Back into the routine

It's been a long time since I last posted (some of you have probably given up on me). The holidays and lack of a school schedule threw me off more than I thought it would. We skipped school the whole month of Dec and have just started back this week. I think C is relieved to have a schedule again. He was a wreck and awful to be around on Mon and part of Tues, but he's doing much better the last 2 days. T still dreads his math, but is making progress. Riley was so excited to start school up again. He loves any worksheet (especially math) that I give him. They both are amazing readers. T has begun reading the Chronicles of Narnia series on his own and he has almost completed reading the New Testament. R is now borrowing all of T's Magic Tree House books to read on his own.

We had a fun Christmas in Idaho. Unfortunately, we did not see snow until the long (8 hr drive turned into 12 1/2) drive home. The boys' highlight of driving home was us stopping on the freeway (too much snow for anyone to be moving faster than 20 mph and the offramps hadn't been plowed), opening the van sidedoor and letting them take turns peeing in the snow. They had to make designs and see who could make yellow snow the farthest away. We spent Christmas with the Cavazos family (Manuel officiated our wedding). The boys love visiting them. They have 3 high school boys that are wonderful with our boys. They even babysat for us a few times so the adults could go out. The boys' highlight gift on Christmas was a bottle of Diet Pepsi each. They all asked for that so we put it in their stockings and they were so excited to see it. Tegan sat high on his knees and held the bottle high and said with incredible enthusiasm, "I can't believe I got Diet Pepsi!!" The Cavazos gave us a hard time for depriving our kids :). After that we headed to some other friends' house (Andy's old roommate, Lance, and his family moved to Boise in May). They have 3 kids the same age as ours, except they kept going and just had their 4th in Oct. It was fun to see them and watch the kids play together. I even had time to teach Robyn how to knit.

The morning after arriving home we had our Christmas here with all the gifts we had left behind. I think the three favorites were a BB gun, microscopes and a trampoline (which we hid, fully assembled, in the back yard for 3 days while home). They are assembling the gun cabinet for their gun as I write (the friend that gave them this thinks proper gun safety should be learned from the beginning so he's starting them off right). T keeps trying to talk A and I into giving him specimens (hair, blood, etc) to look at under his microscope. I told him a good scientist will sacrifice himself for research, but he doesn't buy it. They were amazed by their trampoline, but it's rained every day so far so it hasn't got much use yet.

We got home for the New Year's weekend, but we were all asleep before midnight. We left the boys at some friends house for a while and A and I actually went to a party for a couple hours (don't be thinking big party animals here - we left by 8:30).

A is continuing his job search. He has interviewed many places and has narrowed it down to 2 possibilities. One is a Financial Planner, but he'll hear next week if they are going to offer it to him or not. The other is buying our own pest control business. Our "ant guy", as I call him, is selling his business and we're very interested in the possibility of that. A will go around to the calls with him tomorrow to check it out some more. Two other Financial Planning opportunites have been offerred to him, but it's not what we're looking for. We'll keep you updated as we know more.