Weekly Happenings: This past week was rather interesting. Monday was a holiday (Martin Luther King Jr. Day). Then Tuesday, a cold front came swooping in, taking the form of an ice storm. The entire city pretty much shut down. Joseph didn’t have to go to school and Paul didn’t have to go to work. The ice pretty much stuck around all day, so we just stayed home to stay out of it all. The rest of the week after that seemed to get back to normal rather quickly, but it was quite the way to start the week!
The Weekly Weather: Sunday and Monday were really nice (60s-70s), Tuesday was, well, kind of gross (it didn’t get out of the 20s for the entire day), and then the rest of the week was pretty normal (50s). This is why we can never pack away a certain type of clothing. We end up using short sleeves and long sleeves all in the same week, haha.
What Paul’s Been Up To: He’s been pluggin’ away at work and at school. Not much else to report on that front.
What Sarah’s Been Up To: Mainly just keeping the small fry happy and entertained (especially during the coldest days).
What Joseph’s Been Up To: He enjoyed having two days off of school (the holiday and the “ice” day), but also enjoyed going back to school to see his friends.
What Abigail’s Been Up To: Here’s where the title to this blog post comes from: she’s figured out how to pull herself up into a standing position! At first, she was trying to stand tippie-toe, but I’ve been working with her to stand flat-footed and now she’s doing it more and more on her own.
This Week in Pictures:
Playing with her reflection. 🙂Playing outside on Monday (before the big freeze).She loves the swing!Joseph’s dinosaurs were just enough motivation for her to pull herself up. 😉Discovering more things that she can get at, now that she’s on her feet.Hat!We were greeted with a thick layer of ice on our windows on Tuesday morning.It was still there in the late afternoon…in fact, it didn’t start melting until the next day.Checking out what Joseph’s up to.Standing flat-footed is much sturdier than on tippie-toes.Cozy jammies to stay cozy on a cold night.
Weekly Happenings: January can be rough. It comes on the tail-end of the magic that is the holidays, it’s cold and sometimes dreary, and it can just end up feeling kind of ho-hum. We did our best to chase away the January blahs by going to the park to play a couple times, going for a bike/stroller ride, and hanging around, having fun at home.
The Weekly Weather: It was mostly on the cooler side, but there were a few days that were beautiful and warmer (those were the days we went to the park, haha).
What Paul’s Been Up To: He’s back into school, so that keeps him busy. He also went to PAX South, which is a gaming convention. He went with one of our friends and the two of them had a pretty good time looking at all of the different gaming stuff.
What Sarah’s Been Up To: I didn’t do too much out of the ordinary. It was fun to get the kids out of the house a couple of times to go to the park.
What Joseph’s Been Up To: He’s finished up the testing process for the Gifted & Talented program at school (we should get the results some time in the spring). He enjoyed getting out in the fresh air (even though it’s currently full of mountain cedar pollen which we are all allergic too) at the park and also enjoyed having a play date at a friend’s house.
What Abigail’s Been Up To: Crawling like crazy, playing peek-a-boo (where she actually will put something over her own eyes and then move it to see the other person), teething like crazy (I think her first set of molars is working its way in), putting EVERYTHING in her mouth (ugh), clapping, “dancing”, “singing”…this is such a fun and entertaining age!
This Week in Pictures:
Someone was tired and cozy enough to fall asleep on our way home from dropping Joseph off at school.I sure love this little girl!She loves to see herself in the camera, haha.She loves the swings at the park!My first attempt at making cornbread, from scratch, in my new skillet.Ta-da! It turned out so good and went perfectly with the roast and veggies I made in the crock pot.It’s a savory cornbread (no sugar or anything sweet in the recipe), but we found that we liked that better because then it went well with the roast (soaking up the juices) but then also could be sweetened up with a drizzle of honey (yum).It’s nice to know that weaponry of all sorts is ready wherever I might need it…in this case, the kids’ bathroom (Joseph had set it there while he brushed his teeth and then forgot about it). 😉Joseph needed new bedding, so Paul found him a bed-in-a-bag that was Pokémon. His face when he first saw it was so great. Several times that night he would come up to either Paul or me and thank us for it. I love that he is such a grateful kid!Going for a bike ride through the neighborhood (I was following along with Abigail in the stroller).
Weekly Happenings: I can hardly believe I typed that year. It’s a little surreal when I start to think just how long ago certain things (high school, getting married, etc.) were. Next year, Paul and I will mark our 20th high school reunion! O.o Anyway…this past week marked ringing in the New Year (with a lot of noise from our neighborhood, as always) and the end of the winter break. We tucked all the Christmas stuff away, started back to school (for Joseph, at least…Paul starts up again tomorrow), and tried to stay warm, haha.
The Weekly Weather: As I eluded to, it’s been downright cold. There were a couple days there where we barely made it above freezing! Thankfully it’s starting to warm up a bit to more average winter temperatures (50s and 60s). This SoCal-transplanted-Texan couldn’t handle it when I would go outside and the air would actually make my face hurt, haha.
What Paul’s Been Up To: He soaked up his last week of his break from school by keeping busy with work, family time, and taking down all the Christmas decorations at all the entrances to our neighborhood (luckily take-down always goes a bit faster than putting them up).
What Sarah’s Been Up To: Not too much, other than getting back into the swing of things (mainly that 5:15 alarm). I did get to play the piano for a baptism yesterday (which is always a fun experience).
What Joseph’s Been Up To: He started back to school, attended a friend’s birthday party, and (drum-roll, please) lost another tooth!
What Abigail’s Been Up To: She continues to improve on crawling on hands and knees (I think I noticed some calluses developing on her toes…it took me a bit to realize what they were and how they got there), loves to bounce up and down whenever there’s music of any type playing, is really into growling (this week, anyway), is figuring out waving, has started to “sing” when she hears other people singing (mainly at church), and has figured out how to clap. It just might be one of the cutest things she’s done so far. She gets the biggest grin on her face when she does it!
This Week in Pictures:
She likes to empty the dress-up box one item at a time. This stormtrooper mask is probably her favorite thing to look at, though.One last shot of one of my favorite Christmas decorations before it got tucked away with the rest. I don’t know how long ago my mom gave me this lighthouse, but I’m so grateful it has survived our multiple moves!Photographic evidence of just how cold it got!And yet more photographic evidence, haha. Yes, that does say 21 degrees on there…brrrrrr!The smile makes up for the mess. 😉Paul was holding his phone in just the right way so that it looked like the kids were taking their own pictures. This was on our “family date night” to IHOP (because Abigail really, really loves pancakes). 😀Joseph loves to ham it up for the camera.I sure do love his fun personality!Every once in a while, I get a hankering for chocolate chip cookies. Thanks to some advice Paul gave me a couple years back, I always keep the ingredients on hand. 😀A new gap! His tooth had been loose for such a long time (to the point that he’d show us how he could move it just by pushing air out from behind it, haha) and yesterday it literally fell out on its own while we were sitting and watching TV (he was probably mindlessly wiggling it back and forth with his tongue). We were just relaxing and all of a sudden he got a weird look on his face, reached into his mouth, and popped it into his hand.
Bonus Video: This is not a video I took. It was taken by a person who had a drone that recorded the crazy fireworks that go off in our area (in this case, a neighborhood that’s just a couple miles from ours) during New Year’s Eve.
