Knott's Berry Farm

The kids were super excited to go to Knott's Berry Farm one of the days we were there.  

 I am not surprised that Sadie had the time of her life, and LOVED every ride she was able to go on,

 while Marissa was not always as brave.  Apparently she enjoyed this ride once it actually started though:)

The biggest surprise to me though was when we had Shane stand to get measured and we saw that he was 48 inches and tall enough to go on most everything!  What?  He has definitely been growing.  Also surprising was that he wanted to go on a real roller coaster!  We didn't pick one too crazy for his first time, and he wasn't so sure of it while he was riding, but shortly afterward was talking about doing another one.  

 We tried to pass up the ferris wheel but he looked at it and said very cutely, "but I've never been on a ferris wheel before!"  and he had a blast seeing how high up they got.

 Unfortunately it rained later in the afternoon so our trip got cut short a little but we managed to squeeze in plenty while we were there.  My kids sure are lucky to have such nice grandparents!

California Trip

When I realized I had not been home to California in 2 1/2 years I knew it was time to make a way out there before Sadie turned two and we had to start buying her a plane ticket.  We searched for a conference for Josh to go to out there so that he could use some of his CME time and his program would pay for his ticket.  We found one in San Diego at the end of January, and voila! we were in business.  We stayed at my parents' house for a few days, then Josh and I left the kids with them and took off to San Diego for our first getaway without the kids, ever.  We squeezed in a lot of fun in the few days before we left, but mostly it was just so good to be back home, in the beautiful Southern California weather, and enjoy time with family.  

 Lucky Charms and a warm backyard.  Life is good!

 I love this park, and the walk to it from my parents house, and all the memories of Sunday walks there through the years.

I expected to feel something akin to "Oh the weather here is so great and California is awesome!" What I underestimated was how much I would feel a nostalgia and longing for California as the place where I grew up and my childhood memories were.  Going for runs in the morning on my old route I passed by one of the elementary schools and saw all the kids walking there and thought about how I used to do that.  Every day. That I can't even ever remember a time when my mom drove me there, because it was almost always nice enough to walk (the only thing that changed was that all the parents were walking with their kids).  I didn't realize how much I missed the Hispanics and Asians, and the smells of cypress trees and orange blossoms.  And all the wonderful amazing people in my home ward.  And even as we were driving to San Diego with each song that would come on the radio in the car, I would turn to Josh and say, "Oh my gosh, these are my jams!"  I'm sure I had a romanticized version of everything in my head, but I was seriously trying to figure out how we could make it feasible to move back.  Dang you exorbitant student loan.  I realize that when I look back at all the places I've lived, I tend to romanticize all of them- even Saginaw for crying out loud ha ha, so I'm sure wherever we end up will be fine, as long as we can make it back to the mother land for visits:)

Jesus Wants Marissa For a Sunbeam!!

I was SO excited to see Marissa on her first day as a new Sunbeam at church (one of the perks of being in primary), I knew she would just eat it all up.  But the morning came and I had to wake her up and she kept saying she was so tired and went straight to the couch.  Shortly after came the "my eyes are hot!" and we realized she had a fever.  No sunbeams for her.  She was so feverish she didn't really care, but I was so sad! But she made it the next week, and they even sang the Sunbeam song for her again.  

I love watching her in primary- she is still a little unsure- when we sing "Do as I'm Doing" and the kids pick something like jump or dance, she will look back at me like, "is it okay for me to be doing this here mom?"  And she really picks up on those songs- she knows the one they are learning better than Shane does!  Love her- she is the sassiest of sassy one moment and the sweetest of the sweet the next.

The cold never bothered me anyway...

Our December was really pretty mild.  The day after Christmas was warm enough for me to go for a run without a jacket, and to take Sadie with me.  

We had some spotty snows, but the kids were dead set on making a snowman. I am not very good at it!

But January rolled around and we have had more cold and snow, though nothing compared to last year.  Sadie does pretty good playing it in sometimes,

and other times I don't want to suit her up to have her come in 5 minutes later.  She was so angry at me this day when I wouldn't let her out with the big kids.

But these two love it out there and can last for awhile in some serious cold.  They are so cute when they are playing well with each other, which actually happens a good amount.

This boy is the winner though.  He begged me to go out and play one day after school when it was -6 windchill, and I said he could if he would come inside when he started to feel cold.  40 minutes later he came in and said very straight faced, "Do you know why I'm in?  Because I almost got frostbite.  I peered under my gloves and noticed my hands were turning red.  Aren't you glad I came in?  Because if I got frostbite you wouldn't be able to feel these nice cheeks.  And do you think I probably saved my life by coming in?"  I love that boy, especially those cheeks:)   (We had read a book together about people that survived really cold places, and talked a lot about frostbite.)  

And as the title alludes, we are now in the full throes of the Frozen mania.  We took the kids last year when it came out and I think they were the only kids on the planet who weren't impressed, but since Marissa has been in school she has been more interested so we watched it again and they are sold.  Marissa tells us all the time "I'm Elsa", and sings the songs and Sadie tries to join in too.  Shane hated it at first but one day I found him hiding behind a door reading a Frozen book and he told me that he realized that Elsa was pretty cool because she has powers.  So Marissa Elsa uses her freezing powers while Shane is fire man or somebody else and they have lots of adventures.  

Christmas 2014

Christmas was good to us this year.  I took a few pictures at the outset and then just enjoyed being in the moment with my kiddos at this fun age.  

We ate our traditional cinnamon rolls, and spent the afternoon playing with our toys and building lots of legos.  Josh enjoys it as much as they do:)  

Josh's parents were out of town so we we didn't have any family around, but we were just happy that he got Christmas Eve and Day off!  Our residency friends the Allens and Blechs came over for dinner and after lasagna and dessert the adults got to play games because the kids were playing so well together.  It was a great day/night!

Welcome Back to the Midwest

I have a lot of posts I want to write, but I thought I would start with this one since it is freshest in my mind.  So we went to California last week (you know there will be lots of posts about that), and left on Sunday morning.  I was already anticipating a little bit of a rough time coming back to business and back to winter after spending such a nice week in beautiful southern California, little did I know how rough it would really be!  There was a big storm set to dump a foot of snow in Fort Wayne, and the worst of it was supposed to hit right when our flight was supposed to get in.  Our connection was in Dallas, and when we left in the morning our flight to Fort Wayne was still on, so we headed out and landed in Dallas, only to find out that our flight to Fort Wayne had been cancelled.  I had anticipated that and thought it would be okay if it happened because Shane had no school on Monday and Josh didn't have to be into work until Monday evening.  I did not anticipate that we wouldn't be able to get a flight to Fort Wayne until Tuesday.  So we (I) freaked out and wondered what the heck we were going to do in Dallas, without a car, in a hotel, for almost 2 days.  Luckily the kids' clothes were in our carry-ons, but our toiletries and Josh and I's clothes were in our bag that was in transit.  And since it was weather-related the airline did not put us up in a hotel, though the airport did give us a pretty good deal on a room at Embassy Suites.  The cook-to-order breakfast, happy hour (shirley temples and hors d'ouevres for us), and separate suites did cheer us up some.  The kids all slept on the pull out couch (though Sadie got put on the floor the next night because she was biting Shane??)

Happy hour was especially good this night with fresh fruit, cheese and crackers, and bar mix along with the standard popcorn, so I thought I'd capture this nice moment, and 2 seconds after I did Marissa knocked half her crackers into the koi pond.  I was mortified and wondered if I should try to get them out or alert someone, and then a large koi came by and ate them.  I didn't know whether to be worried if we had poisoned the poor guy or relieved that the evidence was gone:)

 I hesitate to share this story because part of me is embarrassed by it, but I do want it recorded.  The airport had told us that they were giving us two vouchers for two nights at Embassy Suites, but when we got there they told us they both expired tomorrow and that they have never seen them do that.  Of course when we tried to get a hold of the airline people at the airport they don't really let you unless you go back there.  We were worried and debating about what to do because the rate was going to go up substantially our second night.  We decided we needed to move to the cheaper hotel across the way for the second night, but there was the worry about what to do in the 3 hours between checkout at Embassy and check in at the next hotel.  Lug our carryons around Dallas with our 3 kids for 3 hours?  And by the way, it was not particularly warm there- high 30s/low 40s.  So we went down to enjoy the breakfast, and there was a couple at the table next to us who kept commenting, "what a good dad!" about Josh as he was running around getting all the kids' food.  We chatted with them most of breakfast, they were from Michigan and stranded but on their way out, had grandchildren, etc.  They were super nice and fun to talk to, and told us we had a beautiful family etc. and I guess while I took Sadie potty they were asking Josh what he did and got to talking about residency and how their grandson is an ER resident and how they knew what comes with that.  As they were getting ready to leave they put a $100 dollar bill on the table and said that they hoped this might ease some of the burden and that we might be able to do something fun.  I started to say "you don't have to do that" and felt a little embarrassed but I started to tear up and realize that these people wanted to do something nice and were in a position to do so, and to just let them and appreciate it.  (A man in the airport had seen us and noticed we were stranded and offered to get us some food but I turned him down and realized afterwards that he just wanted to do something nice and I should have let him.)  As awful as an experience as it had been, it kind of turned around then to see the goodness of people.  I am really looking forward to one day being able to do things like that.  And it was really an answer to prayer because we used the money to be able to stay at Embassy Suites instead of dealing with changing and wandering around with our luggage.  Though with a full day ahead of us we did do a lot of walking around (without luggage thankfully), to Jack in the Box and Walmart and just to get some fresh air.  

 The next morning we were more than ready to be on our way, and the flights were uneventful and easy.  Oh, and it happened to be Josh's birthday.  Oh well, We will celebrate this weekend:)

The first night we were stranded my sister said maybe one day we would look back at this with fondness, and I thought, "yeah right" but I already can.  I love my little family and am glad for all the adventures we have together.  The ordeal has made a warmer locale sound more appealing, and we are looking into the possibility of that, but also have a lot of good opportunities here.  And seeing my kids having so much fun playing in all that snow today *almost* made me forget how angry I was about it trying to get home.