Winning the Lottery

We had a GREAT day yesterday! I'm not sure Landon would agree with me though. He spent much of the morning in his room. Screaming, kicking, crying....tantrums are becoming an art in our house. And then, in the evening he decided to throw another one at the church so he was sent to the wall for quite a while. He even got a chair for that one, it was so long. Let's hope HE has a better day today...but I'm going to have a hard time topping my wonderful Friday. After an excellent visit with my visiting teachers - They are soooo wonderful!! - I got a call from the local community center informing me that Landon had won the lottery ( literally, it was a lottery system. If you are not in the system, they have to draw your name out of a hat for you to get in.) and been accepted into their preschool program. I really can't convey to you how exciting this is for me! I am very critical of preschools. Being a degree holding preschool teacher myself, I have a hard time finding a "good" one. With that in mind I've heard nothing but good things about this teacher. She even has a Masters Degree in teaching preschool. It's also an affordable program, he will be going Monday through Friday 12:30 to 3:00, and it will only cost us around $250....so much cheaper than the $400 at the other preschools we've looked at. Now you may be asking "If you're a preschool teacher, why are you paying to send your son to someone else?" It's because Landon doesn't do well with me. I'm hoping that another authority figure will be able to help him overcome his habit of speaking gibberish and help him make friends. I know he really wants friends, but he just doesn't know how to go about making them. I see so much of my shy self in him. I remember going to preschool and playing by myself most of the time, because I was too afraid to play with the other kids. In so many ways I'm still that little girl, sitting in the corner by myself, I just want something better for my little boy.

The day just got better for us. We picked up the mail as we left for the Ward Primary Talent Show. Much of our mail is still sent to my parents house. We feel badly about this. We use their address as a permanent one, because we know we can always be reached through them, but this means that they get a lot of our junk mail. We tried to change it a few weeks ago with a certain school insurance company and they wouldn't let us, so the frustration continues, however sometimes my parents do get something that is important for us. When we got a letter from her last night, we thought it was something from that insurance company, but were pleasantly surprised to find it was from the Army. Chris has been fighting for the school money that the Army promised him for the last 18 months. We had resigned ourselves to never getting it, or at least only getting a minuscule amount. So when the letter said that we would get the whole active army amount that we should have been getting since August of '07, we got very excited. It's all money that is not apart of our budget, so we can do something fun with it - or at least a portion of it. So on the fly, we bought some girl scout cookies.

The Primary Talent Show was great!! We ate tacos and enjoyed the best talent show I've seen, since Bishop Evans did that lip sinc to Achy Breaky Heart with his counselors Bill Thurman and Roger McClain. (That was so funny. Bill Thurman is usually so serious, and so when they started throwing scarves out into the audience like a strip tease they had the whole ward rolling with laughter) The program consisted of jokes, dancing, instruments, acting, light sabers, and a reenactment of the chaos of primary on Sundays. They had the kids sit in front of the stage to watch and, though Landon wasn't on the program, he danced across the floor during all the songs and laughed very loudly at all the jokes. During one of the piano solos he inched himself up to the piano and I had to sternly motion for him to get away from it, I was so concentrated on trying to get Landon to not ruin the girls performance that I neglected to watch Sam closely and so he made it to the piano and played a few notes before I snatched him away. Landon's huge tantrum came later, during the clean-up process. But he managed to calm himself down finally and we went home, put the boys to bed, and Chris jumped onto the Internet.

Still high on receiving the large lump sum of money, he spent a half an hour finding a great deal on plane tickets. We're going to spend Spring Break in Utah and Idaho - so FAMILY HERE WE COME!!! I'm so excited I'm shaking! We can't wait to see everyone! I know we won't be there for very long, but a few days with each family is better than nothing. Let's hope we all stay healthy for it!