A New Year: January 2019

Yay for a new year! I like new beginnings and chances to start over so I'm grateful for every new day,  new week, new month, and new year. This year started with a visit from Jason's cousin Andrea who is only a couple days older than Jason. Andrea and her family were driving back home to Michigan from visiting family in Texas. They took a break in their day of driving to have dinner with us and it was fun to catch up and let our kids play together.

We also got two big snow storms in January that both happened on the weekends and was enough to cancel church for us two weeks in a row. That rarely happens, so it was kind of crazy to miss so much church especially with the recent change to a 2-hour church block. We didn't experience that change until the end of January!

Next-door neighbor Carly playing with Lydia in the snow.

Sunday morning

Painting fingernails and toe nails. :)

We visited a new library for the first time and enjoyed a cool story time and exploring a new place.

We had a fun visit from Jason's brother Tim in the middle of the month. He had a free flight and so he used it to visit us and see a couple of basketball games. The first night Jason went with Tim to Lexington for a University of Kentucky (UK) basketball game. Kentucky played awesome as usual and won the game. And of course Ethan and Lydia loved having Uncle Tim around to play with.

This is Ethan showing Uncle Tim that he is upside down in the spoon. :)

These two are such good friends (most of the time) and I love to see them give hugs and help each other.

We started the new Come Follow Me curriculum at home in studying the New Testament together as a family. In this lesson we talked about different soil types from one of Jesus' parables. It's new and exciting and we're still trying to figure out how it works best for our family.

Lydia's hair is getting long!

More sledding adventures!

Always the best to come in from playing in the snow to hot muffins and hot cocoa. :)

Ethan also had a bike day at preschool where a police officer came in and talked about safety and then the kids got to ride several times through an obstacle course to practice stopping at stop signs and watching for cars. Super clever activity! Ethan rode his Strider balance bike even though he had ride a real bike. He just still working to maneuver the small spaces.

Ethan was proud of his marble track surrounded by Legos and a cool train track. It stayed in his room for a couple of week. He likes to keep his door closed all the time now to keep Lydia from going in and "messing up his stuff." :)

I volunteer on the board of MOMS Club and as part of that club we have monthly activities at the library. I brought soup to this activity and the girls had toys and a story.

We also coordinated a temple trip with some other couples in our ward so we could all go to the temple. We took over the Relief Society Room and turned it into a play room! We had 9 children ages 5 and under in there and it was kind of crazy at times. :) You can see in the pictures that we had three six-month-olds!

Ethan wanted to show off his "Lego Exhibit" which he labeled on the white paper. :)

I also celebrated my birthday at the end of the month. Jason and I went out to eat the weekend before and that day I worked out with my friend Charlotte in the morning and made some amazing lemon-filled cupcakes with raspberry frosting. They seriously tasted so delicious. I wish I could have shared them more, but got stuck eating too many of them myself. :) Jason was also nice enough to bring home dinner that night so I didn't have to cook or wash more dishes. Yay for thoughtful husbands.

photo courtesy to Ethan for this pic :)

Ethan was told at church that I was turning 20 years old as a joke, but Ethan kept telling his teachers and our neighbor friends that it was my birthday and I was turning 20. I'm sure all the adults smiled knowingly. :) I was also surprised in the evening by my friend Hannah who made me this gorgeous chocolate raspberry cake. It was also super delicious. So you can see why I gained several pounds in the days following my birthday. Yummy cake is hard to say no to. :)

Christmas in Kentucky

We had a great Christmas season in Kentucky this year filled with fun and service and good memories. Here are the highlights!

Ethan and Lydia enjoyed decorating the tree this year. They got a little carried away however and decorated it with their cars, hair toys, and little people. :) Hopefully we got all the toys taken out since we were still finding cars in the tree as we were taking it apart to put it away.

With the MOMS Club we went to an assisted living home and sang Christmas carols to the residents. They loved it and so did we!

Here is a picture of a game that Ethan and Lydia like to play. I cut up apples and put them on the counter and then the apples "mysteriously go missing" as they hide under the table and eat them. They love to ask me, "Mom, what happened to all your apples?" And I play along and they love it. :)


Ethan earned money this month by sleeping without his beloved silly monkey that he's had since he was a baby and as a result stopped sucking his thumb at night. He earned 50 cents each night the first week and 25 cents each night the second week. After paying tithing he used his money for his first big purchase of a Lego airplane and we were both happy. :)

My kids had fun decorating sugar cookies. I was in charge of a cookie decorating MOMS Club activity and let my kids do it at home first so I would be prepared to do it at the library. The cookies were yummy and the activity turned out well. 

Our friends the Huxels invited us to join them in their yearly tradition of decorating gingerbread houses. Ethan decided he was going to build a gingerbread airplane....and he did. :) It was really fun and I would love to do it myself next year.

Jason and I went to Jason's company party again this year and ate a very yummy dinner. It's fun to get all dressed up every once in a while.

Ethan had his preschool Christmas program and this year he was a wise man....very fitting. He was actually going to be a shepherd at first, but I guess the hat kept falling off the other little boy and since Ethan has a nice big, round head, he was immediately promoted to wise man. :)

Ethan and Lydia jumping off Ethan's bed onto a mattress.

One day I took Ethan and Lydia to the Cincinnati Children's Museum with some friends. They rode a Christmas train, sat on Santa's lap, and Ethan built a cool car with the help of a kind engineer grandpa who was there with his grandsons.

We also stopped by Dad's work to say hi since we were just down the street.

I also helped with Ethan's preschool Christmas party and brought a candy cane bead craft and Bingo game. The girl in the picture actually used to live in our house, but they built a new house somewhere else in the neighborhood and she ended up in Ethan's preschool class. Small world. :)

Since our family stayed put for Christmas this year and we didn't have any visitors, we did a few extra fun family things. One was a combined trip to the Columbus Temple and COSI museum. We watched a planetarium show and the kids got to play while Jason and I switched off working at the temple. Ethan loved the cool Hot Wheels exhibit they had there.

Ethan was really excited when he got his disk to keep spinning on a larger disk. He was literally jumping for joy! :)

Christmas Eve we acted out the Christmas story while Dad read it from the Bible, ate yummy cinnamon rolls with hot chocolate and read "The Night Before Christmas."

 Christmas morning we all received plenty of presents and enjoyed playing with them throughout the day. Ethan loved his Legos and Ki'nex. Lydia loved her new baby and doctor's equipment. We were all "sick" many times that day with fevers and such, but she "fixed" us with shots and band-aids. That evening we enjoyed a lovely dinner with our friends the Scotts and the missionaries. It was a wonderful day.

Ethan got a new fort building set that was fun to put together. He even slept under it the first night.

After Christmas we visited The Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky about 45 minutes from our house. It was impressive to see the actual size of the ark as recorded in the Bible and to see some of the ideas of how the animals were taken care of, etc.

 They also had a glice skating rink there that we all tried. It wasn't actual ice so it wasn't as cold or wet, but that made it a little harder to skate on. Still fun to try and the kids liked it.

Over the break Ethan was also excited that he was able to learn to ride his bike without training wheels after learning to balance on his Strider bike. After a while of practicing he also wiggled his tooth out and lost his second tooth. After commenting to him that is was such a big day that he had both learned to ride his bike and lost a tooth he said, "Yep, I'm pretty much a grown man now." Ha ha. Cute boy.

We rang in the New Year playing games with the Huxels and others. It was so fun that we hope to do it again some time. We have been very blessed in 2018 and we look forward to good things to come in 2019.