January seemed like a very long month this year for a few different reasons. For the rest of Christmas break our sleeping schedule was very thrown off. Here is a picture of Bentley sleeping in until 10:45 on New Year's Day. Is she a teenager already? Jeff and I got sick for a lot of January with a cough that wouldn't go away and kept us up at night, as well as off and on sore throats and less energy. We didn't do a whole lot with the time the kids had off school, unfortunately. It was nice to be able to sleep in and take it easy though. We did have some play dates (like the one with the Jenkins in the photos). We forgot to decorate gingerbread houses at Christmas time, but I had already bought some, so we pulled them out...better late than never.
Deacon is now a part of Activity Day boys, which is so exciting! Their first activity of the year was combined at Flying Squirrel. That was a lot of fun for them! We also went over to the Loewen's one night when Dakota was in town and had such a blast.
One of the worst parts of the month was how cold it was. We hit a lot of records with how cold it got and I don't think I've ever seen my van read -39! It was insane. Activities got cancelled because of the extreme cold and some unlucky people in Sundance even lost their water because of a pipe burst. We were really lucky because everything kept working for us and schools never got cancelled, only buses.
We have started to develop our basement, which is exciting news! We are turning our upstairs bonus room into 2 rooms so that the kids can have their own rooms, and then we're putting all the toys and tv in the basement. There will also be a bedroom down there that Jeff will use for his office. Lee is doing it for us and we are really excited, but we also had to move everything out of the basement and stick it in our garage. It was very cold to be out there carrying shelves around the house, but we spent an entire Saturday and got it done! Jeff is taking one for the team and parking on the street until it's done, and letting me have the spot in the garage.
The kids were quite ready to go back to school when it was time. Leo had an unfortunate accident while he was at school one day. I guess he ran into another kid in the gym and his lip got sliced open. Jeff took him to urgent care and he got 4 stitches. I was glad I wasn't there with him, because I would have been so scared, but apparently he did amazing and was incredibly brave. That's my boy! He did, however, have a tough time not biting and playing with his lip, so some of the stitched came out and I ended up taking him back to urgent care the next morning. The doctor thought it would heal okay on it's own, though, and more stitches were not necessary. His lip looked awful for a week or so, but eventually started to heal and hopefully it will go completely back to normal!
I took Boston and Leo to Treehouse one morning to meet up with Brent and Bailey, as well as Rebecca, and the kids had lots of fun playing together. Sometimes I forget I still have little kids that want to do fun things too! It's so cute seeing Boston make friends with Arthur and play with Jack and Tara.
The end of this month was full of birthday parties, which I will post next. We also started thinking about Deacon's baptism! I took him to Moore's and we picked out a suit and nice shoes for him. I also bought him some ties from Amazon. It's become tradition to get the kids special colored scriptures with their name engraved, so I got him some green ones with a camo spine. He thought they were really awesome! Then I pulled him out of school a bit early to get some photos of him taken in his suit at the temple. He had a great time seeing the beautiful temple and hanging out with me! He made me take pictures of the temple so he could show them to his friends, because he had talked about how pretty it was! I love how open Deacon is about what he believes, and I can't wait for him to be baptized.
