EFY registration

This morning one of my friends, who is also the mother of one of my youngest son's friends, called around 8:00 and asked if my son had talked to me about going to EFY. Especially For Youth is a week long program sponsored by the church with social activities, spiritual classes, and lots of fun for teenagers. There are many different sessions in many different locations. She said she was trying to get a group of boys together to go to the session that was being held in Ogden, Utah the second week in July. Of course I had heard nothing about this from my son, but in his defense he was in Arizona and I was in Utah. I have always thought it would be wonderful for my kids to go to EFY, but it wasn't financially an option at times and other times they really weren't interested. I told her that it sounded fun to me and I would see if I could register him. Registration started this morning at 9:00 AM.
I texted the son to make sure this was something he wanted to do and he seemed excited so at 9:00 I attempted to sign on to the website and register him. At first the website wouldn't even open and then after trying for about 15 minutes I got on to the website and was greeted with the message that basically everyone else was trying to register their child for EFY and there would be a "wait in line". That was to be expected, so I waited.
Our mother/daughter plan for this morning was to go to the back and get all of the daughters authorized on my mom's bank accounts before she had to go to physical therapy at 11:00. I was patiently waiting for my turn to register and everyone else was patiently waiting for me to be ready to go to the bank. Finally just before 10:00 I said let's just go. I left the computer on and thought maybe we'd be back before my turn popped up.
The bank took quite a while and we dropped my mom off at her appointment and went home to find the computer looking just like we had left it. What we didn't know was if my turn in line had come and gone or if I was still waiting for a turn. I didn't want to close the page in case the line was really that long and it was going to let me on any second, but I wasn't sure so I opened the same page in a new window too and waited to see what happened.
My sister who arrived yesterday had come with the assignment from her family at home to buy a web cam for my mom's computer and set her up with a SKYPE account so they could make video phone calls to her and she could see them and their families and they could see how she was doing. She bought the camera on the way to mom's house yesterday so while we were waiting for the EFY Website to let me in we decided to set up everything and see if we could get it to work. I was a little bored sitting by the computer watching the 2 screens count from 60 down to 0 over and over again so I starting trying out some of the fun photo effects that came with the camera.
This is me trying to look nice in case someone calls.

Here's the rainbow effect. Do you think green makes my skin look a little purple?


This fishbowl effect was my favorite. It made us all laugh and laugh, which by the way is a very healthy thing to do.

We decided that when my mom feels sad and discouraged she can just get on the computer and make faces at herself and that can't help but make her feel better. When my mom came home she said this picture looked just like her. I always thought I looked like my dad.
I decided we needed to document the three sisters being together so we took our picture too.

We have all spent quite a bit of time with mom recently but we haven't had the chance to be here at the same time. It was fun to get to be together and watch movies and laugh and catch up on life. I am lucky to have such nice sisters.
My mom and the sister that was staying left to go to my mom's club luncheon just before 1:00 and my other sister and I tried to decide how long we should hang out to get the son registered. Finally she decided she would call her roommate and have her turn her computer on and check it for us every now and then. As soon as the roommate came on the phone, the registration page FINALLY popped on. Hooray! When I got to the part where I actually had to commit and pay the money for the week I vacillated for a moment if this was really such a good idea (the price had gone up from years ago when I had considered trying to get my other children to EFY, but I decided it would be a good experience for the boy. Hopefully he'll still be friends with all these guys by the time July rolls around. Maybe that's not as big a problem with boys as it is with girls.