We spent a fun weekend in St. George with Nana and Papa to celebrate Enoch's 3rd birthday. Enoch loves anything green. It's more than a favorite color. It's an obsession. He loves to wear PJ's. He loves monsters, dinosaurs, trains, and race cars. His favorite food is Dad's waffles. However, he recently made a rather loud announcement to me when I was at the opposite end of the produce aisle at Sam's Club. He was standing in the cart holding the broccolli up, yelling, "hey mom! I love this stuff! I call it 'trees'. It's green!"
We also got A LOT of snow this month! The third biggest storm on record for Flagstaff. School was cancelled all week. Aaron's work was even cancelled for a couple days. He said he always dreams of how great it would be to get so much snow that work was cancelled, but in the end it was just a lot of shoveling. We had the biggest mountain of snow that filled the entire cul-de-sac. It was mind boggling. The girls were playing in their snow castle (complete with a secret entrance stairway, awesome emergency exit slide, and tunnels) one day when a tractor came rolling down the street and proceeded to load 15!!! dumptrucks full and hauled it all away! It was the craziest, stupidest, saddest, most wasteful thing I've ever seen. The girls stood on the driveway during the whole thing and bawled like their house had burned down and their parents had both died. Enoch thought the tractor and trucks were cool, so he didn't mind too much. (The pictures show it all!). I think the guy felt so guilty he cleared the 18ft deep, 6ft high wall of ice-snow in front of our driveway, but don't tell, because he said the city would fire him. (by the way, I'm not exaggerating those figures. we measured. The plow guy has something against us-that or we are at the end of an exceptionally long street for the neighborhood and also not on the clean-sweep-in side).
Later in the month Aaron went on the snow cave campout with the scouts. We met him up there the next day for some sledding fun.
Oh, and the funny swim suit picture is how the kids spent their entire first snow day: playing in a 'fort' under the kitchen table...in full swimming gear?!?!?!?!
Needless to say it was an adventurous month, and we loved every minute of it.
January Chronicles
Special Edition: The Laundry List for a family of 6
When I finished folding the laundry this morning I paused for a brief moment to look at the row of finished piles. It occurred to me that they reflected the family members to whom they belonged in a uniquely telling way.
Mine was a pile of jeans and pajamas: two staples in my life right now. I remember when I only had one or two pair of jeans and could wear them more than once before they needed laundered. Being a mom is a dirty job and now I have several pair which I wash every single week.
Aaron's pile: no jeans. There have been no jeans in Aaron's laundry, nor on his closet shelf since he was in middle school. It's just one of those quirky things we love about Aaron. He owns no jeans.
Addie has the smallest pile: 3 items (for a whole week?!?!) including 1 pair of pajama pants, 1 pair of pants and 1 shirt- incidentally not from the same outfit. Bless her heart, in an attempt to be responsible and helpful she always puts her clothes away in the drawer- clean or dirty.
Quinn has a usual and varied stack. She usually has the largest stack of all of us because she thoughtfully selects just the right outfit each morning by digging through her drawers for just the right shirt and pants, flinging any article that just won't do, willy-nilly over her shoulder. Then she frequently repeats this ritual after lunch- just because.
Enoch has a pile of no less than 8 pairs of pajamas (minus the pair he dug out of the clean basket last night to wear to bed), and as a gesture toward convention three shirts: the soccer shirt, the motorcycle shirt, and, of course, the green shirt. Enoch puts on a pair of beloved pj's each night before bed. When he wakes up he takes them off and gets dressed into another pair of beloved pj's. 'Is going out a problem,' you ask? No. He finds that cowboy boots fit quite nicely over footsie pj's.
Jean has a neat and tidy little stack of pink, brown, and white clothes and a soft, square stack of blankets next to it. So sweet. Just like her.
