Moran Family Fun

Those daily posts in November were a lot of work and I was happy to have made it through the month so I could be finished with it, but then I started to kind of miss writing each day. Anyone else miss my daily ramblings? No, just me? Either way, I'm back at it again! Not daily writing, but it will be good to get back to posting every Sunday. That was my original intention back in 2009 when I started this blog even though it's never been something that has really happened. Sometimes I post more frequently than once a week but usually it's much less than that.  We're a third of the way through what is arguably the busiest month of the year and we've already managed to pack a ton into ten short days. Strangely, most of what what we did starts with the letter S. We'll cover just the highlights below! The first exciting thing in December was having a day out in London with Katie!  She's been studying in Seville this semester and we were so happy to ...

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...