The month of January

This past month has been pretty rough for our family.  We have had so much sickness in our home.  It started off with Kyle the beginning of January.  (following his illnesses during the holidays) He had high fevers, and headache for about a week.  The next week was Kaylee's turn, she was home from school for 3.5 days with high fever and headache.  Then came Ryan, he had a little bit different time of it.  He still had the headaches and fever, but he also had stomache ache and vomiting.  He was home from school for 3 days. Next came Tiffany home for an entire week with headaches, fever, and vomitting.  Now, this week is Jacob's turn and he has been home for 2.5 days with headaches, fever, chills, and vomiting.  Yuck!!  I sure hope we are through with it and we don't start a second round through the kids.

Thankfully (knock on wood) I have not been sick.  I have cleaned carpets twice though and there has been plenty to do in the care of the kids when they have been home in addition to my whole house organization project that is moving forward, if rather slowly, and all the normal everyday household chores.  I am working towards teaching a digital scrapbooking class.  I am still working out all the details, but I am hoping to start it later this month if I can get enough ladies interested in taking the class.  It will be 6 weeks with one 1.5 hour class per week for $40.  I will teach the basics of how to create digital layouts along with some of the styles and techniques I have found useful over the years.  If you would be interested in taking my class, and live close by, let me know.

Mike continues to travel.  He has been leaving on Sunday afternoons and getting home on Thursday nights.  Last week he got caught in a bad ice storm down in Lawton.  His apartment lost power, his flight got cancelled for coming home, the airport remained closed the next day, and he ended up driving 3 hours to Dallas on Friday in order to get home.  He was home for less than 48 hours and was on his way back again.  He is working hard and the job is in full swing.  He is at least happy to be working even if it is far away.

Tiffany started playing basketball.  She missed her first game because she was sick, but she was able to play today and had a great game.  The team has won both of their games so far and is looking good for the city championships next month.  We will see how the rest of the season goes.  Tiff is pulling straight A's this year and is loving Middle School.

Kaylee has been working very hard.  She took an afterschool position to work as the school wrestling team manager.  She is in charge of the team equipment, records, weigh ins, etc.  She is doing a great job and the coach told me she is one of the best managers he has ever had.  She is still pulling straight A's despite missing tons of school this year.  I think she has missed almost 15 days.  Yikes.  Like I said this winter has been really rough on our family.  We found out this week that Kaylee will be having a second surgery on her pinky finger.  (more school to miss) She still has very limited range of motion so the surgeron is going to go in and remover her screws and scrape out the scar tissue.  The hope is that she will be able to start moving it sooner this time around since we don't have to worry so much about the bone healing so hopefully she won't form so much scar tissue.  This should increase her range of motion and hopefully get her back to 100% just in time for track season followed by conditioning for the high school volleyball team.

Ryan, Jacob, and Kyle just finished their wrestling club season.  They had a lot of fun and by the time the season was ending, they finally figured out what they were supposed to be doing.  Ryan and Jake had their pinewood derby last week.  They both designed and pretty much built their cars themselves.  They had a little bit of help from mom and dad, but they did the majority of the work.  The derby was so much fun.  They had a blast watching their cars run the races.  Ryan ended up taking 4th place and got the Blue Streal award and Jacob ended up in 6th place and took the Tricked out Truck award.  Here are a couple of pics of them with their cars.

The boys are all doing well and are loving school. 

So in the last 2 weeks I have taken on and pretty much completed a fun project.  I have redecorated Kaylee's room.  She had been complaining that her room was so "BORING".  I agree, it was, since we had done nothing to it since moving in to this house 2.5 years ago.  She had a very specific idea of what she wanted so I ended up making a quilt for her bed, since we couldn't find this color combo in any of the stores.  I also built a platform bed and headborad, made pillows, refinshed and painted her nightstand, covered a lamp shade, refinished a shelf to coordinate, and painted some decor items to match as well. We are still contemplating repainting her dresser and vanity/desk black to match. It was super fun.  Here are the results.

Next project (some time in the next couple of months) will be Tiffany's room .  Of course we also would like to get busy framing in some portions of the basement too.  I guess we will see how it goes.  Well, I guess that is about all for now.