Bowl Week 1 Results

Yea! I finally won a week! Yippie! It was exactly what I asked Santa for Christmas.
Tough week for BYU fans! But there's always next year! Unless of course the economy tanks and all sports are cancelled. Talk about riots! Am I right people!
Here are the results:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pGlbc_um5DZHLQwVDRJK4OA

The games for this week are the BCS games .. some pretty good matchups!
The Utes are in the Sugar bowl on Jan 2nd vs. Alabama
The Rose bowl on Jan 1st is USC vs Penn State. Go Joe Pa!
--And choose between some good basketball matchups
BYU hosting #6 Wake Forest on Jan 3rd
Utah hosting Gonzaga #7 Gonzaga on Dec 31st
or the Jazz at the Lakers on Jan 2nd

Christmas craziness

Maybe I am getting too old, but right now I am so ready for all the snow to end. We live next to a park and get the added benefit of having the wind blow all the snow from the park into our driveway. We also have the city when they plow, most of the time, turn the corner and leave it all right in front of our driveway. I feel like I am getting big blisters. I think that before the season is out, I am going to need to get a very nice massage.

This year I shopped more on line than I have ever before. There was a lot of killer deals out there and why shop all over the place if I can have them shipped to me for free? I am now just hoping that I receive them today, I'm worried that all the snow will prevent them from leaving me my packages. In the past, I have received nasty notes in my mail box saying that I need to clear the snow or not recieve my mail. Oh well, hopefully it will end soon. I guess if I don't receive the packages, we will just have to go with what we have and the kids should be happy with that.
We hope that everyone out there has a very Merry Christmas! Stay safe this week!

Week 15 Results

Its not over yet. Some good games this week. Unfortunately they didn't turn out so well in my opinion. Snow College lost their national championship. Weber State got knocked out of their quest for a title. And Utah State lost to BYU. Bummer! Then I go and take 2nd place to my co-worker (Ryan). Its sucks!
Anyways, here are the results:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pGlbc_um5DZFjV9RJr-iRKQ

So still on the season, Tammy is 1st. Keep a look out for games in the bowl season. We're not done yet!

So how do you cope?

Raising kids and dealing with the problems that affect everyone else is oftentimes very difficult to deal with. Case in point: How do you react when you have a certain 5th grader that is already running behind because there is no sense of time? When its time to leave for school and he has to rush back into the house to get his jacket; but then gets distracted by whats on TV, all the while his dad is waits in the truck for 5 minutes to take him to school. In certain cases and for certain ages, timeouts seem to be somewhat effective. But when they're older and when there is no time for a timeout, what then? Yelling doesn't seem to get thru, it just causes friction and gets misinterpreted as a lack of love for the child.
I guess you might have heard that Elder Wirthlin passed away last night. I really admired that man. Do you remember his last conference talk? It was titled "Come what may, and love it" For reference, here it is: http://lds.org/conference/talk/display/0,5232,23-1-947-9,00.html
He mentions that when adversity strikes, we need to learn to laugh. Good advice. But difficult to put into practice; as I guess most good advice seems to be. Just yesterday, this same child on his way to school -- as he often does; stopped by his friends house to venture out to school together. But this friend was still off-track (even though he had already been off-track for 3 weeks). Long story short, the 2 of them spent the next half-hour watching TV at his house until his mom came downstairs and saw the two of them there. One of them (mine) should have been to school 30 minutes earlier. A moment like that, funny. That is, if you weren't there and after having some time to reflect on it. But in the moment, very frustrating.
So to all of you, especially those with older children and more complicated frustrating situations, how do you cope?