Great Little Happenings - February and March

Wow - lots of great things have happened that haven't quite made it on the blog. So I'm going to do a little catching up here.

Eliza has so much fun with all the great girls in the neighborhood. Here they are doing a cookie stand on and extra-warm February day. They were dancing around and getting cars to stop and they ended up making a decent little profit while having a really fun day together.

That same nice warm February day, I found Ashton, Isaac and their friend doing this:


Jared was loading up our old TV to take it to the D.I. and when these boys came along and apparently the three of them decided that the TV could find a great new home at their friend's house. So now their friend's family has a nice big TV that flickers when there's too much white on the screen and has some cobwebs inside it that add interest to whatever you're watching. Glad that old thing could find a happy new home.

During the Olympics, we had a fun Family Olympics Night. We did "ice dancing" involving "skating" around with our socks on the slippery wood floors and doing lots of spins and fancy "finishing positions" (like the one below):

We also threw in a little "limbo" - makes a good winter Olympics sport, right?

And we made up challenging new events - hopping up our steep stairs on one foot (wow, was that ever hard! Isaac beat us all on that one), seeing how far we could slide in our socks on the wood floor, etc.

We did have to have a talk about being a good looser when Oliver got very sad at one point... (see that tear? But he still automatically smiled for the picture...)

There were a lot of great sunsets. And Eliza or Isaac love capturing sunsets in photos:

We made a lot of cookies. Oh, how we love cookies. And sometimes we eat so much cookie dough that there aren't that many baked cookies in the end. We make a few different kinds but these are our favorite - Oatmeal chocolate chip (recipe here).

I went running quite a lot. I love running when it's in the 50's - perfect running weather. I love the snow-capped mountains and I love seeing the cemetery where I run gradually ease it's way out of winter yellows and grays and browns towards spring greens.

Eliza made a LOT of rubber band bracelets.

We skiied a lot. The kids all know Snow Basin Ski Resort like the back of their hands now. And wow, they are getting to be really great skiers!

 

After a long day of skiing, this is how Isaac and Eliza feel:

Isaac had one pretty bad ski day. He lost control, ran into Ashton and whacked his nose really hard on Ashton's helmet. His nose started gushing and ski patrol was pretty worried about the large pool of blood in the snow. They strapped him to a sled and took him to their little clinic place. But after watching him for a while, he was just fine and headed back out to ski again. Tough kid!

Here he is heading off with ski patrol (Ashton was with him and took great care of him until I could meet up with them and get the full ski patrol report.):

The twins had a great basketball season. They got to play on the same team as one of their best friends, had a really excellent coach, and their team ended up winning the tournament! 

 

The twins were thrilled with the cool trophies they got:

 

Eliza needs to get glasses - one eye is 20/20 but the other one is pretty weak so she's getting headaches. Here she is trying out different frames. We still haven't found just the right thing for her but we're working on it!

 

Isaac had a good basketball season. He's one FAST kid on the court and did a great job getting the ball to the right people at the right time. He's definitely more into cross country and soccer though. He's thinking this might be his last year playing basketball.

Quite amazingly, Ashton got 4th place in the Chemistry category with his science fair project. We were all (including Ashton) pretty surprised. He put in very minimal effort on the project (despite plenty of nagging from his parents...) and went with a pretty lame baking soda and vinegar hypothesis. But he followed all the instructions regarding research and experimentation, made a nice board, and did a great job presenting to the judges.  I guess he proved that a nicely put-together and well-presented project can do well even when it's not based on a stellar idea! He heard that there are some pretty great prizes when it comes to excellent 9th grade science fair projects so he got excited about coming up with a better project next year and coupling that with his good presentations skills to do something really great next year. So it all ended very well.