The month of January has come and gone. It was full and fun and long.
Ryan had his belt ceremony where he moved up to the next level in Karate. He is yellow with a green stripe, which means the next level is green belt, which will push him up into the intermediate group.
Megan has been looking forward to joining Karate with Ryan for a while, and when I realized he'd be in the next level after this time I thought we'd better get her signed up so they can at least be in the same class for one semester. They started the new semester last week and both were super excited about it.
I went out to lunch with my birthday buddies, Jill and Jen at Costa Vida. Mmmm mmmm good! Then that night Grandma invited the kids over for a sleepover on my birthday so Jacob and I could go have a real date out to dinner and to the temple without worrying about being rushed to get back for the babysitter. It was a lovely evening and a nice birthday.
The circus came to town! Some friends gave us their tickets from a previous show which got us in for half price.
We enjoyed it a lot. There were dogs that did tricks, some really cool acts including a couple that did awesome tricks on a vertical pole, a tightrope walker, and people catapulting through a flaming ring of fire.
The kids got to meet the little pony and pay more money that it was worth for a picture that was worse than this:
When my cell phone starts taking better pictures than your "professional camera" it's time to get a new camera.
But the kids all had a great time and were raving about it for the next few days.
President Ballard, Elder Clayton, and Elder Robbins came to town for some training and a youth devotional. I was lucky enough to get to go to both, and Rachel got to come along to the youth devotional. Some youth met us at the stake center, but this was a good part of our ward youth:
Rachel is in the front second from the right.
President Ballard talked about finding the desire to grow in our testimonies and encouraged us to be like Nephi with a desire to know the things of God. At the end he asked the youth to stand up and put out their hand "like this." Then he had them shake it up and down and said, "Now you can go home and write in your journal that you shook hands with an apostle."
Ryan's class had a Morning Mingle where we got to spend an hour or so in the classroom and share some breakfast and do some reading group rotations. Megan was happy to get to be a 1st grader for a little while.
She didn't want to leave.
Annie loves cooking and occasionally gets in super-server mode. I made breakfast for dinner one day and she jumped in and made all the waffles, then set the table and even put out place cards with our names on them.
With our FHE lesson now taking place on Sundays for our Come Follow Me lesson we have more time on Monday nights to do a real activity instead of just cramming in a quick game of hide and seek or duck duck goose after the lesson is done. So we borrowed a net and went down to the church to play pickleball. The pickleball lines are taped on the floor of our church building.
We had a lot of fun and some of the kids caught on pretty fast.
That's an activity we'll repeat.
The last January fun night was at the kids' school for Family Academic Night. It was a science night and we got to try concussion goggles,
see all the science fair projects, see some cool optics stuff, and learn how cacti store moisture and build their own version of a cactus.
They all had a good time and were sad the night had to end.
Looking back, we were able to cram in a lot of fun family time.
