Living in the New Year

Happy New Year!!!  How is your year going?  It's well past January, but the year is still fresh!

One night for a date Lee and I were on the hunt for some dessert.  We have never been to O'Charley's, but went on a whim after Olive Garden was super packed.  We loved their peanut butter dessert! Yum!


We traveled up to Pennsylvania and met our new niece, Serena! 


A cute sign that my brother owns.  My sister Lena made it for him years ago.


While in Pennsylvania we stopped at my mom's house.  She showed us some fun things like this kimono my grandpa bought during WWII.




Here is a teapot that a great-great grandma (?) brought over from England and across the plains and mountains to Utah.






We made this trip without Lee and he made himself a fun dinner.


When we arrived back from PA Shanna was sound asleep, toothbrush in hand.  Hopefully she used it that night!


Lee dropped a little key down the sink on accident one day at work.


He got it out!


One of our snow days.....lots of snow, right?  Haha. Sledding was still successful!


Clark and Cal arrived back from a campout and went straight to standards night in Waynesboro. 


We love making cookies around here!


We did pixies one week in January.  We need to do it more often.  Pixies go about doing service, but secretly. We did this growing up and I think it's so fun. 




I finally went through my files.  I think I will start doing this just once a year.  See the stacks?  I just pile stuff up through the year, and then go through them when I get to it.  I decided to go through all of my files and do a major purge.  I adopted Marie Kondo's method for files...which is basically to not have files.  I kept a couple of things separate like taxes. 


While going through my files it was a trip down memory lane!  I found Lee's optometry graduation program and invitation.  And for the record, he was Magnum Cum Laude. He was on the boarder and they didn't know for sure if he would be on it or not before the program was printed.




Lena had the girls make these when she watched them for two months for me while I was in the hospital, and then when Elden was in the hospital when he was born.




The twins birth cards and Elden's as well.


Also, I forgot but Lena and Mike gave us $300 for the twins.  Wow, so fun and generous!




Years and years ago when we went to Nutty Putty one time...a underground cave in Utah.




And look what was left!  ONE file cabinet and lots of stuff to throw out.  YAY!


In January the paper got a photo of the kids about an article of having safe routes to school.  It was in our local paper and the Harisonburg one.  So fun!  They rode their bikes all winter long, unless it was raining.