January Review

Well, once the kids returned to school on January 7th, our life got pretty quiet. :) Looking back on the calendar, we did a lot of regular things; working at the Young Life office, taking Charlie and Alanna to basketball practice, piano lessons, small group, dinner guests... all of the normal things in our life! The calendar is also marked several times with who was sick because OH MY GOODNESS we had had a lot of sickness in our house this winter. This month, really. Ugh.

The government shutdown was the longest ever shutdown at 35 days meaning Matt was home from work from December 22nd until January 27th. It was epic! It was such a gift of time, really. Matt spent some time doing a few home projects, but the big project he worked on was turning our 2016 blog posts into a printed book. He spent probably a hundred hours (for real) on creating the books and the end result is five new volumes of family pictures and memories. It's so great! It was a really good time to get that project done. Matt actually started the next year and got halfway through 2017 before the government reopened. Yay! We got a lot of comments about the shutdown and most of them were questions about how we're doing. Great! We're doing great. I'm grateful that we don't live paycheck to paycheck because not receiving a paycheck or two wasn't a big deal. It was really neat to see our community rally around government employees by offering free services (like free labor from a local appliance repair shop) and extra food banks and the school district offering super fast processing on free and reduced lunch applications. There was one food bank set up for 1/28 which was Matt's first day back to work after the government reopened, and a retired BLM employee was helping out at it. That retiree wasn't seeing any BLM/USFS people at the food bank so he called one of Matt's coworkers and tried to get some people to come down and that coworker pushed Matt to attend so when it was all said and done, Matt came home with a trunkload of food from the food bank. Um, ok! I'll take free food as long as there's enough for those that really need it. We took advantage of a few other freebies; one was a free $40 gift certificate from a front range law firm, one was a pair of tickets to the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, and the other was a pair of tickets to a Harlem Globetrotters game (we're saving the tickets for Charlie's birthday!). Seriously, what a gift. Thanks, community, for loving on government employees and their families! :) 

1-16

Hattie got herself dressed. Her undies were on backwards, her pants were backwards and inside out, and her slipper socks were on upside down so the heel was really bunchy on top of her foot. But she nailed her shirt! :) 

1-17

I was working on a Young Life mass mailing and hired Molly to help me. She put stamps on envelopes for quite some time! I told her I would pay her one penny for every stamp she put on, and she earned $1.12 for her 112 stamps. A few days later, I paid Charlie and Alanna one penny for each envelope they stuffed. I had 350 invitations to send out so it was actually really helpful. I rounded up on Charlie and Alanna since their job was a little more putzy. Best $4 spent that week! :)  

 This was one of Charlie's worksheets from school. The last question was so cute! 

It says: 2. How do the pioneer chores compare to household chores today? Are they the same or different? Would you prefer to live then or now? Give reasons to your choice.

Charlie wrote: I would want to live now, because there would be no electricity, no books, and no sinks. 

No books! Boy, that kiddo loves to read. :) :)