Sledding

My moms group just had a successful sledding trip!  When we planned it we said that it would be contingent on the weather cooperating and there still being enough snow.  With the winter we've been having that was no problem.  While we almost had to cancel because of dropping temperatures, it decided to warm up enough just in time.

This is the first sledding trip where I didn't have to sit someone on my lap and take them down the hill against their will.  All three kids were ready to go and took off!

Becca's Birthday #1

This week is Becca's birthday.  The actual day is on Thursday, but our Thursday is a bit out of control scheduling wise, so we are spreading out the celebrations.  Yesterday was part #1.  Per Becca's request, we took a family trip to Crazy Bounce.  In the past, she has always gotten too scared of the big slides here, so I was a bit surprised that this was where she wanted to go to celebrate her birthday.  In fact, she has been waiting since Michael's birthday in August, always insisting on Crazy Bounce for her birthday.

My goodness did she have fun.  She went on everything in the building and had a huge smile on her face the whole time.  I guess the fun anticipation helped build her confidence.  I can't believe she is just about 4 years old.

Swimming Lessons

Jon and Becca just finished up a session of swimming lessons.  I am happy to report that they have both become a ton more confident in swimming without life jackets on.  They were even jumping in on their own.  And our big news is that on the last day, Jon actually swam for 6 seconds without any floatation devise before his face started going under water and he grabbed the edge.  They both can't wait to go back to the pool again soon to play around.

Snow Days

So with all of the snow we've had an amazing run of snow days.  Back at Christmas our Christmas break was bookended by one snow day before and two after.  Then last week we finished a string of a full week of snow days.  We had snow days on Thursday, Friday, (the weekend), Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

The first Thursday we had a friend from our church small group come and play so her parents could still go to work.  I was so excited to get them all outside, but it only lasted about 10 minutes before they were too cold to come in.



Come in for a snack and a movie. :)



So with the cold temperatures we did a lot of inside playing.  One day we got out a bunch of legos and duplos and did some fun creative play.



The boys also did a lot of stacking getting ready for this coming season.



And Becca has been into doing her "homework" which is workbooks I've picked up for her.



Tim spent much of the break rebuilding his computer.  For his birthday we had order a bunch of parts for our super old Windows XP computer and they arrived just in time for some snow day fun.  My wonderfully gifted husband (with the help of youtube videos) took apart and rebuilt the computer and I'm happy to say that it turned on and worked great the first time!  So he and the kids have been spending a lot of time playing minecraft and starting some minecraft video recording on it.



I did get the boys to forgo the new machine for the old video games once.  The last time they played MarioKart together Jon didn't do so well.  This time I smiled when I heard Michael say, "Wow, Jon, your actually pretty good."



As you can imagine things soon got a little crazy all cooped up in the house.  Finally, when the weather got up to a balmy 8 degrees we forced the kids outside.









A couple of minutes later I found Jon wading through the snow to get to the back door to let me know that ....


Becca's boot and sock had come off and gotten stuck in the snow.

Snow

Well, we have had quite the snow in the last week and a half.  It never dumped more than 5-6 inches on any day, and most days it was only about 2-3 inches, but it kept coming and coming.

This first picture is the snow out our back door.  Impressive, but then you remember that there is actually two large steps down out our door to the ground and the snow is still almost a foot up over our door.



Here is the picnic table.


Tim actually measured and we have 18 inches on the picnic table.  Amazing considering a lot of snow blew off the table with the huge winds we've had.


As Tim has been snow blowing, our piles have been getting quite large.  It has been fun watching the kids try to climb up the ridges to get out in the snow to play.


My favorite thing, though is that even though we've had so much snow, we've actually had a couple of hours of this too:



Do you see it?  Sunshine and blue skies!  That is unheard of most days in Michigan.