A candle lights his head

We interrupt our regularly schedule blogging for this important announcement: we have been released as Seminary teachers! As of their Christmas break, December 18th, we will no longer have the boys (and the one girl) over any more, nor will we have to get up at 5:30am every week day and be, you know, all spiritual...or something like that. My hope is that now my first child will learn how to sleep past 6:00am on a good day, and my second child will never know that such awful times in the morning actually exist! All we'll have left to do are the innumerable end of the quarter reports for our officious supervisor (that I will NOT miss! Huzzah!!) and the obligatory mourning that we won't see the kids as regularly or on such an up close and personal basis. They drive me crazy sometimes, but they really are fun to have around.

BUT, before you send congratulatory or conciliatory thoughts our way, know that this release was quickly followed by the husband getting a different assignment, one that came out of the blue and entails even more responsibility, much to our collective chagrin. By the time I post this on Sunday, it will all be official, so I can tell you that now he is 1st counselor in the bishopric. ACK! For my uninitiated readers, this means he is now part of the group who take care of all the administrative details (both temporal and secular) of our congregation. It means he's gone more to meetings, which will through a crimp in our very satisfactory bedtime routine with J. It means he will sit on the stand during our Sacrament meeting, which will be a new challenge for us to face with Toddler J, who is very possessive of his parents right now, and with Baby #2 on the way, since I'm pretty sure he'll want to be fed and have diapers changed during that meeting and Toddler J will be just as accommodating about that as he will be about being separated from daddy, whom he'll already be seeing less of. It means the husband will have more to do all around but also that we will have more blessings for his service, so I'm counting on some of those blessings to help ease my Terrible Two Year Old through the transition. For now, I'm still in the presidency of the women's organization, but we'll have to play that by ear and see if we as a family can handle doing both at the same time. I know, I know, people do this all the time, people like my parents, for instance, but I'm a big wuss, okay??

In the meantime, the husband is out of town in Las Vegas at pharmacy's annual convention where he is, among other things, sussing out some potential job prospects in places not here. So our tenure could be shorter than everyone thinks. Plus, we've all gotten yucky colds after all our travels, colds that keep getting worse and worse. J's is the worst, of course, and he's miserable, as is his mommy and, apparently, so is the husband. So just a little bit of stress around here!