Post-Christmas and into January

After Christmas Day, we had a few days to relax and eat leftovers and try to figure out where to put all the new stuff.  Then Craig flew to Houston for the second wedding of the year on his brother's side, and I stayed home with all the kids.  (I never got Craig to post about the first wedding, so I doubt I can get him to blog about the most recent one, either, but I'll try!)

I declared it "Mommy Movie Week" and would choose movies for the kids to watch with me.  The rule was that they didn't have to watch my movie, but they weren't allowed any other screens while it was on.  (Which meant they all sat and watched my movie, because moving pictures are too hard to resist!)  In this way, we watched Disney's Robin Hood, Singin' in the Rain, The Pirates of Penzance, and Little Shop of Horrors.  And I had so much fun!  (The kids mostly had fun, too, except Camille was freaked out by the dentist in Little Shop.  Not the plant, mind you!  Just the dentist.  So she left halfway through and played in her room and then had nightmares for the next couple nights.  Oh, well.)

Craig finally came home to us in the evening of New Year's Eve, arriving just after we'd finished our cheese fondue.  I was so happy to have him home!  I'm very good at taking care of everything while he's gone, but it's just no fun without him.  

Colton stole my phone so he could take obnoxious selfies.  But in the background he managed to capture me happy to have Craig home. 

Then we had chocolate fondue with daddy:

And did a slideshow of all our pictures from the year until it was time to send little kids to bed.  We played games, watched Taylor Swift's Miss Americana documentary, and Craig made his beloved hotdogs wrapped in crescent rolls.  And then once midnight had finally come and gone and we could send the big kids to bed, too, Craig and I stayed up until 2am because there was just so much to talk about from when he'd been gone!

Everyone was back at school on January 2nd, which was pretty lame.  Who goes back on a Tuesday after a major holiday like that?  All the other school districts around us started back on Wednesday or Thursday!  I definitely was not ready for the break to be over!  But since then we've had school canceled one day and delayed two hours for rain (???) last week and then this week (after having Monday off for MLK Day) we got two snow days, another 2-hour delay, followed by another snow day (at least all this fuss for snow makes sense!).  So, yeah, this week they went to school once, two hours late.  I guess we've been easing back into things after all!  

My kids are still goofy...

Oh!  The chickens are finally all laying eggs!!!  It's been so fun trying to figure out which eggs belong to which chickens and the kids are always really excited when they find an egg and it's still warm.  Once we used up all our Costco eggs, I sat down and washed all the ones we'd collected so we could refrigerate them.  They're so pretty!

The dark speckled ones are from Taylor; green eggs are from Dolly, the large cream colored eggs are Billy's and the smaller in-between light and dark eggs are Adele's!

I finally went back to work for a few hours last week.  (I hadn't gone in to the office since October!)  Now that it's a new year, I can send out another batch of letters for all the files that were closed previously.  Anyway, this was one of the first times I've been in the office since we moved.  At first I was sitting facing the door so I could see people coming, but then I realized I was really doing things wrong if I had back to the window and all this light.  (I didn't have windows in my previous office!)  So even if I'm working in the conference room on a laptop instead of in my own office, I still think this is an improvement:

Daylight!  Sky!  Some pretty snazzy apartments, and ACAC (the fancy pants gym in town)!

My friend wanted to see the new Mean Girls, so we got tickets for a few of us to all go together.  It turned out our showing was an "event" so we got party favors to go with it-- I was thrilled!

In addition to the tiaras, we also got tiny "Burn" Books, blow-up microphones, and those ribbons like they use in rhythmic gymnastics, all in pink, of course!

Craig was a good sport about the tiara!  😂

Actually, all the men were!

(The movie was fun, but not amazing and definitely not an improvement on the original.  I thought Slate did a pretty good job summing it all up, if you're interested!)

I didn't take any pictures of the snow because all I want to do is stay inside wrapped up in a blanket.  Fortunately I have kind neighbors who aren't so wimpy and send me their pictures!

Sydney, Camille, Beth, and Colton at the neighborhood sledding hill

And then Adam came over and took pictures of us.  We're hoping to do a (spoiler alert!) "4 Seasons of Smiths" thing for next year's Christmas card (we'd actually been hoping to do this last year, but we never got any snow so it didn't happen!) so this was the first step for that.  I thought they turned out great, and I had an excuse to wear my favorite hat and scarf!  (I will, however, be the first to admit that you wouldn't normally see me putting on lipstick and mascara to go out in the snow!  Nothing about these pictures is realistic!)

Camille looks a little devious here.  I love it.

I suspect this winter is going to be making up for last year's lack of snow.  This morning Craig made cinnamon rolls.  It's going to be a good winter!