December 2020

 The girls couldn't wait to kick off the holiday season. I had bought a few crafts and things to do during December and they wanted to do all of them right away! We made gingerbread houses, paper snowflakes and went to see the Zoo Lights all in the first week of December! 

McKenna's house kept falling so instead of getting mad, she got creative a made up a story to go with it. She showed us how Santa had crashed his sleigh and had a lot of fun decorating how she thought it would look after the terrible accident. 

The weather was warm enough that we were able to go find a few more RiverBoxes.  It has been such a fun challenge! The snake one was one of our favorite pieces of art and probably took us the longest to find too. 

We got a little bit more snow that was perfect packing snow. The girls convinced Richard and I to help them build a giant snowman.  It was about as tall as Kaylee! It has been years since I've built a snowman and it was actually really fun. 

Kaylee heard about an outer space art contest through school and wanted to enter it. She sat down one afternoon and painted all of the planets. I was super proud of her! 

Another one of our favorite Christmas traditions is going to see the Christmas lights at Columbus Commons. It is still so eerie to me to see how deserted everything is downtown.  For the most part, we don't feel how much the world is still shut down in our own little bubble, but it was crazy to see how few cars were parked and how few people were walking around. We were sad we couldn't combine this with seeing the holiday train at the downtown library like we normally do but the lights were better this year than they have ever been so that made up for it. 

We also decided to go to a drive through light show this year since there aren't too many places we can go indoors. I'm not sure it's something I would do every year, but it was perfect for this year!  We started off the night a little rocky and it seemed like thing after thing after thing kept going wrong. It was something that could have made us all very frustrated and grumpy but we just started laughing at how many things kept happening! We got lost multiple times, we sat in line to pick up our dinner forever, we kept having to make U turns because our GPS kept having us go really strange ways, we got stuck behind an accident that completely closed off the road we needed to go on, we got super far out in the middle of nowhere (close to where the lights were) when we realized we needed to find a bathroom so we turned back and drove 15 mins back the way we came to find a store, on our way back we got stopped by the longest train I have ever seen and just as that train was about to finish, a train going the other direction came past and we were stopped twice as long, and then when we FINALLY got to the lights after going very far out of our way to avoid the road with the accident, we found out it was an hour and a half wait to get into the lightshow!  Oh and did I mention it was pouring rain through all of this?  By the time we got through the light show and drove home, we had all been in the car for almost 4 hours.  It could have been a very miserable night but instead turned into a very fun, memorable night for all of us!

The girls did the winter reading program through our library.  Besides entering in the hours that you read, they also had activities for you to complete.  One of them was to read a biography and then dress up like that person. Brooklyn and I read a biography on Gandhi and then she dressed up like him. She made the cutest little Gandhi!

Another fun thing we did was this color by number nativity. Every night you would color one piece of the picture and there was a song and a scripture to go with it. Sometimes we start things like this and then it peters out but all of us looked forward to doing it every night! Maybe with COVID we are just excited about anything we are doing in the future but I guess that made it perfect for this year ;)

Christmas Eve we had a Zoom party with my family that was so much fun. We filmed a lip sync video to our new favorite  Christmas song, I Believe In Santa, and then we also did a little Christmas video with 4 different endings, like in the movie Clue.  Sometimes I have way more fun than the kids do filming these, but this time everyone was really involved and loved doing it!  Each family also filmed a different part of the nativity and then we watched them all in order. 

That night the kids exchanged their sibling gifts.  We had some really creative ideas and hard working girls this year! I hope this becomes a favorite tradition of theirs. Brooklyn got a picture frame with a picture of the 3 girls and an amazing unicorn that Kaylee made from scratch!

McKenna got a painted frame with a picture of her and Brooklyn and a friendship bracelet Kaylee braided.

Kaylee got bookmarks made of pictures of herself and a snow globe. 

Christmas was pretty much the same as always for us.  The kids got extra gifts this year thanks to the generosity of their aunt and uncle who are starting a foundation in honor of their sweet baby Neil. 

We were hoping to go sledding but since the weather app said it felt like 5°, we decided to wait until the next day when it was a much warmer 17°!  Ha ha.  Sledding is one of my favorite winter activities and I think I go down more times than the kids do!

Our New Years Eve was pretty chill and I didn't get a single picture! As usual, we put a bunch of activity ideas inside balloons and would pop one when we were ready to do another activity. It seems like a very fitting ending to 2020 that a lot of our ideas didn't work or we kept having to change things around. Richard wanted to be in charge of the mixed up menu and he went a little overboard!  He bought a ton of appetizer type foods for the kids to try. It's always a big hit! Since none of the cities were doing their big firework shows, we just watched some countdowns from previous years while we did our Spanish grape tradition.  I don't think anyone was sorry to see 2020 go!

November 2020

 The girls really wanted to go back to their favorite metro park that has a zipline they never seem to get sick of.  Little did we know, the park also recently added some rope swings that the girls had so much fun on! We have been so impressed with all the great parks around Columbus.

Richard got some really sad news this month.  His dad had contracted COVID-19 and didn't want to go to the hospital because he insisted he would be fine. He finally got bad enough that his kids forced him to go and was in the ICU for less than a week before he passed away on November 16th. Richard flew to Utah for the funeral and the girls drew cards to put in his casket. We had so many people send Richard things to let us know they were thinking of him!  We got multiple bouquets, a huge plant, gift cards, and letters.  The girls favorite thing was an Edible Arrangement! It was pretty big but they polished it all off in barely two days. 

We knew Thanksgiving would be very quiet with just our family but we tried to make the best of it. We decorated our table and made a centerpiece turkey out of vegetables, as well as paper bag teepees. We played a lot of games, including our very own turkey shoot with balloon turkeys and a Nerf bow.  We also got to play some Zoom games with my family so even though it was different, it was still a good day. 

McKenna's birthday was the day after Thanksgiving and I was really worried about it.  She always gets so excited she can't sleep and then is disappointed that the day is not as magical as she thinks it will be.  She got very little sleep so we had a few rough parts of the day but I think it was a good birthday overall. We played some Zoom games with her cousins, did a home escape room, and made mint chocolate cupcakes for her treat. She had been wanting an American girl-type doll and I bought this one that I thought looked just like her! We are very grateful for our spunky 9 year old!

The city of Dublin put together something that sounded like a lot of fun so we decided to try it out. It is somewhere in between geocaching and a scavenger hunt.  They put up all kinds of art installations (15 I think) around the parks next to the river and give you a booklet that has clues to help you find them.  Each piece of art has a hidden box somewhere on it and inside is a stamp, ink and a notebook you can write your name in. It was such a fun adventure for our family!  We only did a handful of them the first day and explored some of the parks that we went to. 

President Nelson issued a challenge to post on social media things you are grateful for every day for a week. Since I am the only one with social media, we decided to make a list of things at home instead. It came at a perfect time and it was really helpful and peaceful to focus on all the good things we have right now when there is so much going on that seems bad. 

We decided to do a virtual Primary Program this year and I thought it turned out so great! We had each of the kids record just a sentence or two answering a question based on the Come Follow Me lessons throughout the year.  Our music leader also asked a few families, including ours, to record a song. Our kids sang I Will Walk With Jesus and they did a great job! We decided to do a Zoom session on the 5th Sunday to watch the program all together as a ward.  For some reason, I was really nervous about conducting this meeting and had a lot of anxiety about it.  My anxiety definitely didn't settle down when I saw Elder and Sister Uchtdorf pop up on the Zoom!  Their grandson is in our ward so their great-granddaughter was going to be a part of the program. I got extra nervous and started shaking uncontrollably. Luckily I had already pre-recorded my testimony and an intro talk, otherwise I might not have made it through the whole thing!  It was fun to have them on there but because I was so nervous, as soon as it was over I thanked everyone and very quickly logged off.  Apparently Elder Uchtdorf stayed on and talked for a minute so I have been kicking myself ever since that I missed the opportunity to talk with him!  

We heard about a fun challenge where you would give up sleeping in your bed for a night and tag it on Instagram to a mattress company who would donate a bed to a child in need.  This is definitely the most fun way we have ever done service!

We finally got a little bit on snow on the last day of November.  McKenna and Brooklyn only played in it for a little bit but Kaylee stayed out for hours!  She even built a pretty big snowman all on her own. We don't get a ton of snow here so we have to take advantage of it while we can!

October 2020

 Richard got a new job!  He now works in the E-learning support team at OSU.  I went with him to help clean out his old office and it was definitely a little bitter sweet but he is excited to move onto new adventures!

We drove past his new building and saw that it is really close to this pretty pond where OSU does agriculture studies.  We took the girls there and walked around the little pond and Brooklyn and McKenna found a grasshopper to play with and took him around with us the whole time. 

I was so proud of Kaylee. The kids in her class were supposed to pick one word that was important to them and draw a poster of it. She chose equality and it made me so happy that she truly does see everyone the same and tries to treat them all the same. She has a very sweet heart!

 We made sure to go to Boo at the Zoo. My favorite part was the Red Pandas. We usually don't see the them very often, but this time they were so active and were going all over the place.  Then we got to see a tour come through and feed them so they were even more active!  It was so fun to watch and we spent at least 40 mins just watching them!

We also had REALLY good weather most of the fall season, it was so nice!  We raked up our first pile of leaves and the two older girls felt like they were too old to jump in the leaves anymore.  I had to get in there with Brooklyn to prove to them that you are never too old to do fun things!

We also got the girls their own pumpkin to decorate. Brooklyn and Kaylee had fun with the paint but McKenna just drew on hers with marker. Richard also bought a huge pumpkin to carve and the girls had fun helping him scoop out the guts!

We had a problem with one of our gutters and I thought I could look at it better if I went on the roof.  Kaylee has begged me for ages to go out on the roof so I let her come with me to check it out.  When Brooklyn and McKenna saw us up there, they wanted to join too so we let them crawl out Kaylees window and sit on the roof of the garage the rest of the night.  They didn't want to ever get down! It was really fun and brought back memories of how much I loved being on the roof with my dad. 

Trick or treating was scheduled for two days before Halloween and all day long it poured rain! I was really not looking forward to going out but luckily the rain calmed down and it was just drizzling when we went out. Kaylee was so sad that her friends canceled their plans to go together so we told her she could go around an extra loop in the neighborhood without her sisters and I could not believe the amount of candy she got! There were a lot less people out trick or treating and not quite as many passing out candy so everyone felt bad and gave big handfuls to all the kids. 

Since Halloween was a Saturday, and we had already gone trick or treating, we did a few Halloween crafts and then watched a Halloween movie. It was pretty low key as far as holidays go but it was still good.