I find it hard to keep up with things on the blog, but still enjoy doing it. When I do update it's usually fast and furious...and full of typos. So forgive all my errors. I try to fix them when I notice them.
We made it through December and got back into the swing of things in January. I made a sort of resolution to go outside to exercise most days. So I've been getting outside most days and got some good cozy waterproof gear. Here I am by the river (Columbia) one morning when the kids were back at school. See, there's a little sun out there.
This is what we're dealing with in the winter - this is 7:30am, early January. This is Emma walking to the bus. It's still so dark out at 7:30am. This is why I do not favor year round daylight savings time - if we had that it would look this dark at 8:30am. :( When I do my walks around the neighborhood at 9 or so its a bit brighter.
Emma's basketball season is in full swing. Her team is doing great this year!
Grant was ordained to be a teacher (at church) - he's moving on up!
This is one of Anna's final projects for her cooking/foods class for school. She made chicken tonkatsu and a Japanese style curry dinner. It turned out just perfect.
Playing lots of cards - winter time fun
Emma and some girl scout friends went sledding at Mount Hood
Anna is very talented in sewing and things. She turned these jeans into flare jeans!
Again, she is getting zero help from me because I don't know how to do this at all. She does have two grandmas who are good at sewing who can help. Good job Anna!
One Saturday I walked John, Emma and a neighbor friend to the dollar store. We had a fun time!
Getting Dairy Queen one day
Matthew performed in the Night on Broadway choir performance. He did the song Trouble from Music Man, which is a tough one. He did a great job!
Ya got Trouble!
Anna performed in some songs at the choir event too - here she is a tourist. She borrowed the shorts from Scott and the fanny pack from me. Looking like your parents is the height of dorkiness apparently. This was the last time I ever saw that fanny pack. I used that one all the time too. Maybe we'll find it again some day. :(
This graphic made me laugh so much. We have discussed the dynamics of the midwest a lot in the past few years in our house for some reason - after our road trip there. This graphic came up in one of my running groups on fb, and all the midwesterners chimed in to rip on Indiana. My friend who is from Illinois would use the term "Hoosier" where most people would employ the insult "redneck" or white trash" or something. If you see someone mowing their lawn on a riding mower in their underwear for example, "look at this hoosier!" might be the correct insult. So I learned that some parts of the midwest really look down on Indiana for some reason. Anyway, poor Indiana. My parents went to graduate school and met there. And then served a mission there. So we are Indiana friendly. And also we enjoy the Illusion of Safety from Indiana here in Washington state. :)
Ok, back to reality
We made these groundhog pancakes for Groundhog Day
We had a two hour delay for inclement weather. But the weather wasn't inclement enough so the kids had to go to school. This is what it looked like at Emma's bus time - a bit rainy, a few snowflakes
Then 15 minutes later
By the time the older kids had to head to the bus it was snowing quite a bit
I ended up driving them all to school, but only after they walked around in the snow a bit looking for the bus. I didn't see them out there and thought they had been picked up by the bus. So everyone was cold and mad. And it snowed heavily while we dropped everyone off - then stopped and melted. Sigh. We need better snow days than that!
Matthew got an award for Calculus
Anna got an award for US History
Good job guys!!
More Basketball action!! Emma is getting better and better and making baskets in most games!
I tried to throw away some garbage from Emma's room
She had to go through the garbage bag to retrieve some "treasures"
In my defense she had oked me to throw this stuff away but then had a change of heart
Grant being goofy on another snowy day
We got enough for a little snow fun
John and I sewed this cowboy hamster pillowcase
Having some Valentine's Day fun with our new chocolate fountain
Band concert! Go Matthew!!
Me and Emma hanging out at church
Having birthday dinner at Gustav's to celebrate Matthew!
And Matthew turned 18!!
I'm excited for him and also dying inside.
How do they grow up so fast!
Emma's team ended up winning the end of season tournament!
They were 3rd place going into the tournament - and came back for a big upset!
The top two teams had a bye for the first round
Emma's team is the Electric Jellybeans and it was such an exciting year!!
Way to go Jellybeans!!
The final game was a nail biter and really close!! Emma made some baskets to help her team to the win!
Matthew had some friends over to the house for a birthday party - so I took some of the other kids out for an exciting and fancy dinner at Costco. Everyone loved it, really.
Emma helping me make our king cake for Mardi Gras. This is just a big cinnamon roll log with cuts into the side. It never looks pretty, but always tastes great!
John at his band concert - not sure why we didn't get his trumpet in this picture. But he did a great job!
Happy Birthday Scott!!
We didn't celebrate Scott's birthday on the correct day because Matthew and Anna had play dress rehearsal that night, I had a big final starting the next morning and Scott was leaving town for work for the rest of the week. So we decided to postpone the festivities. But we got him a donut, which he didn't eat 'cause he's not eating sugar.
So Scott left town and I took my 30 hour final in my Advanced Algorithms class (I have 30 straight hours to complete it but only took about 12 this time). The final was tough, but I made it tougher by accidentally crashing the Jupyter notebook I was taking the exam on. While writing some code I accidentally put an infinite loop in one of the test cells and then it autosaved just before crashing. I was unable to reopen the test successfully for several hours and contacted my school to see if they could just give me a new blank test and I could start over - even though I had already done several hours of work. Anyway, long story short, I fixed my own problem by closing everything else on my computer and giving my computer just enough processing power to open the test briefly in which time I was able to scroll to the problem cell, delete the infinite loop and quickly save the file again before it crashed. Every time the test opens it runs every cell (the test is like 20 pages long too and of course the problem was towards the bottom - so hard to scroll to before it crashes), causing the crash again. After several hours of trying, I was finally able to delete the infinite loop and continue with the test. I was really careful not to make that mistake again. In my defense, putting an infinite loop in on accident while coding is a pretty common thing to do, and would usually be easily fixed - but because this was an exam, the test autosaves and I can only access the notebook for the test a certain way (no access to files and things that go with it) and no ability to restart with a blank test on my own, it caused a problem. But it all worked out in the end.
This is the 5th and final algorithms class that I have taken and this class was HARD! Quantum computing algorithms, complicated data structures - well, it was hard for me anyway. This final let me see how far I've come - the first class I took was such a struggle and my confidence in being able to read and write code has grown a lot. I can troubleshoot a lot easier - and was thus able to troubleshoot the problem I created (I didn't know what was causing the crashing problem at first but figured it out), come back from it, regroup and finish the test. And I ended up getting 100% on this beast of a final. I was really proud of myself.
(The date says May 2 in the pic because that's the end of the term date).
Grant continues to be awesome on the guitar
He is learning Stairway to Heaven for an upcoming recital
Emma is doing saftey patrol - and not exactly loving being out in the rain all the time, but doing a good job anyway. She wishes she'd picked the May/June safety patrol term instead of March/April. :)
Biography Day - Emma and her friend both did biography reports on Marie Curie. Good job, girls!! A lot of the pictures we looked up of Marie Curie she was wearing black, so we went with a black ensemble. Later I thought maybe we just saw pictures of her in mourning after her husband died, because we did learn she liked the color purple. Oh well.
Emma wanted to bring Grandma's periodic table quilt to show the elements she (Marie Curie) discovered.
Celebrating Scott's birthday a week late - after he got back from his trip to California
It was also St. Patrick's Day - thus all the green. Happy Birthday Scott!!
We made some festive cupcakes
Later in the week Emma was sad because someone ate all the rainbows off the cupakes.
A rainbow mystery (it was Grant)
Hadestown!!
Anna was in the dance ensemble of Hadestown (the school musical)! She did a great job. This play required a lot from her - in time and emotional reserves. She wasn't sure she wanted to do this (once things got started and the schedule was so intense) - but she persevered and in the end she made some great friends and they put on an amazing show! Matthew did the lights as part of his senior project. Look at that amazing lighting!!
Good job Anna and Matthew!
Some of the championship team reunited for a weekend b-ball camp!
Working on those dribbling skills!
Emma loved playing basketball this year - and we've been walking up to a nearby park to practice shooting baskets pretty often. I would love to get a basketball hoop at our house.
Emma is also participating in an after school music club and an after school running club. She also has girl scouts and piano. She's busy! And we're busy driving her to things!
And we made it to spring break!
Matthew went to Florida / Disney World with the band. So he was off having fun in the sun all week.
Here are Scott and I playing Root with Grant. This is one of those strategy games that make me feel real insecure because I can't figure them out. But it was fun anyway - insecurities aside. Scott won, as usual.
We went ice skating one day during spring break. I was real nervous that I was going to fall down and hurt my knee more. So I was extra careful - and luckily didn't fall. Hooray!!
Quick knee update: After hurting my knee while running (about two years ago) things have improved a lot! I learned that I needed to change my gait (shorter strides but more of them) to minimize the impact to my joints. I have been able to run without pain but am taking it VERY conservatively right now - just run / walking or walking. I have run up to about .4 miles at a time with no pain. Yea!!
I love ice skating!!
But every time I go I feel like I'm a little worse at it. It's not like riding a bike. ;)
Family Trivia: Scott and I first got to know each other at an ice skating activity in Florida. We had already met before, but talked to each other at the ice skating thing for several hours - and ignored everyone else. :)
After we ice skated we got food from Baja Fresh and then Cold Stone ice cream after.
Grant didn't want to come. He doesn't love ice skating.
Another day we ran/walked the cross country course (1.5 miles). Grant was there too but ran on ahead.
I brought up the rear with my slow run/walking. We got Dairy Queen after.
Another day I took the three younger kids and one of my nephews swimming. I didn't get to the swimming pool early enough and there were so many spring break swimmers there ahead of us that we got turned away! Luckily another pool across town was having a swim time too so we headed over there and were able to swim. It was a fun pool too. So our swimming adventure didn't go according to plan, but there was fun swimming involved. And donuts!
Woohoo!!
This pool had a ton of fun bouncy balls that everyone loved.
On my birthday (also during spring break) the younger kids, Scott and I walked from Fort Vancouver over to the Vancouver waterfront and got ice cream. It was a sunny day and not too cold, so that was nice.
I got to try pear and blue cheese ice cream from Salt and Straw. It sounds scary but it was great - and yes you can taste blue cheese in it, but mostly pear. But I love blue cheese so its all good.
Walking back to Fort Vancouver
We also had cake, presents and went out to dinner - it was a fun day!
Grant requested a low key birthday for himself - and to play video games all day. So that's what we did. He wanted to celebrate his b-day early, before spring break ended. Usually his birthday is during spring break but this year it was the Monday we headed back. He felt that was unsatisfactory, so we celebrated early. Here he is with his cake from Costco.
And beating the heck out of his tiny dinosaur pinata.
He had fun playing video games all day. :)
And Matthew made it back from Florida with the band - they had a great time and survived - all band friendships seem to be intact!
And he picked where he's going to college next year - The University of Utah! We're excited for him! Although as a BYU grad, I do have a hard time saying "Go Utes." ;) I'll work on that.
He is starting the process of signing up for housing and orientation. Things are getting real!
