January back to school and such

January 10, 2024

Boyd and Barbara came to visit! They just happened to come the week that it’s below freezing every morning.

At least it’s still warmer than Idaho, especially during the day with the sun warming things up. They got here Monday, and head home tomorrow. I didn’t get to hang out with them much because I had a doctors appointment yesterday when they were going to the temple, and was helping with teacher of the year interviews at Desert Sky today when they went to San Xavier mission and the air and space museum. But I did get to meet up with them for lunch at El Guero Canelo today, and we all ate dinner together tonight. It was good of them to come visit. I think this might be Boyd’s first time and Barbara’s second time to Tucson? They were already talking about “next time,” though, so maybe we’ll see them again soon. Or at least soonish.

January 13, 2024

Annie was invited to participate in the middle school honor band festival again, so this week she practiced at Empire on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and this morning, then had their concert. It was a great concert and she has a good time having the high school band directors teach and lead them.

January 13, 2024

Ryan was ordained a deacon on Sunday. He’s pretty excited to join young men and receive the priesthood. And as a deacon he can now go to the temple! We went today as a family. Grandma was working her temple shift and came to say hi. Megan stayed home with grandpa since he wasn’t feeling well. It was fun to have most of the kids be able to go. Just two more years and our whole family can go together!

We went out to dinner afterwards at Pei Wei even though we already ate out for lunch today after Annie’s concert. Racking up the eating out bill, I guess.

January 15, 2024

We had a ton of people donate items for the hygiene kits we made for Primavera for the MLK day of service. The Croppers, Reimanns and Allen’s joined us to assemble them. It’s always nice to see what we can accomplish when we put a little effort into organizing some friends to do some good together.

January 19, 2024

Yesterday for my birthday I invited friends to join me to go to the temple and lunch. Karolee, Jill, Katie Johnson, and Rachel Cropper joined me at the temple, then all except Rachel went to Baggins for lunch where we were joined by Susqui, Aimee and Jen Grace. It was nice to visit with them.

Today I was able to go out to lunch with my mom for my birthday, which is always nice. Of course, as usual, we forgot to snap a picture.

January 21, 2024

This week I have been realizing over and over how blessed we are to have two cars normally. Jacob’s car has been working towards dying its last death, and Tuesday he brought it home making crazy noises that told us that taking it out again would end in a call to a tow truck. It’s 24 years old and not worth fixing at this point, and we already had put things in motion to get a new car, which will hopefully be arriving soon.

But since Wednesday we’ve had to juggle schedules, leave extra early to take Jacob to work, borrow a car from my parents on multiple occasions (thankfully they live close), call in rides, and just skip a couple things. Normally Sunday would be an easy day to just use one car, but today I had to go to a different ward, Jacob had to go into work, and my kids needed a ride home from church, all at the same time. So while we could have used 3 cars, we had just the one. Thankfully we also had a friend to give me a ride, and my mom to give my kids a ride. It sure has made me appreciate the blessing we enjoy normally of having the transportation we need whenever we need it. Nothing like not having something to make you appreciate it more.

Wilma (the 4-runner) has lived a good life. 240k miles and 18 of its 24 years with us. Jacob has had her longer than we’ve been married. Looking forward to the next 18 years with the next car whose arrival we are looking forward to soon.

New Year--Week off of school

Jan 4, 2024 
New year, new blog…er method for family history keeping. Since blogging once every 6 months wasn’t working, I’ve decided to try a different way to keep track of what our family is up to: using Facebook but changing my post settings to only my family so I can add the kids as they get older and get their own accounts so they can look back. There’s also a company that makes physical books out of social media posts, so we can still have our annual book for the kids to look back at.

All the kids stayed up for New Years, then managed to sleep in pretty late the next morning. Jacob cleaned the house before half of them were up, then they pitched in with laundry and finishing cleaning up from our trip. We had a lovely, relaxing afternoon, finishing the day watching The Sandlot. It was actually nice having everyone in the room watching together. We haven’t had movie nights a lot lately because of marching band and busy schedules. And because the kids generally like to find their own activity on a screen when they get a chance, usually on Minecraft or YouTube.

We’ve spent this week slowly cleaning our house and backyard and putting away Christmas and relaxing enjoying too much screen time. The kids do get out every once in a while and actually have gone to grandma’s a few times for exercise, and today to do some trench digging on the back yard.

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Jan 4, 2024
Time to reorganize our games. Pulled them all out so we can put back just the ones we actually play with. Holy smokes! How did we get so many?!

I just counted them and we have at least 97 games! We could play one a day and not run out until April!

...

So we found a few more, bringing the total, I think, to 103. We got rid of ones we rarely use or ones the kids have grown out of or lost too many pieces to, and we’re down to somewhere between 70 and 75 games left.

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Jan 5, 2024

There has been a lot of sleeping in this week. Even Megan, who doesn't normally sleep in, hasn't been awake before 7am all week, and has slept until 8 a couple of times. Rachel has reluctantly gotten up when we wake her up at 10am to start on chores, but when left to her own devices doesn't sleep past 10:30 anyway. And today she was up earlier, eager to get her chores done so she can go hang out with friends.

This morning I turned on the light in the family room at 7am to read my scriptures and Ryan was on the couch. I don't know if he was already awake or if turning on the light woke him up. He turned the TV on and when I told him to turn it off he said, "But it's Saturday." They normally can watch TV Saturday mornings as long as it's after 6:45am. He was surprised when I told him it was Friday. He turned off the TV and headed upstairs. Apparently if it wasn't time to watch TV it wasn't worth being awake because we found him asleep a little while later, and he's gotten at least 3 more hours of sleep this morning.

It's been a nice week to relax. We've had a few chores each morning, and our house will hopefully be nice and clean when they go back to school on Monday so we can ease back into the swing of things.

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Jan 5, 2024
Megan and I went out to lunch at BJs today. She got a free lunch in a drawing for not being absent on benchmark day. Worth celebrating, since she got 100% on her math benchmark. She’s been waiting for this all break. We squeezed it in on the last day.

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Jan 6, 2024

We went to the U of A basketball game against Utah tonight and Ryan got to play a scrimmage with his Desert Sky team during half time on the McKale Center court. It was a good game and the U of A won. Ryan had fun playing. He wanted a picture of himself on the Jumbotron, but taking a picture of a screen never turns out great.

Utah vacation

 We arrived in Utah Tuesday evening and left on Saturday morning. This was the part of the break that everyone was most looking forward to, especially Megan who had a countdown to Boxing Day going on. 

Wednesday we went to the Bean Museum, then walked to the Wilk to visit Annette at her office. Rosie loved bossing Megan and Ryan around. 

We stopped by the creamery on our way back to the cars and grabbed some ice cream to eat back at Grandma's house.

Back at the homestead Mark played some guitar for our listening enjoyment.

Of course, the cousins were back to beating each other up having fun together.

We played a few rounds of Quiplash and Drawful on Jackbox games on both Wednesday and Thursday night. There were some super funny answers. For example: "Name of a song that would be in the Broadway production "Farting: The Musical" had these two answers: Oops, I Did it Again, and Let It Go. 😂

Thursday we snagged Cari and headed to Tucanos for lunch. That's a tradition the kids love whenever we come to Utah.

After lunch we met up at the church so the kids could run around and get their wiggles out. They played Mafia, Colors, and Jingle Pong.

Mark's family brought their puppies over for someone to come pick one up that they were buying, but also for the kids to be able to play with. They're so cute. Lucky for us, Annie, Rachel, and Jacob are all allergic, so there's an easy reason to not have to argue about bringing one home with us. :) 

With our powers combined, we finished the puzzle Sharon had started.

Lisa's family arrived and Andrew's family came up, so we had a fun few hours with everyone together. The kids braved the cold weather and some braved walking on the frozen duck pond. The water was only 2 feet deep before it froze, so the biggest danger was the duck poop on the surface. They had fun feeding the ducks at least. 

We had a nacho bar for dinner and enjoyed everyone's company that night.

The evening turned a bit musical with Rachel showing off her brass skills, playing the decorative horn hanging on Grandma's wall.

Then we enjoyed a lovely rendition of the song Mark wrote: Come, Sweet Jesus, Come.

Friday we headed to the church again to run around without having to go into the cold outdoors. The kids were super glad that Lisa's family had arrived the day before and they had a good time playing with Wes and Brayden. Megan was really good with baby Wes.

Brayden had an RC car that was pretty cool. He had a fun time chasing it around, but Wes especially liked trying to chase it down.

The little ones cleared out of the gym and headed to the nursery so the bigger ones could play kickball without maiming them. Much fun was had. Anya got a free ride with ghost points and ghost outs when it was her turn. 

We also tried Swedish Twister. You stand in a circle and you move a foot to touch your neighbor's foot, and they have to move that foot to touch their neighbor's foot, and so on. The first time we played the gymnasts (Megan and Miri) ended up in splits. After that we realized the rules are that once your hands touch the floor (or you lose your balance) you're out. But it was pretty funny to watch from the outside.

Rachel and Wes having a staring contest. 

Friday night Rachel and Annie went to play wall ball with Cari and a few others, while the rest of us stayed and tried out some new Jackbox games. When the wally ball players returned we played more Jackbox with them. 

When it was time to say goodnight, it was also time to say goodbye, since we were leaving early the next morning. We were glad we could visit for a few days, but it's never enough, and the kids always wish they could stay longer.

Our drive home was blessedly uneventful and we got home about 6:30pm. The kids are good travelers now and it makes the drive go nice and smooth. 

The following day was New Year's Eve. Jacob taught a great lesson about how to have consistent and effective  Come Follow Me lessons that day. We enjoyed time at Grandma's, and more games at our house. Since we didn't have fireworks, it was kind of low key, but that was fitting since it was also the Sabbath. We played games then watched It's a Wonderful Life until just before midnight, then had the countdown and jumped into the New Year. 2023 was a good year and we're grateful for a good family and good friends that made it great.