End of Trimester Accomplishments

Abby surprised me once again by singing at her guitar concert!

This time it was a solo!

She sang "I'm Yours" and did a great job!

It was just kind of hard to hear her but she was awesome!

Such a brave girl!...I would never have been able to do that!

Josh had his end of trimester orchestra concert as well.

This one was the pops concert where they have a little more fun with movie clips and visual effects...

Dad was the grandparent support for these two concert just a couple of days apart since Mom was super busy with a church assignment and taking care of Grandma Kidd.

We had just barely made reservations and plans to take the family to Hawaii at this point and I remember talking to the Jeff and Cressent Nielsen family after the concert.  They were congratulating us on that decision and we were half joking about how maybe we wouldn't be able to go because of this Corona virus that we were hearing about happening on the other side of the world.  Little did we know...

Abby had taken art that trimester and I was so impressed with her projects!

She had so much fun and flourished learning new mediums and techniques.

Here are some of my favorites...

She's always had a talent for art and it's fun to see it grow!

Some February Snippets

Here we are at Mom and Dad's house for Grandma's birthday celebration.

It had been quite a while since she had been out on a Sunday evening so it was delightful to have her again.  She turned 90 years old this year.  Quite an accomplishment...and quite a woman!  I don't know that she will ever lose her spunk!

The big reason she was able to come again was that Mom and Dad had a chair lift installed on their stairs...

                                        

Everyone needed a turn...Abby took one too but for some reason the only thing I have of her is a video :(

               

For Christmas Andy gave me tickets to The Illusionists!

They came to the Ellen Eccles theater and we made it our Valentine Date (It was Valentine's Eve)

I thought they were so much fun...things like that always blow my mind!

We also saw lots of fun friends at the show like Trudy and Gerald Knight and Trina and Blake Smith :)

The biggest news of February was definitely Josh getting his driver's license!

We worked awfully hard to get those hours in and it was tricky finding a time between track and piano and cello to get him in after school to make it official but we did it and we are pretty proud of him!

                                     

January 2020

Well, it seems to be my norm to do my first post of each year 3 or 4 months in.

This year I stretched it to 5 months :)

Here's a quick update of things that happened before COVID changed our lives...

Josh was born with a "lucky" toenail (like on Nemo).  It has always been little and deformed.  When he had his feet operated on many years ago, his doctor offered to take it off while he was doing the other procedure but Josh was too attached to it and wouldn't hear of it :)

Fast forward to this January and Josh tells me he thinks it's time to have it taken care of.  He would struggle with it getting caught on things and it hurt whenever he had to cut it so he decided it was time to have it removed.

Dr Cook looked at it and suggested cutting it out instead of a less invasive treatment.  That way there would be less chance of any of it growing back.  However, he didn't have the time to do that at the moment so we rescheduled and Andy took him in the next week to have it done.

These are the before pics...

I will spare you the pictures right after it was done...they're a bit gruesome...

Here it is bandaged up and several weeks after...pretty much healed.

He had many follow up visits and all in all it was a bigger ordeal than we had expected but everyone is glad that it is done :)

                                                      

We had decided at the beginning of the year to try and get the kids to the temple to do baptisms more often.  I had heard it was kind of a nightmare after school with all kinds of wait time but a good friend had said that the sooner you get there the better.  So one day that Matt didn't have school we picked the high schoolers up and had them change there at school and then we rushed to the temple.  We were pretty lucky and didn't have to wait very long.  It was a great experience to be there with all three of them!  We did pie in the cafeteria afterward.

Here's some pics of Ben doing some sit ups with Andy during his morning exercise routine...

such a cutie!