January

January is never very much fun.  This year the month was a blur as I tried to recover from Christmas and prepare for our trip to Hawaii in February.  There was a lot to prepare for!  I had to get Valentine's Day all taken care of before I left because we were gone until the 15th.  And so I got their boxes, their cards, and Dylan's class party all straightened out.  I also planned as much as I could for Grandma Cheryl while we were gone.  I wrote out the schedule, I planned a grocery list, I arranged car pools.  I did everything I could to try and make things easy on her.  Then I still had to plan for myself and my needs on our trip!  Anyway, here are the few pictures that I ended up with for the month.

Sadie and Dylan played basketball, Kylee played indoor soccer.  This was Sadie's first year and she LOVED it!

 Dylan played two sessions.  The second session they split the boys into two teams and had Ryan coach one of them.  Three of the boys played on both teams.  It was fun!  This is a good group of boys!

This is Dylan during one of Sadie's games, haha.  We were able to leave Kylee in charge of Kaden at home most of the time, and Sadie played at the same time as Dylan a few times.  But occasionally they were back to back so they had to go to each other's games.  Dylan was involved in Harry Potter.

I took Kylee up with the school for skiing the first night and it was cold and crowded!  The next time I sent her on the bus.  And the third time I was in Hawaii, but it was cancelled because of all the melting going on anyway.  She loves it!

Dylan's scout group is huge!  And they have a lot of fun.

Kaden is just so cute.  Especially in his crib.  I love how he crosses his foot over his knee.  He was pretending to stay asleep when I took this picture.  Then he started giggling.

Here he is climbing on my lap trying to eat my food (most likely a salad).  Little stinker.

 And he wants to be like Mommy so he copies me.

 Sadie received Sleeping Queens as a Christmas present and the kids have really enjoyed it!  It's a fun game!  Enough going on to keep it interesting, but not too complicated for a Kindergartener to enjoy.

In the Fall Dylan had this slit in his tongue that wouldn't heal and I was asking Dentists and other Drs their opinion.  But it went away.  And then it came back in January!  He was so sad.  We were careful and treated it with salt water and mouthwash and it didn't stay around as long this time.

 This was a picture that Dylan and our neighbor Brynlee drew together.  She is a fun girl and often plays with Sadie, but sometimes wants to play with Dylan instead.  I'm careful not to tease Dylan about girls, and I still didn't, but Brynlee's mom and I had a little chuckle at this.  Apparently their penguins were in love?

Ryan left for his vacation to Arizona in January for a week.  Before he left he gave me a bit of a lecture about keeping the snow off the driveway and not driving on it and packing it down.  So I was trying.  I spent quite a bit of time on Monday shoveling the little amount of snow there was with Kaden's help.  It was a lot of scraping and I really spent a bit of time.  I woke up the next morning at 5:30 to go to my swim class at the gym and decided I had better make sure the snow was somewhat cleared before I left, considering I had worked so hard the day before.  Well, THIS is what was out there! It was like two feet deep!  And blowing like crazy.  And still coming.

 This was my first attempt with a shovel, which was comical.  I quickly realized I would not get far with the shovel.  And that I couldn't drive over it if I wanted to.  And I was thinking I would have to get the kids to school so I decided I needed to take care of it.  I tried to work the snowblower, but it wasn't working.  I sent a text to Ryan, but I knew he was sleeping.  So I found some gas, added a little just to see, and started it up.  It took me like 20 minutes to blow the whole thing.  I obviously didn't make it to the gym.  When I got done and looked at my phone I saw the message saying school was cancelled.  A few hours later it looked like this again.

 So I got Dylan out there pushing the blower and got it done again.  In the meantime, the satellite TV wasn't working.  So I went out there with a ladder and a broom to try and clear it off.  It was SO covered.  And I had feet of snow falling on my head.  I figured if I fell off the ladder, I would land in powder so it wouldn't break anything!  It took my four tries but I finally cleared it enough to get it working.  And I looked like this.

 The pictures don't do it justice, but the sides were so tall!  I only shoveled one path on our sidewalk.

 I tried to do the sidewalk, but our little snowblower couldn't handle the packed down stuff that had been there for weeks.

As you can imagine, the snow all over town was hard to clear.  The parking lots ended up a big ice rink.  This was our church and you can't really tell but there's at least an inch of slippery ice on there.  Very treacherous especially in church shoes.

Ryan plays pretty rough when he plays ball.  He took a knee to the leg earlier in the night, that left a bruise like a foot long on the back of his leg.  He left that league game to go play pickup ball where he got jabbed the eyeball with a fingernail.  It was pretty bad.

It was bleeding pretty good and it hurt and his vision was a bit blurry.  But he talked to a lot of people who gave him advice and didn't end up going in to be seen.  It missed his iris so after the first day he didn't have blurry vision anymore.  And he never developed an infection, thankfully.  So it just healed.  Ouch, though!