Leah is 15!

Holy smokes! Leah's birthday was a massive celebration this year, broken down into three great celebrations.  First up- breakfast in bed (back to orange rolls this year!) with presents and cards from her family!

Next up, partying with friends!  Leah wanted to make customized sweatshirts so they met at Walmart to gather up supplies and snacks before heading home for games, crafting, and lots of laughs. 

And the sweatshirts turned out so cute!

After the friends all went home Leah had another choice to make- Sarah's dad was sick so we invited her to stay the night at our house and I'd guess this was some of the most fun of Leah's birthday celebration!  These two are definitely peas in a pod, and there is nothing quite so wonderful as a bestie that you can be your whole true self with. 

Time for L-ondue!  What a delicious tradition!

I don't think the kids really mind the kissing rule!

And celebration part three- the lunch date with Mom and Dad!

Look at that cute giggling girl!

PepperJax for lunch!

Leah is pretty easy to please! Although she does have a relatively hard time coming up with much of anything by way of birthday presents, hard to do when it's just five days after Christmas.  Maybe this is the year that she'll start celebrating her half-birthday! And she tell me that she wasn't all that thrilled about receiving jam for her birthday last year.  You win some, you lose some, and often the worst presents make the best stories!

And somewhere in all that celebrating we finally had room in our tummies for Leah's birthday cake of choice- brownie mallowbars!  Sweet Leah didn't even mention that she didn't get to blow candles out on her actual birthday. 

She finally got to make a birthday wish!

It's going to be a good year for this girl!

Ahh, sweet Leah-Bee-a!  It has been such an exciting year for Leah, with the return to in-person school, the start of seminary, starting violin lessons up again, working as her young women class president, going to as many stake dances as possible, making new friends, attending her first high school homecoming, giving driving three solid attempts, getting involved in her new school, volunteering in an impressive variety of ways, and watching her continue to grow into such a wonderful young lady.  Leah makes parenting a teen quite a bit easier (so far!) than it probably could be, and she genuinely works hard, loves big, cares with her whole heart and has a whole lot of exciting adventures headed her way in this new year!

(And we don't talk too much about the fact that 15 sounds so much closer to 18 than 14 did... where are the days going?!) 

Happy Birthday Peanut! We love you!

Wrapping Up 2021

 Our final days of 2021 were spent in lots of happy ways!  Baking cookies at the Ronald McDonald House- a sweet service because (although my kids think the name is hilarious since they only associate it with McDonalds) the Ronald McDonald House holds a special place in my family's history since my parents stayed there while my brother Aaron was in the hospital with eye cancer, or retinoblastoma.  My mom was pregnant with me and I was named after another mom that was a good friend to her during that incomprehensively tough time in her young mom life. 

Our baking service was all fun and games until a grandma came into the kitchen and told us about her five-year-old grandson who had developed a sudden fever on Christmas Eve and passed away just a few days later.  They were just waiting to find all of the donors to share his organs with. It was a sobering reminder that we have so much to be thankful for!

It finally snowed!  Noah was nearly in tears as the days leading up to Christmas brought no snow, but it finally came!

And brought some extreme cold to go with it!

But boy was Noah happy about all the snow!

We enjoyed a few good afternoons of sledding, building snow forts, and making piles and piles of snowballs. 

Our friends Helena and Diego joined us!  They are from Brazil and love snow maybe even more than we do!

Leah and Helena built Emma a snow... coffin? They had fun with it whatever it was!

There was lots of time to rest over Christmas break too, which we all needed!

We went to the temple!  It was such a cold night, but we were so happy to be there. 

We stayed warm at the zoo by visiting all of our favorite indoor exhibits, including the gorilla family, which consists of the grouchy dad, the pregnant and restless mom, the mischievous teenage boy, the dramatic teenage girl, and the two tumbly little toddlers. They are all fascinating!

Emma took some great pictures in the aquarium!

We know right where Brazil is now!

It was extra hot and humid in the Lied Jungle. 

Emma's Christmas wish came true- a sleepover with Little Leah!

Truly her wish would be to still live just down the street from her bestie, but this was a pretty great deal too. 

We also watched a few SpiderMan movies and a few Harry Potter movies- some parts were scary!- 

and did lots of puzzles and games-  

Once Grandma and Grandpa even joined us!

And in exciting birdwatching news, we had a new visitor to the birdfeeders!  I'm still not sure why everyone else wasn't as excited about it as I was. 

The dark-eyed junco is the plump little hallmark of winter birds!

Leah and Adam had a great winter youth conference that included ice skating and Chick-fil-a, and Emma also went ice skating with a friend!

Adam's getting taller, but he's not that tall yet!

Church was cancelled during Christmas break due to the extreme cold and icy, snowy roads, but we still had an excellent home church.  I'm so grateful that we worked hard to form that good habit to lean on when needed!

Emma even built us a podium, complete with a microphone!

And all of our New Years Eve plans- a stake dance for Leah and a party for the rest of us- dissolved into a "quiet" night at home when fog turned into icy roads covered by snow. We still had a great time celebrating with just the 6 of us! It was a happy, solid end to a pretty great year.  

Bring on the new adventures of 2022!