Winter, Winter

A few winter happenings at the Robertson Household...

For Family Home Evening one night when I was a kid, my parents handed out a lot of cash to each kid.  Then they told us how much each bill was and we kids have to "give back" the money to our parents to pay for that bill.  It was a great hand-on and visual lesson teaching me that it costs a lot of money to run a household.  And being in a family of ten kids, the money my dad earned was used up quickly! I always remembered that lesson and have wanted to do it with my kids.  I finally did it a couple of weeks ago.  I wanted to do it because we are going to have some tight months money wise this year with our saving goals we have in place. And it (I think) was good for our kids to see themselves the money that goes in to running a household.  They didn't want to give up the money I handed them!


One day I was at Food Lion and they were giving away free flowers!  I asked if I could have two bunches (maybe that was being too greedy...).  I took one for myself and one for my friend who recently started back to work.


The snow in this picture is practically gone.  And now there isn't any snow in our yard. That is something I love about the weather here.  We get all four seasons, but none of them are very harsh.


I FINALLY redid the kid Saturday job charts and our family job rotations.  We needed some changes.  I made the kid Saturday jobs a bit harder and more cohesive.  So far it's going okay.  No strikes yet.....almost....


One Wednesday night we had a fantastic activity that the young women's president put together--my friend Katherine.  First a fun slide-the-cookie-to-your-mouth-no-handed activity.


The youth did a mock Survivor game.  There were three teams.  They each had to go out in two's and get their specific envelope--color coded.  They had to listen to their specific team member to find out where to go to get their specific envelope.


Shanna wanted in on the action and it worked because that team needed one more member.


The teams dumped out their envelopes to see what was inside.  It was puzzle pieces of the 2016 youth theme scripture--2 Nephi 31:20.  They all sorted them and put it together.  All the youth seemed to love it.  It was a fun activity.




I made some freezer jam last week.  It turned out great!  Guess I should scrub off those old price stickers...ha ha.


Shanna bought some fake nails the other day and put them one.  She removed them about 30 minutes later.  Too funny.


Haley put some on too. Not sure how long she kept her's on.


One Saturday I made some German pancakes.  Normally Lee makes them, but he and Clark were busy that morning so I helped out.  I think Lee's are better, but these turned out fine.


We've been having some washer problems lately.  For two weeks water was leaking while doing laundry.  The second week the water leaks were really bad.  Lee bought a new pump and installed it.  The new pump seemed to do the trick, but it started leaking a little bit again.  Lee tightened the belt and so far so good.  I was going to run a small hot load of water last night to keep the washer from freezing up over the weekend.  But the water wouldn't even come out.  Spring is around the corner, right?  Here's hoping it fires right up Monday morning!


The new pump.  Thank you eBay--twenty bucks.


On a Tuesday we pulled the kids out of school for a couple of hours to get their passport applications in.  Lee had to be there too.  We went to a nearby post office. When we arrived they said they had down only 2 people on the schedule for passports.  One lady didn't seem happy that we had five kids that we wanted to do passports for.  It wasn't my fault that someone wrote the number of kids down wrong.  But it worked out just fine and they got them all done before their lunch break. 


We had a pretty snow fall for a couple hours that same day.  And surprisingly school wasn't canceled.


Hope you are all enjoying winter!  It will make summer that much sweeter, right?!