Keep Thou My Feet

Finals were over last week. This semester I didn't end up feeling burned out a month before it was over. Maybe that's because I wasn't taking physics, chemistry, or calculus, and I wasn't eight months pregnant. It might also help that the two classes I took this semester were very good.

But it's still nice to be done for a while. We've had a fun week. I've gotten Kevin outside for a walk or to play most days this week, which has made him a lot more pleasant to be around.

 On Friday we went to a new park with some friends. This area has a lot of parks, which is good, because the variety makes Kevin much less inclined to run away. He stayed at the playground the whole time and I never had to chase him down.

Yesterday we finally got around to picking strawberries. I didn't want to go alone, so I asked Ryan to come with me and we brought the kids. I really should have gone alone. Heidi wasn't happy to be on my back in the Ergo. She wanted to eat strawberries. Kevin was a lot better than last year. He helped Ryan. Ryan told him to only pick the red ones, and he understood that, but he also picked a lot of mushy ones that I ended up having to throw away. So I'm going to have to go again to get more, and this time I'm going alone. I've learned my lesson. All my friends blog about taking their kids to pick strawberries and how much fun they have, but that's just not my family. And I'm pretty hardcore about my strawberry picking because I'm trying to replenish our freezer jam supply here, not just make a couple of smoothies, so I probably can't expect to get as many good berries as I want if I take the kids. Oh well.

I'm working my way through Undaunted by Gerald N. Lund. I'm not a huge fan of his writing style, but he does tell pretty good stories. Things have picked up in the book now, and for the most part I'm really enjoying it. It's about the pioneers who went to the Hole in the Rock and the hardships they faced. I appreciate what Lund is trying to accomplish by writing this book. A lot of people say that the expedition was a mistake, but he's trying to show that just like with the Willie and Martin handcart companies, it wasn't a mistake. The people that went built up strong testimonies, and they went because they needed to build up peaceful relations with the Native Americans in order to protect the Latter-Day Saints in Southern Utah. I'm enjoying learning about it. It's a part of church history that we don't talk about very much. We tend to talk about the pioneers reaching Salt Lake and then stop there, but a lot happened after that. I'm going to have to look up some of these books that Lund used as resources so that I can learn more about it.