January

After Christmas, Grandma and Grandpa Graham came for a fun visit.

Grandma and Grandpa took Jared and Nathan along with Kevin to Promontory Point.

Grandma helped Amanda and Megan sew skirts.

They were able to wear their new skirts to church the next day. They turned out really cute and have since sewn a coordinating one for Rebecca. I'll have to post a picture of Rebecca in her skirt another day. (Notice Amanda's shorter hair. If you had trouble telling them apart, now you have a visual cue!)
Todd and I flew to Indiana with Kevin and Christine for Greg's wedding. It was a fun weekend being able to spend it with Todd's family. Congratulations to Greg and Lucy!

While in Ft. Wayne we drove by the home Todd's family lived in when he was a baby.

We also drove by the home Todd lived in during high school after his family moved back to Ft. Wayne. It was interesting for Todd to see how much has changed in the area.
Nerf Gun wars are serious business around our house!

Jared celebrated his 13th birthday. He is now a teenager, but what a nice teenager!

Joshua demonstrated how to make play-doh for his kindergarten class.

Amanda and Megan did an experiment on how vision affects taste for their science fair project. They made all lemon Jell-O into different colors with food coloring. Then they had people taste test the four samples both blindfolded and without the blindfold. It was interesting that if people could see the Jell-O, they usually thought the green was lime, the orange was orange, the red was strawberry or cherry and the yellow was lemon.

Ethan got his first football injury. He plays football almost every recess. When he called from the school to tell me about his injured eye, I wasn't too surprised it was because of football. However after I picked him up, I was surprised to find out he wasn't actually playing football. Before school started, he threw his football into his cubby and it ricocheted back into his eye. His eye was still hurting and blurry by lunch time when he called. I took him to our pediatrician who put dye in his eye that makes any scratches show up with a black light. Ethan was pretty impressed with his glow-in-the-dark eye! He was then sent to an ophthalmologist since his eye was scratched, but mostly because his vision was blurred. His eye turned out to be fine with the help of some medicine. The whole incident was definitely worth it for Ethan when the dye from his eye apparently drained down through his nose and he had glow-in-the-dark snot!

Back in October, I thought I triumphed when we sold our rabbits. However only a few days later, we decided to get different rabbits and I found myself being the one actually picking them out. We now have Dutch rabbits which are considerably smaller which makes them much easier to handle and pet. We also like the fun markings of this breed. Our compromise with the new rabbits is that they are marketable as pets, but can be meat rabbits (hopefully only if desperate times!). During one especially cold week, we brought the rabbits into the garage and the kids enjoyed spending more time with them.

Rebecca spent a lot of time going up and down and up and down the stairs once she figured them out.

She also figured out how much fun it is to put macaroni in her hair!