Just a month in and 2015 is off to a rollicking good start. We rang in the new year with family-reunion-a-polooza!
It was pretty awesome to get about 2/3 of the family together under one roof for a wee stretch of time. Awesome, and crazy, and kid fabulous! 9 cousins! Thankfully the weather was mild so nobody froze too bad and the kids were able to range outside for most of the time, where they soldiered on sledding until the very last of the snow melted. Army-sized meals were prepared, and the decibel level in the house was equivalent to a rock concert at any given time.
About a month before this insanity all went down I broke down in my own little moment of crazy and brought this home:
Actually, that's about three times the amount of dog I brought home in December. Puppies grow at an even more exponential rate than children. Artemis "Aurora-Rapunzel-Cinderella." She has pretty much won us all over heart and soul. Every time we turn around she is just sitting there with those eyes full of unconditional love seeming to say, "I'm your biggest fan, I'll follow you until you love me, or feed me scraps of moose meat."
As things slowed down & got very chilly outside towards the end of January and our house seemed strangely quiet (for the first time ever maybe) the kids and I have been reading lots of books. We have a cook & book theme going on and they are totally diggin' it. This week we read
The kids baked the apple pie recipe from it (they did the majority of mixing and chopping themselves) and were quite delighted with the result.
Other than that we are just crafting, and garden dreaming and doing some nesting in this last little stretch of winter time.
