Pictures of the Snow

Here's 2 pictures of the snow. Obviously the first was taken as the snow was at its peak. About 2:30 on Saturday. I wanted to take a comparison shot.

The one with less snow is from about 2:30 on Monday. The snow is almost all gone now.

Tamra

The Weather and Stuff

The view from our front porch Saturday morning.

But we'll start at a few weeks back.

Jump Rope for Heart

Miciah did Jump Rope for Heart and loved it. She ended up raising a little over $250, which I thought was fairly impressive. Thank you to everyone who donated. It was a good experience for her.

Teancom

Teancom is now getting into things and trying to figure out how things work. Not in a destructive way, in a pleasant, isn't that cute, kind of way. For example, he found our stash of random CD-ROMs sitting on the desk. He found a CD-ROM in the pile that wasn't in a case and took it over to the DVD player. He knows how to open it (I wasn't aware of that), and he knows that that's how you make DVDs work. So he spent, I dunno, 10 minutes trying to put that CD-ROM in the player. He'd put it in, but it wouldn't be in the well right. So when he'd shut it, it would push the CD-ROM out. He'd quickly open the DVD player and try it again. It was cute and I couldn't even be mad about the CD-ROM. One, I'd left it out, and two, it wasn't one we cared a ton about. So I let him figure out his world. (I'm sure the more destructive side of Teancom is coming, so I'm giving myself the "just you wait" lecture so I can tell myself "I told you so" in a year. Just in case any of you felt like giving me the lecture, too bad, I beat you to it. :) )

Teancom has also figured out that the more vocal he is, the more things he can get and do. He has figured out how to say words for almost everything in his life, and it is wonderful. He actually is pretty easy to understand, which surprises me, since he didn't talk for so long and we were a little worried about that. He loves now to ask for Baby Einstein and he'll watch them over and over if I let him, which I don't unless he's sick because they make me sick. Teancom is also exceptionally good for his age at following directions. He's better at following directions than Elijah is (not that that is much of a feat because Elijah refuses to follow directions). What amazes me about this isn't that he knows what I'm saying. It's that he's patient enough to do it. He'll really want to watch a movie, for instance. He'll hand it to me and I'll say, "Go take it to Miciah downstairs and ask her to turn it on for you down there." He'll take the movie, go all the way downstairs (which requires, mind you, crawling down the stairs with the movie in hand), and ask her to turn the movie on. And Miciah's really good, she knows what he's asking, and she'll turn it on for him. I'm happy Teancom is such an easy kid, and I'm MORE than happy to let Miciah be his mom, too.

Of course that backfires when Miciah tries to be too much his mom. Fine lines.

Teancom was sick over the weekend. He's better today, thankfully. It's good to have my happy little boy back. And it's nice: last night I slept all night and didn't realize that was odd until I woke up at 8 am and was wondering what was wrong. :)

Elijah

Elijah is on drugs. He's bouncing off the walls and I can't wait until it's consistently warm outside and I can send him out there for hours. He's bugging Miciah a lot and I have to send him to bed early some nights because he can't calm down (B will say, "Hey, I didn't rile him up!" I know. I just say, "Yeah, you don't have to. He's just been like that."). Seriously, after 7 pm he's crazy. Not that he's sedate other times. He's a normal boy. But at night, sheesh. Maybe I'll just move his bedtime way earlier.

Avatar

My Mom decided to buy the first 2 Avatar seasons for us. Awesome! I told Elijah that Grandma bought us Avatar and he went out right then to check the mail. I told him it wouldn't come for a few days. Not that he understands time. The next morning, Rob and I had taken a shower and we're getting dressed and heard the door open. We were trying to figure out who was at our house at 8 am. Elijah was in the living room, but he doesn't go outside usually. So Rob went out there and asked if Elijah had gone outside. No, he said. Then he came up to me and asked me to put on his shoes so he could check the mail. I told him the mail hadn't come yet but he was unconvinced. He checked the mail that morning as well as the morning after. Then, Saturday night the kids were in the bathroom for too long (always a bad sign). Elijah came out with a blue arrow on his forehead. Rob took it off for church, but we told him if he was good he could have one after church was over. So on it went again Sunday afternoon. It's pretty funny. Elijah then put on his Spider-Man pajamas and said, "Mom, can these be Aang pajamas?" Sure. So he's Aang with his blue arrow. He also informed us he wanted to shave his head and draw the arrow all the way down his head. I told him I'd have to think about that one.

How proud we are.

After the arrow was drawn and Elijah was officially then Aang, he tripped and bonked his head. Miciah said, "Accidents happen even if you're the Avatar." So wise.

The movies came yesterday and Elijah screamed to the mailman, "That's my Aang package!!"

Miciah

Miciah is still doing crafts faster than I can catalog them. The other day she made a "tent" out of a piece of cardboard and paper. She had the tent flaps and everything. It was pretty cool. Did I take a picture? No. Probably should have. I did take a picture, though, of the pet rock we made as a family. Miciah wanted to make a beetle. You'll notice from the pictures that the beetle has a tail. Why a tail? Who knows. She wanted it to have a tail. The legs are made out of straws, as you'll see, which wasn't a very stable design. But oh well, it was cute. Miciah loved the shiny blue paint (she painted it). The rock is now on display at her school along with all the other pet rocks. I guess the entire Kindergarten made them.

Rob

Rob is still plugging away at his dissertation. It's going well enough, I guess, since he doesn't come home stressed out of his mind. I was expecting stress levels through the roof right now, but it hasn't been bad. I think the switch over to being in the Bishopric has helped ease some of it, since it's a change that he can focus some of his energy on. Plus, he's decided not to push it and try to actually graduate in time to walk in June. The June 13th graduation would have meant he'd have to be done with all his stuff by mid-May or so. This way, he gets an extra month, and that's helped him relax a little.

Health and Fitness Challenge

Rob and I both have been doing a health and fitness challenge that J put together. It's been AWESOME!! We're just under 3 weeks away from being done with it (it started at the beginning of January). We've been exercising every day (Rob has done a full hour for 6 days a week for 9 weeks now--I sometimes wimp out at half an hour or 45 minutes) and we've made a huge effort to eat better. I have successfully killed my sugar addiction, and that feels really nice. Plus, me being ACTIVELY supportive of Rob in his weight loss efforts has gone a long way for both of us. I, of course, am not trying to lose weight, so I've always had crap around to eat which isn't good for either of us. We've both really liked cutting out most all of the crap. We won't be psycho about it, and I still like sugar, but not being ruled by sugar is a good thing. Rob has lost almost 20 lbs. in the last 2 months, and he's looking and feeling great. He feels better about his body than he has in years and it really shows in his confidence level. I'm proud of him and I think he's looking hot! As for me, like I said, I haven't lost weight (which is good), but I can now see muscles in my body. It's nice to think I look "right". I've always been pretty athletic, so seeing a scrawny body without muscle definition is foreign to me. I feel better in my mood, I'm happier, and I'm healthier. Yea for all of those things!!!

So all of you should join us again in August when we do the challenge again for 3 months. We're looking forward to a break, but it'll be good to do the challenge again because I'm sure we'll be slackers again by then.

And now for the Weather Report.

Last week started with almost 70 degree weather! It was awesome. We went on a hike with our kids. It was muddy and a little rainy, but it was beautiful. And it was fun to get out of the house. The kids spent that lunch outside on the deck, and spent quite a few hours playing outside. Yea for almost spring!!!!!

So, check out Miciah and Elijah in these pictures. I took out the camera to capture them doing their first lunch on the deck of the season. And while I was taking pictures they decided to smell each other's feet. Weird, but kinda cute.

Then, it was raining for days. We had probably an inch of standing water in our yard on Wednesday. Mom in Toledo was talking about all the snow they were getting and I told her that here it wasn't even below 50 degrees, probably. On Thursday we were hearing about a snow storm coming in and I thought, "Yeah, right." We watched the news on Thurs. night to learn about it. They were talking about this huge storm coming in and they weren't predicting snow, they were telling us snow was coming. No prediction involved. The only question was how MUCH snow.

On Friday morning Miciah's school called to say school was letting out 2 hours early, which meant Miciah didn't even go to school. It hadn't even started snowing yet when they made that decision. But the whole CITY made that call. Schools, universities, businesses, everything shut down by 2 pm or earlier. It started snowing at 8 am. By noon we had a few inches. It was this powdery lovely snow, not the heavy wet stuff we normally get. It was a weird storm. And it didn't stop. We got a few hours of a break here and there, but it didn't stop snowing until Saturday at around 3:30 pm. We even had "blizzard conditions" for a few hours, but it was all while we were sleeping Friday night. They were talking about snow thunderstorms. How cool is that?

Anyways, I woke up Sat. morning and was pretty shocked by how much snow we had. We had a level 3 snow emergency. Our road was covered with snow. By noon they were reporting 10 inches of snow and another few inches fell by the time it stopped. A good foot of snow. Sweet! Rob spent an hour digging us out. He then went to the church to dig the church out for another hour. On Sunday Rob helped our elderly neighbor do his driveway (he said, "I couldn't in good conscience just watch him do it all by himself!") for 20 minutes (his son came to help, too). I was hoping they'd cancel church on Sunday, but no such luck. :) Only about 75 people showed up, though, so they only one hour of church. The bishop is from Buffalo, NY, and they have 3 or 4 snow storms this bad or worse every year there. He was thinking, "What's the big deal?" :) We were the only ward in our stake that held a meeting.

So the fun parts of the weather story.

1 - We were supposed to drive up on Friday night to see M's play (2 hours North). I'm sad we missed it, but we decided we didn't want to drive up in the middle of the storm. (Especially since we'd done that 2 weeks before and it wasn't any fun--it took us 3 hours to make the 2-hour trip.) We had a babysitter lined up down here for the boys so we could make that trip and they told us if we still wanted to go out, we could, and they would watch the kids overnight. But we didn't even want to do that. So we stayed home and enjoyed the night home. I was thinking we'd made the right call and then we woke up Sat. morning and I KNEW we'd made the right call. We wouldn't have been able to get our kids until Saturday night! Craziness! And if we'd been up at C's, we probably wouldn't have left until Sunday to go home. That would have been crazy!

We tried to go out again on Sat. night, but I bet you can guess whether that happened or not. Rob was also supposed to go out with the missionaries. Didn't happen, either. So we have a raincheck date night for this Saturday night and if it snows, I'm going to cry. :)

2- It was perfect snow for a snowman! A lot of the snow here has ice in it or on it or just isn't right for a snowman. But this time it was great. So Rob stayed home a little later Monday morning to make a snowman with Miciah. I took lots of pictures. It was pretty cute. Rob is a good man and a good daddy.


Hope you're all doing well. We love you all!

Tamra and the Gang

More pictures are coming.

P.S. I have figured it out! I figured out why Elijah needs to pray for the Green Goblin at every prayer. One day it just came to me. Rob said, "Elijah, why do you always pray for the Green Goblin and not for Spider-Man?" I said, "Well, why would he pray for Spider-Man? He IS Spider-Man." And that's when it came to me. Who pretends to be the Green Goblin? Rob does. This whole time he'd been saying he was grateful to play the Green Goblin with daddy (or that he's grateful for daddy who is the Green Goblin).

Makes it a little easier to say we're grateful for the Green Goblin.