January Activities

This month was a pretty busy one. Here's what we got to do

-We attempted to do the Home Depot Workshop this month. Unfortunately, we got there about 20 minutes after the "start time" and they had already run out of kits. I was bummed because we registered for it and kept talking it up to the kids so they were excited. However, I figured we may just need to go early next time AND I did register for the Lowe's one next month (which I've heard if you register for that on you are guaranteed a kit) so hopefully that works out and we can really try that out.

-We started going to the library again. Our city one isn't big, but they do have a huge selection of kids books and we decided to start Cara on chapter books so I'm pretty excited to do that more regularly. I had originally planned to do it weekly so I only let the kids pick out 2 books. Then I saw that you get to keep them for 3 weeks and so I figured we'll just plan for that.

-Lucy got her 1:1 dates so I took her out to this Yonutz place that recently opened. She picked a unicorn donut. They were only okay. I'm not sure I'd go back, but we still had fun.

-I went crazy and got a winter pedicure haha. I normally don't think they are worth it during the winter, but Rachel (Andy's wife) wanted to do them for her birthday so I decided to join in (we go to my new favorite salon place to do them). I have to say, I might be a convert. While winter ones don't seem necessary, my feet sure appreciated the hell out of it haha. The lady I got did the most incredible foot massage and I love the color I picked so I'm definitely pro winter pedi now. 

- We haven't had much of a winter this year, but Larry's taken the kids out for sledding when the opportunity arose. I'm REALLY hoping we'll get a bit more snow so I can go next time. Fingers crossed!

-One night I decided to bring the snow inside to let the kids play with it after dinner time. This was a HUGE hit and I definitely plan to keep it on the list for future activity ideas to keep the kids easily entertained.

-I've been working on figuring out a new cleaning routine for the home. I used to do one full weekend each month, but hated that. I tried to do a Saturday morning cleaning and then fun stuff the rest of the Saturday. I tried figuring out how often certain cleaning needed to be done to create a realistic schedule. Nothing seemed to work out well. I decided it needed to be done every Sunday. The 1st and 3rd Sundays will be the main level, the 2nd and 4th will be the upper level and then if there's a 5th Sunday I'll do the one-off items. No idea what I'll do when the basement is finished, but I'll worry about that when we get to that point haha.

-I have a new found Lego obsession. I decided to start taking some time to do my Friend's sets I have been holding onto for a while and absolutely loved doing them. I also started this set I got in Boston. This one isn't AS much fun since the pieces aren't the same as regular Legos, they are much smaller, and the directions are complicated, but I still like what it represents and I'm excited to see how it ends up. I decided when I'm done with it I am going to start doing my puzzles again. Larry is back to working from home so I have time after dropping Gwen off at school to do something, so why not something like puzzles and Legos? haha

-The kiddos, as always, are so silly:

Our First Month of Tumbling

So I wanted to give this a month of experiencing before posting on if we like it or not, but we decided to sign the girls up for tumbling. After doing soccer this past Spring and realizing I love the idea of making sure the kids are enrolled in activities, we talked about what a good one for the Winter would be and this gymnastics place opened up close to us. I had planned to look into it and then one of the neighbor kids mentioned he went and he really liked it so that helped tip the scales a bit. 

Cara decided she wanted to try their Ninja class (kind of like an obstacle course type class). Gwen also wanted to do it, but they didn't have an opening for her age so we had to sign her up for just beginning tumbling. In all honesty, I wanted both to do the tumbling class since I thought it would be better, but might as well let them pick what they want.

I took Cara to her class first (hers is on Mondays) and she came out smiling so big and saying she absolutely loved it and wanted to go every day. Gwen's class is on Thursdays right after I'm done with work so I assumed I'd have to take all kids (since, at the time, Larry wouldn't get home until 5, but then he switched his schedule and made it so he got home a little after 4) so I had already planned to bring everyone. Luckily, since I didn't have to, I only brought Lucy since she was saying she wanted to do a class and I wanted her to see it first. Gwen was groaning saying she didn't want to go, but I told her she has to try it and that if she doesn't do tumbling, she'd have to pick a different activity. Once she was done she said she loved it so much she wanted to LIVE there haha. Lucy also fell in love and asked if she could do it. Luckily, Gwen's class is for ages 3-5 so I figured lets sign her up for the same class so the could do it together. At first, they said there weren't any openings and she'd be on the waitlist, but the day after I signed her up they called to say there was an opening and they could add her to the class.

We're to the point where at the beginning of the week they ask what day it is and if it's their gymnastics class. Or when we drive by the area they yell out "GYMNASTICS!!" haha. They all really love it and look forward to it. I made Cara go to Gwen and Lucy's to see theirs and she said she wants to now do both classes, but I've decided we'll let them do it for a few months and then see if they want to keep going or switch to a different class or whatever. We'll see how we're feeling at that point. I was originally going to have them only do it during the winter and then do soccer in the spring and fall, but I think we might be able to swing it so they can do both during the soccer season. I do know we are planning on doing Swimming lessons for a couple weeks in April so they will end up missing a couple classes then that we'll have to make up for.

Midway Ice Castles

I was looking for a fun winter activity to take the kids to and stumbled upon the Ice Castles. It was something I always wanted to take them one day and we had just bought the kids good snow gear (boots, coats, hats, gloves, etc.) so I figured why not? Larry and I had gone a handful of years ago.

I was trying to decide if we should do night tickets (because they are lit up at night) or more during the day (when it wouldn't be as cold). After picking the date I saw only afternoon tickets were available, so that solved that issue. I decided to get tickets for 2:30 so the kids could get their nap in on the drive.

It was supposed to rain all day, luckily it was very light once we got there and didn't even start hard raining until we left. It was a little early and I realized we didn't do a bathroom run before it so we stopped at a bathroom stop nearby. It ended up being one of those "hole in the ground with a white semi seat on top of it" sort of bathroom. The girls were horrified and refused to even try and go to the bathroom haha. When we got out they kept saying it was the most disgusting bathroom they've seen haha. I made sure they didn't touch anything and I sanitized the crap out of my hands (because I did have to go, so I had to touch things anyways...it was so cold the toilet paper was frozen haha) when we got back to the van. After that we drove up to this lodge close to the castle entrance and had the girls try and go there (wish I had known of that before the gross bathroom experience that I'm sure I'll get some sort of disease from haha). After that we walked to the entrance and decided to try our luck at getting into the castles a little early...which worked.

They had so many cute photo ops there, but you had to pay for those so we just took our own. Although, they did have a Darth Vader and Storm Troopers there that was tempting, just for some fun. We walked through about half the castles and then decided to get hot chocolate (I told the girls we could get some and Lucy kept saying we forgot it, so halfway through I decided lets just get some so it can be done by the time we finish). Poor Lucy drank it too quickly, I forgot to tell them to wait, and burned her mouth and seemed traumatized from that experience. Cara burned her mouth a little and started grabbing snow from around the castles (not OFF them, to be clear) to help cool her mouth off. Once she grabbed it from the ground I put a stop to that!

This year they had a slide so I took the older girls on that (Lucy was too nervous to go since you couldn't ride on laps). It was a lot of fun, they had helpers there to get the girls set up on their own, and Cara screamed the whole way down. Once we were done, so was Pierce, he was crying and just so cold that we decided it was time to call it quits (we had been there for an hour at this point). We had parked a ways away so I told him to take Pierce and go get the car and I'll let the girls wander a little more (they were not ready to go home). We found this little kid play area that I let the girls play through for a bit and then we headed back to the car.

The drive up and down was so pretty, some of the waterfalls were frozen and some were still running so it was so cool to see. Overall, it was a really fun experience. Cara and Gwen were even saying it was the best day ever and was just as much fun as Legoland haha. I'm just glad they were happy. We mostly finished the hot chocolate, so at least that wasn't a total waste haha. 

Things I'm Looking Forward to in 2024

I have officially decided I don't think I like the idea of calling these resolutions. I do like to think of goals I have for the year, but when I think of a goal throughout a year to add, I don't like to put it off until the next January. As Larry (semi) puts it (I'm paraphrasing): if you want to become a better person, why would you put that off? If you want to be better, start right away!

So here are things I'm looking forward to this year:

-Family Vacations: Our Disney Trip and maybe one more? 

-My surgery. I'm FINALLY going to get my abs repaired from having so many kids so quickly (and how big I tend to get!). I'm beyond excited for this!

-Larry finishing his Masters and his graduation day! He should be done by end of February and graduation will be in March. Yay!

-Staying productively busy. We have plans to have the kids start tumbling, going to the Home Depot workshops, definitely adding library visits to our calendar, reading more with the kids, signing up for swimming lessons, practicing said lessons and riding bikes in the summer, sledding in the winter. Anything and everything we can do, take advantage of our time together.

-Less social media time around the kids. I absolutely HATE when I am on my phone and look around and Larry is on his and the kids are either just playing by themselves or they are also on their tablets. It drives me nuts and I'm going to put a stop to that this year.

-Stop the cussing. I have a terrible habit of saying bad words and I really need to stop. And not just cussing, but replacing them with the same type of words. I need to talk more positively around my kids.

-Saving and spending goals. I want to make sure I'm not spending money on just anything. It needs to be worthwhile and I need to be putting more away. I don't think this one will be too hard for me.

-Purging! This one has a few parts:

• Monday nights I've had to pause my puzzle nights to start clearing out the house (again/still). I've just had such a hard time doing this during the kids waking hours (because they are messy AND I want to do things with them when I have the chance, not just be clearing out every nook and cranny). I know I'll have to do their rooms when they are awake, but that's a small part of the house. I started this one in November and I started with the Master bedroom. I am surprised how much crap we have in there and that's the only room I've been able to do so far. I had to put a pause on it for the holidays (to wrap and do other things), but once this blog gets caught up, I plan to start that up again.
  
  
• I need to get back into updating my recipes onto actual recipe cards like I had planned to do last year. As I stated, I'm still in the "weeding out my really good recipes from just the so-so recipes" part. Once I do that I can transfer them to the cards I have.
  
  
• Clean the house more/better! I'm embarrassed to say how bad I am at actually cleaning my house. And I don't mean like picking up the toys and crap the kids leave around (though it's a hit and miss on if that's done or not each day), but the actual scrubbing and wiping down of my house. We have this beautiful, big house that I always dreamed of having and I'm TERRIBLE at cleaning it. I used to leave one weekend a month where I'd clean basically the whole weekend. However, Larry likes to treat me to dinner when I clean and so I'd clean everything but the floors on Saturday and tell myself I'd finish Sunday, but then we'd go out Saturday and it's like I got my reward so I didn't feel like I needed to finish. I've been trying to find a new cleaning system to make it better/easier, but it's been such a trick. I think I have an idea coming into 2024, but hopefully by the end of the year I'll be saying "yes! I figured it out and we have a nice, clean house all the time now!

-Bath nights, One Wednesday a month. I used to not care for baths, but I've found out how I do like them and I end up looking forward to them each month..

-Game/Date night Wednesdays. Once Larry is done with school we plan to pick up our One Wednesday a month date/game nights. Another thing I used to look forward to (I have ideas on fun ones I want to incorporate like a Lego night, a make a new recipe together night, maybe a candlelight dinner night, a paint night...so many good ideas).

-Get inside home projects done in the winter and outside home projects done in the summer! I have a whole list of things I want to do for the home and I really want to get a good chunk crossed off this year.

-Reading tracking! I absolutely loved reading more this last year and found some really good books. I used to only be into romance, but I've really gotten into mystery and thriller types. This year, I plan to track how much I read.

Not a hugely ambitious list, mostly because I know I can accomplish all of this. But I still look forward to crossing things off and seeing how I do at the end of the year. 

New Years 2024

New Year's Eve/Day was SO amazing this year! We did our usual pizza for dinner with the kids (always a hit) and then the Packers played the Vikings AND just killed it (33 to 10!) It's got me wondering if we could possibly be heading to the playoffs (don't want to jinx it, but we've been doing so good lately). 

After the game was over, Larry and I did our usual game night with the "get to know you" couple's questions. We love just having random questions to ask each other and our answers usually line up so it's even more fun.

We also did some fun non-card questions ( like what our peaks and our pits of 2023 were, things we hope to accomplish or look forward to in 2024, things we love about each kid, etc.) and that was new and a bit more fun, in my opinion. Random "get to know you" questions are good and all, but talking about our specific views of the year and our family was more personal and informative.

We, of course, binged a lot of  candy and soda while kids are down :) because that's a fun part of being a parent, right? We also watched the ball drop and did our midnight kiss. I didn't get around to taking any pictures, I just don't feel the need to pause our fun to take a picture that's like a hundred I already have, but we had a lovely night.

With that, I'll say cheers to 2023 and hello 2024. I SO look forward to what's in store for us. I think it'll be a great one!