Valentine's Day 2013

Memorable moments from Valentine’s Day:

Ben’s awesome minion box (He won first place in the cartoon category.)

Pancakes with heart shaped jam

Breakfast in bed for Abby

Rowan (a boy in Elise’s class) giving Elise all of his candy because he isn’t eating sugar this month

Abby wearing her pretty pink dress to school for Valentine’s Day and having blue teeth all night long from eating candy

Cute heart hair

Making sugar cookies

Ben wearing Maxwell Bowen’s mullet wig for the 80’s themed 6^th grade dance (the day after Valentine’s Day)

Not pictured, but also memorable:

Elise coming home early from school with a tummy ache

Valentine gifts: ski goggles and a slinky for Ben; ski goggles, lotion, and candy scented nail polish for the girls

Emily making cookies and a candy tin at Activity Days

Take-out Chinese food from Zhang’s

Winter Weather

We've had a long winter!  It has been super cold and hazy and we've gotten loads of snow.  Our biggest one day total was on January 29th with 20 inches of the white stuff falling in one day. 

The kids have had lots of chances to play in the snow.  Abby is usually more excited about going out than the other kids and she has spent lots of hours outside all by herself.  Luckily, she is self-entertaining and doesn’t get bored even if no one else wants to play.  Every time I go out to check on her, she’ll tell me “I’m having snow much fun!”  She thinks she is hilarious with that little play on words. 

 

The other kids have gotten in their fair share of play time too.  We had enough snow to make our own little backyard sledding hill.  The kids and their friends had a great time playing on it.  I even got in on the action for a few minutes.

Nate told the kids that he would build them a snow cave.  His first attempt didn’t go so well.  He had it all hollowed out and was just getting out when the whole thing collapsed on his head.  Never one to give up easily, he made another big pile of snow and tried again a couple of weeks later.  The resulting cave was much sturdier and big enough for the whole family.  Phew.  Emily made her own little snow cave.  It was really more of a tunnel that was just long enough for her to back into, but she was excited about it.

Two other funny Nate stories: Nate shaved off his winter beard in stages.  He went from full beard, to goatee with sideburns, to just a goatee, to a moustache with a soul patch, and finally got down to just a moustache.  I was not a fan and tried to get him to shave it off.  Instead, he went out to shovel sporting his Magnum P.I. look.  I cracked up laughing every time I looked at him.

Second story: We drove up to Bear Lake last weekend for Katie Hadley’s (Ballingham’s) funeral.  There was a winter storm warning and we were a little worried about making it through both canyons.  Nate was apparently more worried than I was.  When we got home, he started unloading the van.  Before we set out he had packed a bunch of supplies in case we got caught in a blizzard.  He had a snow shovel, winter coats, snow boots, gloves, a quilt, extra water, and some food (4 cans of ravioli, 2 bags of chex mix, and a bag of peanut m&ms).  “You always hear about people getting stranded in their cars in snowstorms.  I didn’t want us to be unprepared.”  Once a boy scout, always a boy scout.

Artist in Residence

Last night was the kids’ Artist in Residence Art Show.  Over the last couple of months, they have been working with a local artist (Stacy Harris) to create grade level murals.  She chose a photo for each grade and cut it into little squares.  Each student got to paint one square of the picture on the canvas.  The 6^th grade recreated Mr. Barker’s barn, 4^th grade did Kirt’s Drive-In, and 2^nd grade painted a moose.  Kindergarten didn’t copy a picture; they just got to use a bunch of different materials to decorate one square on their class collage. 

For the other part of the experience, she taught each grade (except Kindergarten) about a master painter and had the students replicate one of their paintings (6^th grade Picasso’s Woman with Yellow Hair; 4^th grade Senecio by Paul Klee; 2^nd grade Monet’s Water Lilies Red).  The teachers picked four paintings from each class to be displayed at the art show and both Emily’s and Elise’s paintings were chosen.  

The Big 4-0

Nate turned 40 on Friday.  Mother Nature gave him a nasty cold for his birthday.  That wasn’t his favorite.  We had a really low-key birthday celebration.  Nate insists that he likes it that way.  We had Subway sandwiches for lunch (Nate let Abby pick since she didn’t have school on Friday).  The rest of the kids got out of school at 1:05.  We had just enough time for Nate to open his presents and blow out his candles before we had to head back to the school for parent teacher conferences.  He got a blu-ray player, a Nerf gun (so he can have Nerf battles with Ben…Ben insisted on this present), Hive, a scan tool for the van, pistachios, pineapple juice, and a homemade book from Abby.  I didn’t want to light 40 candles, so I figured we would just use some number candles.  We had a 4 candle but not a 0 candle, so I had to be creative.  I put 73 on his cake for the year he was born.  The kids thought it was pretty funny that it looked like he was 73 years old. 

Parent teacher conferences were great.  Some days I wish our girls were as angelic at home as they apparently are at school, but I guess I should just be happy that they are good somewhere.

 

As soon as we got home, I headed off to Time Out for Women.  I felt a little guilty about leaving on Nate’s birthday (even though he was the one who originally suggested it to my sisters), but I had a great time.  The speakers were amazing!  It was just what I needed.  I didn’t want to drive to Layton twice, so I stayed at Jody’s house on Friday night.  That’s why all of our birthday celebrating had to be done so early.  Nate and the kids had Papa Murphy’s pizza for dinner, played Hive, and watched Apollo 13.  Ben made up for his slacker mother by making Nate breakfast in bed on Saturday.  He made cheesy scrambled eggs with bacon* and salsa, and toast with the number 4 and a balloon painted on in jam.  I love that sweet kid.

I thought about making a list of 40 things I love about Nate, and then remembered that I already made a list of 36 things a few years ago.  They are all still true (I checked), so I decided to just add 4 more things to the list . . . some with photographic evidence.  Here goes:

37.  He teaches our kids how to ski.

38.  He has learned how to listen to the sound the boat makes when it is almost full of gas so he knows when to stop and we never waste gas by having it spill out when he is filling up.

39.  He keeps playing Words With Friends with me even when I beat him 9 times out of 10.  (He holds his own in Scrabble; I can just work the board better in WWF.)

40.  He has depression era philosophies about wastefulness . . . and makes really cool blanket forts.

I sure lucked out to score such a quality guy.  He is better than I deserve, but luckily he still hasn’t figured that out.

* Really it was shredded fajita chicken we had in the freezer.  Ben didn't know the difference and Nate didn't want to hurt his feelings so he didn’t say anything.

Winter Camp

Ben went on his first winter boy scout camp this weekend.  Nate was a good dad and went with him. They spent the night at Crystal Springs.  I was worried that they were going to freeze, but they both said it wasn’t too bad.  The highlights for Ben were going down the waterslide at the hot springs, roasting pizza over the fire, playing truth or dare in the tent, and having a snowball fight in the morning.

I had a bunch of Box Tops to count, so that was how the girls and I spent most of our time while the boys were gone.  On Friday night we watched random TV shows, including Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie (which the girls loved), and played Yahtzee.  Emily rolled two Yahtzees and won with 354 points.  Saturday, we had an Anne of Green Gables marathon while we finished counting Box Tops.  We’ve watched the movies once before, but the girls really loved them this time.  That makes me happy.  Sunday morning I was putting on make-up and Abby came in and started pinching her cheeks to make them pink.  She learned that trick from Emily who learned it from Anne.