December 2019

December is always a fun month.  Besides the Christmas fun, we did some other things too.

Kylee and Sadie had their piano recital.  They are both very talented!  Though they both whine about practicing and often wish they could quit piano altogether.  Sorry not sorry.

We drove down to Salem for my nephew Oakland's missionary farewell.  The sunsets and sunrises in December are pretty awesome!

 We decided to do our Christmas gift exchange during this little get together too.

 We really enjoyed the farewell and were happy we got to be there!  There was a storm coming through, in fact it had rained/sleeted during the Sacrament meeting and it was WET outside!  So much slush.  We decided to head for home before too long to try and miss the storm.  We figured we could pull over and find a hotel if it got bad.  But thankfully we made it without any trouble.  Traveling in winter is such a pain.

Winter sports!  Sadie loves basketball!  Her team played up this year, meaning they were playing in the 4th grade league even though they are all 3rd graders.  This was good because we didn't have to play against boys.  But it was a big learning curve.  We got beat a lot.  Some teams we were pretty even with though.  Sadie plays point guard a lot.

 Indoor soccer.  Always soccer.  I had fun playing with my new phone camera (Iphone 11 Pro, and I love it!!)

 Kylee played in a 3v3 tournament over Christmas break, which was pretty fun!  They didn't have enough teams so we had to play against some 15/16 year olds.  Her coach put a few teams together with the people who were in town to play.  Our team was Kylee, Willow, Jerzey and Averi.  Kylee is tall, but the other three are really quite little.  So when we went up against older girls, there was a big size discrepancy.  It was kind of funny, though.  Because the older girls would always think it was going to be easy to squash us.  But we dominated!  Those girls played really well together and we won our age group.

 I coached an indoor team for Kaden and we had a lot of fun with him and his little friends.  I had Kylee be my assistant coach most of the time, with help from Averi at times too.  And Dylan helped at the end (because Kylee had to leave for swimming.)  It was fun.

I enjoy swimming laps early in the morning.  Kylee always wants to come with me, so during the break we planned to go.  Sadie heard us talking and said she wanted to go too!  We explained it was just lap swimming but she didn't care.  So I woke her up early to go and she was so tired.  I said, do you want to sleep or swim?  She said "both."  She asked if we could just go later but I said no.  It was Christmas Eve and we had some plans.  So she dragged herself out of bed and came.  It ended up being really fun having them there.  Kylee did a little lap swimming with me and playing around with Sadie.  Usually they only allow lap swimming during those hours and no free swim for kids.  But since it was a holiday, they had different hours.

 Kaden and Jason get to hang out together once a week.  This week I took them to ijump.  They enjoy their cousin days!!

 Kylee and Dylan and I were left behind when Ryan took the two younger kids to Arizona last minute. (I'll get into that later.)  So we tried to find fun things to do still.  We made a trip to Rexburg for Gravity Factory (along with the rest of Eastern Idaho, haha)  We were all sore the next day, lol.

I saw this pattern for Starry Night once and told Dylan to make it for me.  Dylan is always looking for fun things to make from perler beads.  We found all the colors he would need online and ordered them and he spent a LOT of time putting it together.  It was huge!  And turned out really cool!  I can't tell you how stressful it was for him to try and iron this, though.  There were a couple problems and he was devastated thinking the whole thing was ruined.  But I convinced him that the few spots were not noticeable and he finished it up.  Then I found a frame for it so we could display it. 

 Dylan's class party for Christmas was a Buddy the Elf party.  They had a lot of fun.

 Kaden is my buddy every day.  As much as I'm looking forward to my free time when all my kids are in school, I will miss this one-on-one time I have had with him.

 Kylee has been baking a lot.  She loves to make treats. (Not so much actual cooking, but maybe some day I will convince her to do more with me in the kitchen.)  I felt like New Year's Eve needed a treat, so I told her to make my recipe for caramel popcorn.  Yum! (I think I actually got the idea from seeing that old popcorn popper in my pantry covered in dust.  I know I need it, but it sure doesn't get much use.  But it did on New Years Eve!)