Starting the New Year Off Busy!

Oh my goodness, where has the time gone?  It's almost as though going back to work means that I have less time to blog!  But how can that be?  (I'm pretty sure if I gave up reading any of my stupid advice columns I could find the time...  Hmmm...  New goal, perhaps...)

Anyway, we've been puttering along as usual, keeping busy, just like you, I'm sure!  

At the beginning of January we had a big planning breakfast for the YM and YW where we hashed out the bulk of our activities for the year.  Stuff like that always feels so daunting, but once it's done, it's so nice to feel like you have a plan in place (even if we change it about as often as we follow it!):

Older YWs class

Younger class (I'm so glad they got rid of all the weird names-- no more Beehives and Mia Maids!)

Teacher's quorum (yup, Ryder is a teacher now!)

Deacon's quorum

Priest's quorum

And we were missing a few kids, too-- I can't believe how many youth our ward has now!  It's so awesome!!!

Back when we had our snow storm, I made soup and Craig mad these beautiful bread bowls!  I don't love winter, but I DO love winter time foods!

Colton ended up exchanging the cruise ship lego set he'd gotten for Christmas for this awesome vespa!  (It turned out the cruise ship was an off-brand and the pieces just didn't fit together well.  Lame.)

One evening, I convinced Bentley to play Go Fish with Camille for old time's sake.  He used to play this with her in the mornings before he left for school!

Temple date night!

Ryder played with the all-district jazz band!  And-- bonus-- we figured out how to sit in the balcony!

The YM managed to create their own gaga ball pit

Camille's hair has gotten very long and it is much thicker than Kendra or my hair, so it also gets knotted up like crazy.  We've started trying to keep it braided at all times to save on tears.  This led to her hair looking very pretty for church one day:

What I wouldn't do for hair like this!

We had one very warm day in January where the temperature shot up to 75 F!  It was awesome, but a little weird.  We celebrated by making the kids go hiking on the Monticello Trails!  And right as we were just starting out, Adam noticed that Bentley and I were reverse-matching!  So, naturally, I had to take the most awkward photo ever of the occasion:

At least Bentley managed to look normal for this picture!

I swear we don't just bring Adam along for the great pictures he takes of us, but that is a pretty fun perk!

We had an amazing ward temple trip back in January-- the youth did baptisms, the adults did sessions, and the primary had really great activities for the kids at the stake center so everyone got to be involved.  I was so impressed with how it all came together!  Part of the primary stuff was they took pictures of all the kids and made little temple books for each child.  How cool is that?

I was supposed to take Kendra shopping after the temple, but I began getting migraine symptoms, so I took my meds and went to bed (and woke up feeling great!).  So Craig got to take the girls to buy pants!  Apparently Kendra felt the need to text pictures of herself trying on pants to her friend, but then she got bored taking mirror selfies and began trying to strike weird poses whilst showing off her pants.  Which is how this happened:

😂😂😂

My daughter is silly!  (And she ended up buying that pair of pants, too!)

The day after a big storm, I noticed this umbrella just outside our garage

I kept asking Colton and Camille to figure out which of their friends had left it there, but they kept forgetting and then when we finally did remember, no one would claim it.  It was so weird (especially for such a cute umbrella!).  After about a month, I finally texted this picture to the neighborhood text chain, asking if it belonged to anyone.  Turned out it was our diagonally-across-the-street neighbor's, and had blown off her porch in the storm and she figured it was just gone!  We were very glad to return it to its rightful owner!

The older YWs class did yoga for their Tuesday night activity and asked the Gaskins to lead it (apparently they do yoga every morning)-- I was bummed that I was stuck with the younger class trying to learn to crochet (I did not learn how to crochet).  I definitely would have preferred a little yoga...  Anyway, it looks like they had fun:

Speaking of yoga!  I'm slowly getting into a pretty solid exercise routine that makes me very happy!  I decided to quit FiA a few months back (long story which isn't interesting enough to put on the blog, I'm afraid), and my sister Natalie gave me a membership to her friend's "home gym," which I've been loving.  (Ritual 365 if you want to try it out-- you can do a free two week trial and I think they're really great!) (If you are seriously interested in trying that, let me know and I'll walk you through how it works!)  And since I don't have any travel time, I usually can squeeze in a 20-minute Yoga with Adriene video, also, before it's time to get the kids up for school, so that's pretty awesome.  I'm also trying to run more and make myself actually like running.  So far I'm learning that listening to podcasts is better than music for distracting me from how much I hate running.  I'll run Craig and my usual route, and then walk for a bit, and then sprint (well, "sprinting" for me is probably what an average runner's normal pace is) down any hills from there, walk on the flat or uphill parts.  Something about trying to run fast for a just a little bit feels a lot happier than my usual plodding jog, so I'm liking that a lot, too.

Fitness is such a process.  

Anyway, back to the happenings in our lives...

Colton and Camille had a "dress as your favorite" day for school, so here they are:

Camille is in her pajamas, because she loves sleeping.  And Colton is Calvin (complete with Hobbes)!  I love how Craig got his hair to stick up all crazy for this!

One more so you can really admire that hairdo...

Walking along the trails behind our house I find this: totally not sketchy at all...

I actually heard a crash in the night about a week before I discovered this-- I assumed something in the house had fallen off a shelf, but I never did find anything broken, so maybe I heard this poor tree go down...?

That was most of our January stuff!  I've got a LOT more to tell you about, so hopefully I'll get that all written down sooner rather than later!