past when we've lived overseas that was not the case. Instead, we'd just be surprised by a little yellow slip of paper in our mailbox anytime there was a package waiting. We'd then take that slip to the pickup window and collect our packages. I can tell you from years of experience that it's really disappointing to go to the post office hoping for a package and finding an empty mailbox instead. It's so much better now that I get an email notifying me that we have a package waiting at the post office - there's no more disappointment.  Two emails came my way today so I drove to the base to pick them up. After a four-day weekend, the line for package pickup was insane and I was waiting for at least thirty minutes. The line stretched the full length of the post office and then wrapped around and doubled back on itself. Package ...

I taught the lesson in Relief Society today, taking the topic for our discussion from Bonnie L. Oscarson's General Conference talk from last month, "The Needs Before Us." Sister Oscarson reminded us that, "...i t’s  easy  to  miss  some  of  the  greatest  opportunities  to  serve  others  because  we  are  distracted  or  because  we  are  looking  for  ambitious  ways  to  change  the  world  and  we  don’t  see  that  some  of  the  most  significant  needs  we  can  meet  are  within  our  own  families,  among  our  friends,  in  our  wards,  and  in  our  communities.  We  are  touched  when  we  see  the  suffering  and  great  needs  of ...

President Boyd K. Packer said, "Family time is sacred time and should be protected and respected." We like to say that we love to play games as a family and we have the closet full of games to prove it. In reality, the thing we do most often as a family is watch movies and we have the movie collection to prove that as well. Since it's a long weekend and, unlike most of the other Americans we know, we're not traveling anywhere we've had tons of time to watch television together. The couch is covered in cozy blankets and squishy pillows and there are permanent indentations in the cushions from our behinds being planted in one place for so long.  We set aside today for a Flash Season 2 marathon! Twenty-three episodes is a lot to get through in one day and we're not going to reach our goal, but we did have lots of snacks to fuel our efforts. The girls requested healthy-ish food for the day so we pulled out all the fruits and vegetables from the fridge an...

Strangely enough, Black Friday is a thing in the UK too. I guess they've adopted some of our American ways. I did a little research to satisfy my curiosity about how this very American day crossed over the pond. Black Friday started here as an online Amazon event in 2010. It wasn't until 2013 that brick and mortar retailers jumped on the bandwagon. So it's still a relatively new event for British shoppers. But today wasn't a day filled with shopping for us as I'm much more likely to shop online than to line up early in the morning for the chance at a good deal.  Instead, we had plans to head over to a friend's house today to help them do some cleaning. They're getting ready for a move and have an infant so extra hands are always a good thing. Since we make five extra sets of hands we were able to accomplish a lot in just a couple of hours. Emily scrubbed the kitchen, everybody washed walls and baseboards, and Samantha and I shared the vacuuming and mopp...

This is the second year in a row that we didn't have Thanksgiving at our home. Last year we celebrated at the dining hall here on base because we were still living in a hotel. This year our friends the Arteagas (who we met while living in a hotel last year) invited us to share Thanksgiving at their home. It's a different experience, not making the full meal. We were able to sleep in and take it easy pretty much all day. There was some work to be done in the kitchen because we did contribute some of our favorite sides and desserts to the feast, but not very much work and it certainly wasn't an all-day endeavor.  Natalie has loved pumpkin pie ever since Mrs. Bainter, her second-grade teacher, shared her secret family recipe with the class. She has been looking forward to Thanksgiving and making her pumpkin pie for months now. I set her loose in the kitchen and she did a fantastic job following the recipe and making a pretty perfect looking pie that also tasted great. I...

Breaking with tradition, we decorated the house for Christmas the day before Thanksgiving instead of the day after as we usually do. We carried in all the boxes from the garage as part of our family night on Monday. We also carried in tons of spiders that had taken up residence on the bottoms of the boxes but we think the eight-legged visitors have all been taken care of now. I was kind of hesitant to touch the stuff again though - what if there were more spiders lying in wait? In the end, my desire for order won out. There was only so long that I could stand having a wall of Rubbermaid totes sitting in our dining room. Samantha, Natalie, and I unboxed everything and set up a few zones before we started decking the halls. We placed nativities on the dining room table, everything for Christmas cards and letters by the computer, ornaments near the fireplace, and candles and miscellaneous decorations together in the dining room. Doing it that way made it so much easier to actually fin...

I can't believe I'm posting this, but the only photo from today was one of my own rear end. Today was busy. Not just regular busy but non-stop, exhausting, feels so good to finally sit down busy.  So busy that I didn't take a picture of anything else despite there being plenty of other, better things on which I could have focused my camera. But every picture tells a story, even if I'm not sure exactly what story this one is trying to tell.    I spent my day at the intermediate school taking care of PTO business. It was our teacher apprecation luncheon today and our amazing parents stepped up and volunteered to bring all the potluck items! All I needed to do was be there to organize things as they came in and do a little decorating in the teacher's lounge. We went with a rustic/simple theme and used kraft paper for tablecloths and black burlap as runners on each table. Mason jar vases holding autumn floral arrangements served as centerpieces.    We're al...

The photos I took today definitely have a theme and that theme is food. Honestly, food may be my love language. I'm kind of in love with food and cooking and one main way I like to show my love is through food.  Food brings people together while it nourishes them. When life is at it's craziest, sometimes bringing someone a meal is the best thing you can do. It shows you care in a very tangible way. Some of my favorite meals have been the ones that have been brought to our home after each of the girls was born. I still remember eating the most amazing chicken noodle soup of my life (homemade noodles!) while holding a newborn Emily. So if I make you food or invite you over for a meal it's because I love you and want you to feel that love.  Natalie wanted pizza for lunch today. But not the pizza that was on the menu in the cafeteria, she wanted to redeem the Book It coupon she'd received for reaching her reading goal. She had it all planned out. I was to go to Piz...

For a Sunday, today was a slightly eventful day. I woke up with the worst migraine I've probably ever had, Emily was released from her calling in Young Women today and welcomed to Relief Society even though she's going to continue attending Young Women until she graduates, we went to the Wake's home for dinner and had a great time strengthening our friendship with them, and we've got a family of seven that we just met today staying in our house tonight. But it's late and I'm tired and I didn't take a picture to go along with any of the things that happened.  Instead, I'm going to share the talk I delivered in church last month. A couple of the speakers in Sacrament Meeting today mentioned things that were similar to what I'd talked about so it was on my mind.  I pulled it up when we got home (yes, I save my talks) and read it. It was good for me to go over it and have the things I learned while preparing it brought to mind again. I thought I...