Written 6/18/99 by Nuria Everitt
The day begins at 6 o'clock in the morning as Jan climbs out of bed and rushes to get the elementry school children, who are in year round school, ready to go. Lars, Radclyffe, Knoton, David, Lavelle, Manjua, Maverick, Tajuan, and Romney are dressed and fed by 7 o'clock. Bill's out the door and off to his first job, as manager of a local store. The younger kids are dressed and fed, Virginia, Chumani, Cherika, Dyami, Chyou Hua, and Jodianne are ready by 9 o'clock. The older girls, Nuria, Philomena, Gerri, Pauline, and Meli get themselves up and fed any time before nine. Dakota, Kenneth, and Cheyenne (who were out of school when they were placed) are also dressed and fed before nine. The older girls do their chores, which change weekly, and help watch the younger children while Jan gets lunch thrown together early, cleans the house, and runs errands. She picks Tajuan and Romney up from kindergarten and lunch is served at 12:30. After lunch the older girls go their own ways while the younger kids nap. At 3:30 the other children are home and snacks are quickly served. The rest of the chores are done, homework is completed (with a little extra help for Lars and David, who are FAS and ADHD, and Manjua, who doesn't speak much English). Jan spends one on one time with some of the children, reading stories, playing games, and helping with homework and chores. Dinner is served as soon as Bill walks in the door at seven, home from his second job, designing and building structures for stores and malls with another man in the ward. After dinner Bill and Jan spend more one on one time with the kids and then the family spends time together. Sometimes they just play games, other times they have family coucil, discussing problems and concerns. Bedtime begins at eight for the babies, with baths and pajamas continuing until the nine year olds are to bed by nine o'clock. The older boys are allowed to read in bed until ten o'clock, the older girls are on their own, the only requirement being that they are up and ready by nine o'clock the next morning.
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7/21/99, written by Jan Everitt
Monday night was very stressful. We ended up with three dozen kids, our two dozen, eight chicken pox kids, and four of the daycare kids. We had an appointment with a real estate agent to look at some land, and then we were going to take the kids out for our once-a-year out to dinner trip (we hadn't planned on having a dozen extras!). Things had been busy all day, we were having trouble getting the extra kids to obey rules, the chicken pox kids wouldn't stop scratching, Dakota was having another bad day (gee, it must be those bathrooms, since that's what he was told to do), ect. ect. ect. My husband gets home early, and we load ALL the kids into the bus (something that took nearly 45 minutes, as I have assigned seating, and having a dozen extra kids threw us off badly), we start on our way and it starts to rain! Now, I hadn't thought ahead and packed jackets, so I'm starting to wonder how horrible this trip to see the land is going to be. It's a 30 minute drive, turned into an hour because the roads were so bad, we finally get to the property and the agent isn't there! We showed ourselves around, and he arrived just as we were loading the bus again, I just managed to keep from screaming at him for being over half an hour late, Bill thankfully took over and told him we liked the land, however the price was too high and we were going to look elsewhere, we drove home, by now it was drying up and things were going well until we saw the deer, all of a sudden it's (wait, STOP, I didn't see it, back up dad-have you ever tried backing up a bus?). We went through the same thing with the rainbow (there's a rainbow, where? I can't see it, stop, I want to see it, hey there's two, no there's not, how is it that kids can make good things seem so crazy?!?). Finally we arrived in the town (which was tiny), since we hadn't been in this town before we hadn't decided ahead of time where to eat, we drove through the entire town and then turned around, with the kids arguing about what they wanted for dinner, we finally decided on Mexican and pulled into a place that looked decent. We walked in and nearly gave the lady at the front desk a heart attack when we asked for a table that seats thirty-five. She started shaking her head and speaking in Spanish, I speak very limited Spanish and caught the "no room, have to have reservations" part (we usually do make reservations, but we hadn't as we didn't know where we were going to eat!). I was really getting ticked and was just about to walk out and re-load the kids in the bus when in walks my niece! Totally unplanned, but I've never been so happy to see her! She walked up, conversed with the woman in fluent Spanish, arranged to have us seated, made sure all of our kids got balloons, made sure our orders came quickly, told stories that kept the kids amazed, and overall made it a very nice dinner. Then the restraunt made the mistake of billing us together (though we'd requested seperate), and my niece ordered us out the door, told us not to worry, and said her buisness would cover it! We then, of course, had to take everyone out for ice cream, it was long past bedtimes when we got home, we called the daycare kids mother (who we, of course, assumed would be home, after all-we'd had her kids nine hours), her older kids answered the phone, said she'd be out of town, and we could drop them off they'd watch them. They had been "watching" them that afternoon when my daughter had brought them home because she'd found the two year old outside in a (very dirty) diaper and the one year old in the nude, covered with chocolate (which gives her a rash), sitting alone in the kitchen with all the rest of the kids downstairs. So we got to figure out rooming arrangements for three dozen, find night clothes, give dozens of baths, read dozens of stories, sing dozens of songs, and we STILL had homesick kids. I didn't get much sleep! Tuesday was just as busy, but this is already a book, and my time really is running low!
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