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.