March 2021

 

March was a fun and quiet month!

Alana is getting ready to be the Lion King Jr. production that her school is putting on. I got make turbans for some of the kids. 

Here I am trying to get some new pictures for my quilting business. This one turned out pretty good.

Alana has been working hard at taekwondo and has moved up to the red belt! I got to watch all her testing out in the car on the computer while I was parked outside. 

I have been super excited about plants this year, but I ended up planting too early. I am going to have a bunch of bushes before I can take them outside!

We saw something online that we wanted to try, so we bought a rosette iron and had rosette cookies! They were yummy!

As Spring gets closer, the deers spend more time in our yard.  Usually, there is anywhere from three to a dozen at a time. 

Apparently our deer resistant plants are pretty yummy before they bloom.

February 2021

 It has been a fun month. Lots happening and not a lot of time for photos. 

Alana had Middle Ages day at school and I got to go in and "help." Turns out it was a fun opportunity to watch the kids have fun and chat with my friend.  This is Alana jousting.

Dan and Dana closed on their house in Colorado, so the boys got to hang out with me while they worked on getting the house ready. The boys were perfect angels! This is the awesome picture Logan drew while I was hanging out with Monica in the car.

Those kids were conspiring against me!

On the 14th, we left for Colorado to help Dan and Dana get the rest of their stuff from Utah to Colorado.  The road was snowy at some points, but we made it over there without any major incidents.  We helped them unpack or whatever we could do and generally hung out. The plan was to drive back on Tuesday  but the weather wasn't looking good and the freeway was closed, so we ended up staying an extra day. Wednesday we headed out. The weather wasn't too bad. There was one point when the freeway closed 5 miles ahead of us, but it ended up only being a 20 minute delay. We watched a movie on the Ipad while we waited for it to reopen. 

We finally made it home to 18 inches of new snow! We had a really nice neighbor shovel our drive way for us so their was only a few inches on the driveway. Blessings!

The rest of the month we pretty much spent putting the house back in order and settling back into life. 

Except for crazy hair days at school. Those are always fun!

January 2021

January was another good month. Covid isn't going away anytime soon, but a lot of people are starting to get the vaccine so maybe we are on our way out of it. 

Dan has been busy working in Colorado, and him and Dana have been working on closing on their house, but other than that, everything has been moving along like normal.

Quilt guild has been having zoom meetings. It's not the favorite of everyone, as we would rather get together in person, but you take what you can get!

We were able to celebrate Tristan's birthday with him! Because we were just on the tail end of quarantine, we had to forgo any parties, but Dan and Dana were really great about making sure he felt special. 

There was lots of presents and cake, and they had a special surprise birthday parade for him! 

We were also able to participate in his baptism too. Such a special day!

Alana has been having fun entertaining herself. She has been baking a bunch of things, and even whipped up some play dough for her and the boys. 

This is her version of Aragog for Harry Potter club at school. 

She has still been doing Taekwondo at home. She tested at home this time too. Master Jeon is very encouraging and she did a great job!

For Christmas, Naomi's big present was a shopping trip with mom. She was super excited for it. We had to put it off for a coupe weeks, but when it finally happened it was like the best day ever for her. 

We went to Fashion Place Mall. She had it all planned out. She knew what stores she wanted to see, what she wanted to buy, and that she wanted to eat at Cheesecake Factory for lunch. She did really good budgeting her money and got a ton of stuff. Boy, we were exhausted after that!

I didn't get any pictures, but we were able to celebrate Grandpa Dave's first birthday without him. We did things that we thought he would enjoy. Will had sausage rolls. We listened to his favorite music: AC/DC, Ozzy Ozbourne, and Aerosmith. We had dinner at Village Inn. We were able to visit with Jamie and Joni and Nate at the restaurant and reminisce a little bit too. It was a good day. 

We finally got the rocks done at the side of the house and now we are looking into getting a new fence installed that will keep the deer out of the backyard. Hopefully that will come soon.

One of the benefits of having the Robert's family with us is all the awesome german food that Dana is making for us to try. It has all been delicious! We have really liked the Kartoffel und Eier (Hardboiled eggs in a cream mustard sauce served over boiled potatoes) and this was a homemade meatball dish that was super yummy too. 

After a really dry November, December, and first part of January, we actually got some good snow. We still need more, but the kids have loved finally being able to use the sleds they got for Christmas. 

 

December 2020

It has been an interesting month. We decided to cancel all Christmas get togethers. If we were going to say no to one group, we needed to say no to all of them. So we had probably the quietest, low stress Decembers that we have had in quite some time. 

But it also gave us time to add in some fun new things. We combined some of our traditions with traditions from the Robert's family. One of those traditions is St. Nikolaus. The kids left their clean boots by the door so they could be filled with treats and other fun things. 

Alana had a class party, where they got to wear ugly sweaters or ugly masks. This is how Alana decorated her mask.

Naomi has taken to drawing comics to express herself, to be silly, and to talk about the things that happen around her.

We had more helpers to decorate for Christmas! (Thanks Dana!)

Since we couldn't have any parties, the grandparents came to see us! Here the kids are all opening presents from Nonnie and Poppa.

Instead of the Knight family party, we had a secret Santa ornament exchange. Here is the letter we got.

Another german tradition we got to participate in was Advent. For the four Sundays leading up to Christmas, we would sit, light an Advent candle, eat cookies, drink cocoa, and listen to Christmas music. The first advent is special so we talk about Christmas and Christ. 

Mom brought me a box of things from Grandma Williams. There is lots of cool things like quilting templates, a quilting frame, fabrics, and even her class notes from when she taught quilting classes in Spanish Fork. 

After the wind blew down part of the fence in September, we decided it was a good time to get the north side of the house taken care of. So we hired a company so come build the rock wall to the trampoline, put down a flag stone path, and some rock stairs up to the chicken coop.  Here are some before pictures. I will post the after pictures next month. 

Instead of the Smith/Kunzler get together, Lindsay came up with an idea to do Christmas Bingo. We all filled in a square on a bingo sheet of a fun Christmas activity. Then from the 20th to the 25th, we had a contest to get a bingo first and to get black out first. We texted all about our activities to the group and shared pictures of the fun. The girls had loads of fun trying to get a black out. 

Here is a snowman breakfast.

Snowball fight. (There was not enough snow outside to have a proper one.)

We went and say a light display. This was at the cemetery by the Bountiful Temple. We also drove around the temple to see the banners with the story of the birth of Christ.

This is the girl's version of a gingerbread house. This was the closest we could come without having to go to the store. 

Naomi read a Christmas story to everyone, and we posted it online. 

The girls also went caroling with social distancing, by standing in the middle of the culdesac and yelling Christmas songs as loud as they could.

We had a cocoa bar with lots of toppings. 

We also watched the Christmas Story movie and ate special popcorn. (That was our contribution to the bingo game.) It ended up being a fun game!

Here is our Christmas morning festivities. 

Later that day, we had a zoom meet up with the Smiths and Kunzler's and watched people open their presents. That seemed to be how we meet up with most people now. 

Here is the letter the kids left for Santa, and his reply.

Will got me some cool puzzles. He has enjoyed helping me put them together. 

We also celebrated Boxing day (a day late) and used the crackers Grandma Jamie got for us. It was fun to share this tradition with the Robert's.

Finally, I will share our experience with COVID. 

Dan got a tentative job offer in October. To get the final offer he had to do some background checks and fill out some paperwork. He got those turned in really quick, but then it quickly turned into a comedy of errors. They lost his paperwork, it was rejected, so they had to to resubmit it, then it was rejected because of a misspelling the HR department did. Then it was a long wait for the signatures. His start date kept getting pushed back. Finally, the long awaited day came when he could start work! It was the Monday before Christmas. He did a bunch of trainings, then found out on Wednesday that there was a possibility that he was exposed to COVID. So he got tested and was sent home for the day. Thursday he returned to Bountiful to spent time with family for Christmas. On his way home, he got the call that his test came back positive. We had all been battling the snuffles, and there was only a very small possibility that he could have gotten it from work. So we started thinking he got it from home. So we all signed up to get tested. Thursday night, he got a call that his test was compromised and he needed to get retested again. So Saturday morning, 6 of us went and got tested. When the results started to come back positive, we got appointments for Naomi and Alana to get tested. Both of their results came back negative. This was quite perplexing to us because we were certain that Naomi had brought it home from school. She had started the round of sickness with a cold two weeks prior. So we are assuming that she had it, but her body had cleaned it our enough that the test could not detect it any more.  So because of all that, quarantine started on December 24th. Each of us quarantined till 10 days after the symptoms showed. Tristan tested positive so her had to quarantine 10 days from the time her tested positive. Naomi and Alana had to be in quarantine till 10 days after the last quarantine ended. That puts them at January 16th.  We had thought about getting the girls the antibody test, but the school district wont accept it, and they would still have to be in quarantine. So we decided to for go it. 

Besides the girls having to wear masks around the house, and being cut off from everyone, it was pretty mild cases. Mostly stuffy noses, and sinus headaches. We were very blessed to have not spread it to our extended family or to have gotten bad symptoms and had to have been hospitalized.  Hopefully we don't get it again.