Random 'January's Almost Over, Hooray!' Post

Quick rundown of some of our January activities:

1. Watching NFL playoffs and dressing the part.

The Green Bay Packers (my fave team) played against the San Francisco 49ers (Chuck's and Quinn's fave team) a couple of weeks ago so we busted out the jerseys and forced the boys to align with one parent and against the other:

I made a point to be the one who got Jack dressed that morning to ensure that our little tiebreaker child would tip the scales in Green Bay's favor :). Also, I attended a baptism that afternoon; I don't usually dress up that much for a Saturday of football watching!

For a while we had two games of catch going simultaneously (Chuck and Will, Clyde and me) while we watched the first half. Then the little boys went to bed and I watched the rest of the game in horror as my team lost :(.

 Buuuut luckily the Niners are my second favorite team, so I carefully put this outfit together the next Sunday for church to support them in their NFC championship game against the Falcons. And it worked, they won!  

[Spoiler alert: I will be cheering for the Ravens in this weekend's Super Bowl, though, because a) I don't have enough red and gold and tan clothes to put together a second outfit and b) it's always fun to root against the team your husband is cheering for every once in a while :).]

 2.  Celebrating the HEAT WAVE (two-digit temperatures, woooo!) by going for an Ice Day walk.

School was canceled again last week after a night of freezing rain left the roads in dreadful condition. The day was surprisingly warm, though, so I corralled the boys for a walk along the path by our house, which was randomly not at all slick; it was SO nice to be outside without our lungs freeeezing in protest.

3. A little early Valentine's Day lovin'...

There's a possibility that January makes me grumpy in general and my poor family has had to put up with that, SO I put together a little activity to help all of us me be nice and loving and all of that good stuff!

 We busted out the construction paper and glue to make little Valentine's Day bags! I couldn't believe how into it the boys got... oh wait, yes I could: they're MY [cheesy little] children! For the next few days, we all found time to write each other little notes and put them into the appropriate people's bags...

 

 ... and then tonight for Family Home Evening, we opened and read them! The original plan was to wait until Valentine's Day, but we quickly realized they would be overflowing by then, and also it turns out little kids do better with more immediate gratification. So now those notes have been set aside, and there's a new stack of paper for this week!

4. Wishing Great-Grandma Thomas a VERY happy birthday!

Chuck's grandma has published several wonderful children's books, so I thought it would be fun to make a video of our boys reading one of them and send it to her for her birthday last Saturday.

Chuck picked "Stand Back," Said the Elephant, "I'm Going to Sneeze!" which worked out, since we have three copies of it. We lined the boys up on the couch and started recording and four hours of editing later (I'm slow and not an adept Windows Movie Maker user) we had this masterpiece:

 

 Which Grandma loved, hooray! 

And that's a bit of what we've been up to this month; the rest (basketball! my birthday! swimming! learning to whistle! learning to 'high five'!) will find its way to the blog sooner or later...