19 February 2020

On Tuesday night, Bobo was walking up and down on the bench next to the dining room table while we were having dinner and he slipped and fell and hit a glass goblet with his hand, which broke, and cut his hand badly.  Mr. Brown took him to the ER (which is called St. David's, very appropriate!) and he got 4 stitches in the ball of his thumb.  There was a fair amount of freaking out on his part at the beginning, because there was a lot of blood, but then he settled down with a book and Mr. Brown said he handled the whole stitching up process really well.

Nut Brown was also very upset by the whole thing and very worried about Bobo.  I tried hard to reassure him that although this injury is no fun for Bobo, it's not critical or life-threatening and isn't going to permanently impair anything.  He eventually got control of himself by doing something to help Rosebud so that she wouldn't worry either, and was very glad when they came back from the hospital and Bobo was his usual cheerful self with a big bandage on his hand.

16 February 2020

 Our ward had a family dance for Valentine's Day and Mr. Brown decided that we should all dress up in 20s costumes!

The dance was 100% fun.  Rose Pink was embarrassed that we were being different from everybody else, but we got a lot of compliments on our costumes, and Mr. Brown and I had a great time dancing.  He looked so sharp in his vest.  Nut Brown was exceedingly pleased with his top hat.  He asked a lot of girls to dance, after trying to practice swing at home with Mr. Brown and Rose Pink's help.  We had fun practicing the week before as well at home, and even Rosebud learned a few moves to do with me.  It was so much fun.

We didn't close down the dance like we usually do, in part because the music choice at the end kind of fizzled, and in part (it turns out) because we are getting sick.  But we really had a great time!

14 February 2020

For Valentine's Day this year, Mr. Brown said he was going to take me out to dinner!  This hasn't happened in a very long time.  I made reservations and we went out.  Some friends invited the kids over for s'mores, although Rose Pink is usually very generously willing to babysit for us.  So we went to dinner and were reminded why we don't go out to dinner together.  The food was too salty for us, and we ended up right by the door so I got cold every time the door opened, and everybody was watching us eat, which felt really awkward and I was so self-conscious that I couldn't talk to Mr. Brown at all.  But it was super sweet that Mr. Brown wanted to take me and that's really all that  counts.

12 February 2020

I see that I never wrote anything up about Christmas!  Also, um, January!  Here's a quick summation: Christmas was a lot of fun.  We were generously given more gifts than we knew what to do with.  Thank you all friends and family for your kindness to our children.  We spent two days opening presents because there were so many.

Mr. Brown suggested a new tradition this year for us, a variant on celebrating the twelve days of Christmas.  We did something each day that was *kind of* related to each of the verses, usually small, because I was so tired of trying to 'do Christmas' that I was not up for anything elaborate.  Here's how it turned out (some of these we completely winged it):

Day one: ate pear custard pie as part of Christmas dinner
Day two: made turtle candies, that didn't really work at all - oh well!
Day three: had Chick-Fil-A
Day four: karaoke party!
Day five: ate gummi rings
Day six: ate deviled eggs
Day seven: made origami swans
Day eight: gigantic ice cream sundaes
Day nine: dance party
Day ten: trampoline party kind of but not really
Day eleven: ate pirouline cookies which look like pipes
Day twelve: ate drumstick ice cream

It was pretty simple but really fun too.

Over new year's we went up to visit Mr. Brown's best friend and his family in Dallas area.  It was super fun.  We made friends with these adopted cousins and had a good time playing video games, jumping on the trampoline and laying around.

January is also birthday month for our girls.  Rose Pink turned fifteen and asked to go ice skating, so we did that with some friends before school started (because she started high school also!).  It was a great time.  Rosebud actually skated all by herself because of her experience with rollerblading.  We all had a lot of fun.

For Rosebud's birthday, we invited the same friends over to play Candyland, but we put candy pieces on each game square so you got a piece when you landed on the square.  It was a lot of fun and very, very sweet.

Meanwhile, all of January was also consumed with getting Rose Pink settled in her classes at high school, learning to ride the bus and pack a lunch and make friends and do homework and all that stuff.  She is really enjoying high school.

February: one highlight for me was that we finished all of the Christmas sweets and candy just before Valentine's Day.  Hooray.

The other major accomplishment was finishing the back patio so we could put the firepit on it.  HOORAY!  I finished on a Saturday with Mr. Brown's help and Nut Brown said, this means we're cooking out tonight, right?  So we did.  With charcoal and miscellaneous twigs.  But it was super super fun, and we are scheduling one cookout per week for the rest of the month of February because it is so fun to be outside together around the fire pit.

Okay, that's the catchup! Back to regularly scheduled programming.