Weekly Review January 2 '15

Happy New Year, everyone!

Now I have to remember to write "2015" on checks and such.

This will be a shorter post, since we didn't have a lot going on this week.  Which was nice for a change!  We all got a lot more sleep and rest and everyone is on the mend.  Not perfect, but definitely improving.  Tanner missed church on Sunday because besides being sick, he also slept terrible on Saturday night.  He and Jared have been sleeping really late every day, even though we haven't been letting them stay up late at night (with the exception of New Year's Eve).  I've been waking up around 8:00 most days, which is really sleeping in for me.

Frank went to work on Monday but the rest of the week he has been working from home (with the exception of yesterday, which he had off).  He has also been busy doing several jobs for clients.  He was thankfully well enough to go to church on Sunday since he was giving a talk as well as teaching Gospel Doctrine.  He did a good job on both.  Well actually I missed most of his lesson because I had to talk to the bishop.  But what I heard was good.

I've been using this week to get caught up on a long list of RS things.  I also helped Jared get going on his Eagle project and reminded him to get his homework done.  I read the entire book for book chat, which was easy to do since it was relatively short and easy to read.  I actually read it in two days.  I really enjoyed it...it's called A Dog's Purpose, and is written from the dog's point of view.  It was really funny at times and sweet too.  We have a couple of members of our book group who do not like animals and I don't know if they will like it but if you don't hate animals I think you will enjoy it!

I've been making a valiant effort to use my new tablet and have resisted the desire to purchase a new paper planner for 2015.  It's working out ok so far, but there are many aspects of the paper planner that I prefer.  Don't get me wrong...the tablet has some nice features, but I've grown used to my paper planner system and the tablet doesn't do everything the same way.  I am persevering, though.  The main reason I wanted a tablet was for the e reader options, and I am enjoying that part of it.

We've had some really cold days this week but a few nice ones as well.  One nice day Frank took his drone outside and flew it around for a while.  Jared and Tanner were trying out Jared's new bow and arrow set, Seth was watching (both the archery and the drone) and I took Snickers out for a walk.  It was nice for all of us to get out of the house for a while.

For New Year's Eve, we were invited to a friend's house for dinner and to play games.  Although we actually ended up talking all night instead of playing games!  The boys did play games, though.  We had a good time.  I think that was Seth's first experience with staying up until midnight to welcome in the new year.  Jared and Tanner stayed there overnight.  We came home but didn't get home until about 1:30 am.

On New Year's day (yesterday) I took down all the Christmas decorations.  I was actually going to wait until Saturday, but the whole house really needed to be swept & vacuumed and I realized we were going to have to do that all over again after taking down the decorations, so I decided to do the decorations first.  I love Christmas decorations and never like to take them down but living in a small house helps to motivate me to do it.  I always feel more than compensated by the much "cleaner" less cluttered look once they are down.  I really miss the beautiful tree, but it does take up space!  Plus this year I got a new tree skirt to match our white tree.  I had a hard time finding anything but I finally found a pretty silver one I liked.  The one drawback?  It has glitter on it!  And the glitter doesn't all stay on it.  So I was more than happy to sweep / vacuum up all the glitter...not to mention the inevitable tree needles (and our tree isn't even real).  If I ever have a bigger house I will probably leave the Christmas decorations up until February.  But until then, it's a good thing my house is small.

That's really it...sorry this week is pretty boring (and no pictures, either).  We are happy to start a new year and have some goals we feel good about working on.  Hopefully in a year I'll be able to look back and feel good about what we accomplished.