Sometimes going back to school and work after Christmas break can be a little depressing. Especially if you are having dreary winter weather. The weather here has been pretty good. We've had some beautiful sunny days and a lot of much needed rain. Northern California has had a lot of flooding and our town was no exception. I gave a talk in church yesterday and have been stressing about that, so now I feel much better. I like getting those kinds of things over with. Here are a few pictures from our first weeks back to school after the break. John (who is looking so grown up) found a friend at Target. Someone had set up all the large stormtroopers to guard the boys clothes section. This sounds like something Uncle Dana would do. :)
Scott had last Friday off (best two days of the month) and we went to lunch with John and Emma. We had enough time to go to Baja Fresh in San Jose before picking up Matthew.
Matthew at school. He loves his teacher and is enjoying school. He's going to be in another school play (entitled The There Musketeers Travel Through Time). Matthew will be playing a Jedi trainer. Anna is (probably) going to be going to his school and have his same teacher next year.
We've had a bunch of doctor appointments over the past two weeks.
So many.
Anna was the most nervous to go to the doctor. I let her play with a photo app on my phone while she waited to get her mind off it. This is what she made in the waiting room.
Here she is in the waiting room, worrying herself into a frenzy about getting a shot. In the end I had to physically restrain her while the nurse gave her a shot. Anna screamed at the top of her lungs. Fun times. Poor Anna. :(
John has had lots of appointments (and more to come) many to assess his development since he's had fine and gross motor delays in the past. Here John made a letter H with some fun magnet blocks. He was very proud of this.
John at Mom school. One of the appointments we went to for John we learned we need to help him with his pincher grip for writing. So that's something to work on. You can see he's not doing it here.
Going up the stairs selfie. The boys like me to carry them (and sometimes Anna too). I hurt my back one night carrying too many people up. Gotta be careful. Those boys are getting big.
There were major flood warnings for our town last weekend. I went to the store to stock up on supplies in case it was too floody to get around for a few days. Californians don't do emergency preparedness like other places in the country, I guess. That or they didn't think the flooding would be a big deal. Florida before a hurricane or almost anywhere before a big snow storm people are out shopping like its the end of the world. Before a big California rain storm no one was out. Maybe I was overly prepared.
In any case, the big rain came and did flood many parts of our town. We got a little water in our garage and surprisingly, a lot in the boys (upstairs) bedroom. The bedroom flooding wasn't caused by rain however. The boys thought it would be a good idea to dump about 30 cups of water on their floor one night. Scott and I were not happy about it. Here's Scott working on drying the floor out.
On the way back from the doctor one evening we stopped to take a picture of the creek crossing in town. It's designed to let the water flow over this part of the road when the water is very high, and they have barriers to put down to close the road when that happens. The day before the water was even higher but I didn't get a picture. I read that 40% of California is out of drought now (compared to 3% this time last year) because of all the rain and snow. So hooray for that.
Blurry picture on the way to school. The kids wanted to take pictures one morning on our school drive. It's a beautiful drive. This doesn't do it justice. There is a lot of water around still.
Double rainbow one morning after dropping off the kids. You could see the entire arc of the rainbow, end to end. I only got one end in the photo though.
At Uvas Reservoir. We went to see how high the reservoir was after all the rain. The answer: very high. When we went to the reservoir a few months ago the water was much lower. This (above) is an after picture. Notice we are standing on the paved boat launch where the water starts.
This is back in October. You can see the paved boat launch behind us. The water was much lower then. Now it goes all the way up to that parking lot.
This was in October as well.
All those exposed layers are covered up now.
