New Years Week

Here's a whole post of what we did during the week of New Years, or at least the memorable that I've been able to remember through the fog. It's really hard to keep track of the days between Christmas and New Year. So things are a little hazy. 

And actually, speaking of hazy things. There were two things I completely forgot to write about when I was writing about Christmas. The first was on Christmas Eve. When we got to Steve and Jacque's house there was about an hour before the party officially started. Lydia and Derrick ended up hanging out on the porch swing together. They had a really fun time talking about dinosaurs.

The second thing was on Christmas Day. I spent a lot of the evening booking hotels for our Spring Break trip to Southern California. Yes we are finally doing that. I booked everything with reservations that didn't require me to put down any money so I can change things if I need to later. But the trip is roughed in and feels much more real. 

While I worked on that I had lots of music playing. Everyone was requesting fun songs. That was a great evening. 

Okay, now onto the week of December 29.

On Monday Brandon left for work. Or so I thought. About 20 minutes after he "left" he came in my room and told me the battery on the Pilot was dead and that he needed me to give him a ride to work. I'd just been writing an instagram on my phone while all snuggled up warm in my bed. I had no idea he'd been outside trying to jump the Pilot with the Odyssey. I was like, "I could have helped."

He'd pushed the pilot down to the end of the driveway so that he could get the odyseey next to it. We tried pushing it up out of the gutter, but the two of us weren't strong enough to push it up. So the Pilot stayed at the end of the driveway most of the day. Every time I looked out the window I thought someone was coming to visit us. 

I dropped him off at work. Then I went back home and went back to bed. Later I went into work around noon and stayed there for three hours. Then I picked up Brandon after we both were done with work. 

Brandon went out to work on the Pilot. Our neighbors had been dying to know what was going on all day so they gathered around. Soon about 3 guys from the street were helping Brandon push the Pilot into the driveway. 

Brandon took out the battery and took it to Autozone. He found out the battery was actually okay. It was the starter that was the problem. I'm still not entirely sure how he deduced that. But that's not my area. My area is making sure that we have money for things like this. And I'm VERY good at that. Brandon told me that a new starter would cost $180 if we took the old one in and exchanged the core or whatever. I was like, "that's no problem at all." 

Brandon felt like he had to get the starter out right away, but I told him it was getting dark and cold outside. There was nothing I had to do on Tuesday that would be hurt by me giving Brandon and ride to and from work. So he didn't worry about the car the rest of Monday. On Tuesday he was able to get the starter replaced after work. I'm so lucky to have him.

In other money news on Monday Derrick had earned $100. He's been saving up for a computer console tower. I told him if he could save $120 we'd start looking for a computer tower. So he's been saving all his money. My kids earn a dollar a day for going to school. They also earn a dollar for babysitting themselves when Brandon and I go on a date or are at work when the kids are out of school. They also earn a dollar if they make dinner. So Derrick has been carefully saving all that money. He earned the last dollar by babysitting himself while I was at work.  

Derrick knew that Brandon had a $100 bill. So he asked to trade his 5 twenties for that hundred dollar bill. Brandon said that was a great idea. So here's Derrick with his first ever one hundred dollars.  

Brandon spent the evening helping Veronica open the geodes that he'd bought her for Christmas. He'd bought special saw blades to open these. They had a lot of fun. 

Tuesday was . . . Tuesday was  . . . Tuesday was the day Brandon fixed the starter after work. And I know I went to work. I think I went grocery shopping because it was Brandon's pay day. And I think I updated this blog on Tuesday. And most of the other details are completely eluding me. 

But I know what I did in the evening. My friend Kaymie had recently graduated with her associates from CSI. This is a huge freaking deal because she did that degree while she had a kid each in elementary school, middle school, high school, and even one at home working after high school. I really wanted to celebrate her accomplishments. So I was thrilled when Jori planned a little get together to honor her.  Jori, Kori, Natialie, Kaymie, and I hung out and talked. We had a really good time. 

Wednesday was New Years Eve. I went into work for a little bit, but I didn't stay very long. Later, at 5:00 I logged into the system to submit the last of the claims for 2025. That was a good feeling. 

I'd written about potting the rose on my blog on Tuesday and then I saw the rose in real life and was like, "that grew a lot in a week!"  So I took a picture of it. 

I had the kids help me get the basement cleaned up so we could have our New Years Eve party down there. I'd sent out a little invite to my friends letting me know they were invited to come watch the original Jurassic Park Trilogy with us. I listed out the approximate times we'd start each movie in order to be done by Midnight. 

I wasn't sure if anyone would be able to come, we have a lot of friends with little kids, but I wanted people to know they were invited. Our friend Joe ended up coming with his teenage kids Addie and Ty. Addie is Charlotte and Lydia's age and Ty is between Derrick and Veronica. None of them, including Joe had ever seen Jurassic Park. So that made it super fun to watch with them.  

As usual Brandon had lot of great food prepared. 

I took this picture before he put out the shrimp. 

Here's one of his amazing cheese ball. These are always so good. 

Joe and his kids loved Jurassic Park. I'm glad we could introduce them to this movie. They had only planned to stay for one movie before going back home to hang out with Megan and the two younger kids. So they left. 

We turned on the Lost World Jurassic Park. That one is definitely lower quality. I was curious if the book is better so I ordered it from the library while we were watching it. (I picked the book up yesterday so I don't know how it compares yet.) I thought for sure I'd seen this movie recently with Derrick. But as we were watching it I was like, "Oh I have absolutely NO memory of this." I realized the last time I watched this movie was with Brandon before any of the kids were born. I think it was before I was even pregnant. So at least 16 years ago. I remembered certain parts, but other characters and scenes were a complete surprise. 

When that one was over we put in Jurassic Park III. That one is an even steeper drop in quality. But it was still fun to watch. We had fun mocking the choices the characters made. 

The movie ended about 3 minutes before midnight. There was just enough time to pull out our martini glasses and fill them with rootbeer for everyone. We toasted at midnight. We went outside for a minute to watch all the firework shows put on by neighbors on other streets. And then we went inside, refrigerated what was left of the cheese ball and went to bed. 

We slept in on Thursday. Well, sort of. Veronica was still in charge of Chandler's dog. So I had to get her up at 8:15 to go let Okie out of her house to use the bathroom. But as soon as we were done with that I went back to bed for a long time. 

When I did get up my main goal for the day was to take down the tree. I'd actually had it out for the tree for a couple days, but the thought of digging out the box and the totes was overwhelming. So the tree stayed up. But I had nothing else to do on New Years Day so it was time to take the tree down. 

I spent hours packing up the ornaments. I realized that I could store things better in the totes if I wasn't storing ornaments in round containers. Brandon had brought home a bunch of small rectangular boxes from work for wrapping presents. He still had a lot of those boxes in the garage so I went and got them and used them for storing ornaments. Then I stacked those boxes inside the totes. It worked very well. Here are all the decommissioned round containers. These were just a conglomeration of things we'd had on hand. The middle clear one is a cake container that has well outlived its original purpose.  The one on top was an ice cream container that Brandon's grandma used to store her nativity set. 

Here's a picture I took when I was taking a much needed break. I'd finished the ornaments. Brandon had packed up both trees. (Yes, we ended up with two trees in our living room.) And I was working on all the other decorations. 

We'd added quite a few other decorations this year. Since we had more shelf space we needed more things to fill them. Charlotte had bought decorations at Hobby Lobby and Goodwill. Then a few weeks later she found a whole little Christmas village in a box for free when she was taking Marcia on a walk. So we had a lot of new decorations that needed to be packed up. I'd bought two new totes to hold everything. 

The good news is that since I was using the rectangular boxes I was able to pack more efficiently. At the beginning of the season we unpacked 4 totes of Christmas things. I was able to get everything - including the new things - packed into 5 totes. 

But wow! I was so worn out. 

On Friday Brandon took the day off work. He started cleaning out the garage. Our goal for January is to get the garage organized really well. I worked online for about an hour, but I didn't want to go into the office. Instead I worked in the basement. I got all the holiday totes back under the stairs. The Christmas things always go in first. Usually we store the tree in under the stairs, but there just wasn't room anymore. So that went out to the garage. Then I put in the Halloween decorations and costumes. We have 5 of those totes too. And then the other holiday things went in last. Whew!

With the totes out of the way I moved onto organizing the shelves where we store things that probably would go in our kitchen if it had any storage space. Things like big pots and pans, the blender, serving trays, crock pots, etc. This was the before picture. 

I also straightened up the food storage shelves. Here's the before picture. 

And I did get things looking better, but I ran out of motivation for taking after pictures. So just trust me that things looked better.

You'll also have to trust me on this other not pictured thing. Veronica also earned $100. Chandler and Cort paid her for watching Okie for over a week. Veronica was very happy to get that money. It made all the early wake ups, and long walks, and remembering to take Okie in at night worth it.  

Lydia had been working on a new painting for our kitchen. Here's her "nest" where she had been working for two days. 

While I was taking pictures she noticed it needed something. So she leaned across the chair to put it on real fast. I joked that we should tell everyone that she painted the whole painting in this position. 

Charlotte had also been artistic. She drew this picture. 

I can't remember exactly what night we did this, but one of these nights Derrick, Brandon, and I watched the 90s movie Vertical Limit. It was a completely made up movie about people climbing K2. Lindsey had told me about it. We are both going through a phase of reading every book we can about people who climb high mountains. We'd both read the book "Into the Clouds" about people who tried to be the first to summit K2. And then Lindsey had been like, "There's a dumb movie about K2" so of course I had to watch that. It was really dumb, but in like the best way. We had a lot of fun mocking the movie. And then we found a reaction video on Youtube and that was almost better. Later Lindsey said she'd watched K2 around the same time with her son Knoxx and they'd had a lot of fun making fun of it too. 

And speaking of books about high mountains, I read "Alive" during this week. Alive is about a plane that crashed in the Andies mountains in the 70's. If you've heard of it you probably remember it because the survivors of the crash stayed alive by eating the bodies of the people who died. This is actually the book that I thought was "Into Thin Air." So I'd never wanted to read Into Thin Air because of the cannibalism. When I figured out that Into Thin Air was about climbing Everest I was like, "then what's the plane crash one?"  So then I had to read Alive. It's circular logic, but hey that's how my brain works sometimes. 

I'd been worried the cannibalism would be sensationalized in the story. But it's actually handled really well. So I give it a tentative recommendation. If you like are like me and like reading books about people freezing in the snow while you are snuggled warm in your bed, then add Alive to the list. 

Another book I've been reading has been a dinosaur encyclopedia that Derrick got for Christmas. We sat down and read about 20 pages every day of break. And what's amazing is that he did most of the reading. He'd read the stats of course, but he'd also read a lot of the paragraphs talking about each dinosaur. His reading has really improved lately. 

We'd also look up things that we didn't know. Like we read one dinosaur lived in among Mangroves. So we looked those up. I also had our globe and would find the countries where the dinosaur fossils were found. So Derrick was doing a lot of extra learning while going through that dinosaur book. 

On Saturday I sat down and made an important list. I wrote out my work commitments, my volunteer commitments and my other commitments. There are FIFTEEN things on this list. That's it, my year is full. 

Our main goal for the day was to hang up Lydia's painting. Brandon had a production meeting for Anastasia in the morning. I took Lydia to Fred Meyer to find picture hook thingies. When Brandon was back he hung the picture. Here's how it looks from our front door. 

And here's how it looks when you go through the doorway to the kitchen. I love how it ties the curtains and the chair rail together. 

And here is the picture up close. This is Grand Prismatic Spring. In the background is Excelcier Geyser. Next to the geyser is Opal pool. I'd been looking at buying a canvas print of a similar picture, but a lot of the pictures looked suspiciously like AI or were too expensive. So it was great that Lydia decided to use her Christmas Canvas to paint this for us. 

And speaking of art here's a picture all the kids drew. I started with Derrick drawing an island and writing Jurassic World Evolution 3 above it. He drew Marcia on the island. Then everyone started adding things to the picture. I think they did this on New Years Day because I had to keep interrupting their happy giggles to get them to carry totes and things for me. 

On Sunday our church didn't start until 1:30, but Derrick, Brandon, and I went over to the church at 11:45 so Derrick could be ordained a teacher. Here he is looking all spiffy before we left. He's developing his own sense of style. When we bought his latest pairs of church shoes he wanted ones with white soles. And he prefers bow ties to long ties. He's also asked for a suit coat. I told him we'd get him one when we were sure he was done growing. 

He was so excited to be ordained a teacher. He's grown up so much in two years. Two years ago he was crying about moving out of primary. And now he'd perfectly comfortable in Young Mens. 

Our ward had like 8 boys move up from Deacons to Teachers and only one boy move up from Primary to Deacons so Derrick will still have opportunities to pass the sacrament if he wants. But he's more excited about the teacher duties. He's excited to "guard the door" and calls it that even though we've explained the word usher.  When we went to church at the regular time he helped get the sacrament trays ready. 

Church was a little dodgy. They announced the wrong classroom for one of the youth Sunday School classes. So me and my friend Amanda were directing the kids to the correct classrooms. I was like, "Once again the MOMS step in and fix everything."  

Veronica stays in the youngest Sunday school class. She is thrilled to have a year where she isn't in Derrick's class. Derrick moved into the middle class taught by our friend Justine. Charlotte and Lydia' have loved Justine as a teacher. She was in Young Women's before and when they first met her they were like, "Mom, that lady who is really invested in us says hi."  And now they are like, "How can we leave Justine!  She UNDERSTANDS us!"  They have moved up to the oldest Sunday School class taught by the previous bishop and his wife. 

I decided to be attend Sunday School because I actually like the Old Testament and was curious how my friend Jeff was as a teacher. 

I lasted a whole 5 minutes. 

I wont go into why, but I was really hurt by something Jeff said. For a day or two I was willing to give up on Sunday School again for this year. But then I was like, "this is Jeff. He is my friend. I've known him for over 4 years. I'm not going to let this ruin our friendship."

My New Years Resolution is to do hard and scary things. Mainly, I need to start an actual billing and bookkeeping business to cover all my little billing clients. And that is hard and scary so I made my New Years Resolution something that will make me do that. But it also covers any other hard and scary things - including having a hard and scary conversation with Jeff about Sunday School. 

So on Tuesday I texted him and asked him if we could meet and talk about the thing he said and why it hurt me. And on Wednesday we had that conversation when we dropped our kids off for the youth activities at the church. It was a really really really good conversation and was much better than the Molotov cocktails I'd been considering throwing at all the bridges. 

Do we see eye to eye? No. But we do understand each other and that's a big deal. At the end of it Jeff asked, "Are we still homies?" And yes, we are still homies.   

But back to Sunday. We watched Newsies after dinner. Ovation will be doing Newsies for the summer play this year. I'd thought that girls camp would interfere with the rehearsal schedule. But it doesn't conflict at all. So I was trying to get one or more of the kids interested in being in Newsies. Veronica was immediately hooked. She kept saying "I can see this being so fun!"  So at least Veronica is going to be in Newsies this summer. 

And that get's us to the end of Christmas Vacation - almost. The kids actually didn't go back to school until Tuesday. So Monday was kind of a soft start to the week. But we'll talk about that next week. 

Thanks for reading.