Brooklyn's friend, April, hosted a party on New Year's Day. Richard took the other kids to the church to do an indoor snowball fight. I joined them later and brought pizza so we could stay at the church and play as long as we could.
The next day Brenton had a birthday party that Kaylee and McKenna attended. Richard also took Brooklyn and McKenna to our favorite pet store to play with the animals for a bit.
Richard even went the next day with all of the kids, plus a friend of Brooklyn's, to the Humane Society to play with even more pets!
For a year or so now, Kaylee has been making bracelets to donate to a woman Kristi found in Utah that makes baby dresses and suits out of old wedding dresses and gifts them in a packet with a blanket and matching mommy/baby bracelets to hospitals for parents who have an infant pass away. Kristi found out that this woman wanted to donate to a hospital in every state and was missing Ohio and Indiana! So she sent packets to both Holly and us. We went to deliver them to the same hospital where McKenna and Brooklyn were born. It was kind of an awkward experience because nobody seemed to know where to tell us to go or what to do. We finally made it up to the maternity ward and rang the bell to get in but nobody answered. We stood there for a minute and then a nurse came up behind us and asked what we were doing. When we explained what we were donating, she just took the box from us and went into the maternity ward and so we were just left standing there again. So it wasn't quite the transformative experience I was hoping it would be for our kids but I was still glad we did it and hope it helps some grieving families in their hard time.
We had a game night planned with the McKay's over Christmas break but I got sick and was throwing up so we had to reschedule. We were able to do it the first weekend after school started and we had a blast and always wonder why we don't do this more!
Jill and Abby Christman share the same birthday and they invited a bunch of people over to celebrate. They even made dinner for everyone! It was delicious and so fun to celebrate these new friends of ours.
My friend, Nicole Anderson, moved to Utah last year and came back for a quick visit. I was able to go out to brunch with her and it was so good to catch up!
The Christman's started a social dance class that they do twice a month. The girls have had a lot of fun learning different types of dances!
Kaylee volunteered for a Martin Luther King Jr Day event at the rec center. We brought the Crossley's, the Christman's, and Brooklyn brought her friend Emma. Kaylee mainly helped with a service project to tie blankets and they also had a project to make birthday bags for the food pantry. There was also art projects, puzzles, and balloon animals that were some of the most impressive I've ever seen.
I was recently called to join the RS Activity Committee and our ward had a puzzle night. (Although it was already scheduled before I was called). We had a puzzle competition where we had 4 of the same puzzle and broke into teams to see who could do it the fastest. A lot of the women beforehand were talking about how they had done puzzle competitions before and I got a little nervous but my team won! It was fun to be able to use my previously useless talent :)
We had already had a few snowstorms but we had a huge storm come dump about 2 feet of snow, which is probably the most snow we've had at once since we've lived here. Church and school was canceled and it was SO cold and the city actually issued an emergency level that made it so nobody could drive unless it was an emergency! The first night, we braved the cold to go walk out to the main roads to see if anything had been cleared away.
I was nervous to drive the first day after the storm and so the Christman's came and picked up the kids and took them to play games and out in the snow at their house.
The next day the roads were much better so we ventured out to go sledding at our favorite hill. It was freezing cold and pretty windy when we got there so we weren't sure we would last long but luckily the wind stopped and we were able to stay for a couple of hours.
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