Surprises

The past week has been full of surprises, mostly good.



We enjoyed a visit from Grandma Barber and Melissa (not a surprise-we always have fun with them). We even managed to make it to a local performance of "Big River," which was surprisingly good. Best of all was the actor who portrayed Jim--he has a CD out and was definitely the best part of the show. Pretty powerful singing.



We realized shortly before leaving that a live performance is not the place to take a baby (we usually take Zeke everywhere), so we left him home with the babysitter (who had brought a friend). Yeah, well, in the past three weeks he has decided he no longer likes bottles. He refused to eat all night and we came home to a hungry (sleeping) baby and two frazzled babysitters. We're now doing bottle training, every night, but he refuses to eat unless he's distracted by the TV. Evidently it's entertaining enough to make him forget the injustice of eating from a bottle.



Saturday night, Bruce and the boys finished cleaning the basement and sat down to play. Riley can navigate our basement floor fine when it's covered with toys, but wouldn't you know, when there are only two or three toys on the floor, he trips and breaks his arm. He cried for about 10 minutes after the fall, and the arm bugged him just a little that night and Sunday. On Monday it was mostly better but we still took him to the doctor. By the time of the appointment, he was playing with it just fine, wiggling like nothing was wrong. The doctor squeezed and prodded and decided it was probably not broken (Riley didn't even flinch at all this), but said he'd order an x-ray if it would make me feel better. So a few pictures later, Riley had a cast on and the doctor said it was good he hadn't made any bets on Riley's arm. Riley was pretty uninterested in the whole thing, even getting the cast on; all he cared about was getting a lollipop at the end. The cast doesn't bother him and hasn't slowed him down at all. For anyone planning to break a bone, I think Riley's method is the way to go.



Sunday's great surprise was that we had almost the entire choir show up to practice after a week off and with no reminder phone calls! Maybe they're all finally getting in the habit of coming. I have high hopes for their performance on April 20 (another Mack Wilberg arrangement) and we wish everyone could be here to hear.



Finally, Bruce was surprised by the delicious pinto bean pie I made for dessert at our ward Emergency Preparedness Fair last night. Or was it a pecan pie? It was hard to tell a difference...