February 2018

Annika and Asher skiing together for the day. According to Annika, "Sometimes I left him the dust. Sometimes he left me in the dust." Skiing with Asher gave her all kinds of new experiences, like going into the trees. On purpose. "Don't worry. I only had to push off a tree once." 

Naomi and Amelia took it a little easier.

...and there is no one Naomi would rather ski with than Amelia.

I'm not totally sure what this was... I think Harry Potter meets Robinhood. Either way, just steer clear of Annika and Asher.

What happens when a seven year old defines something a bit abstract. I think it's pretty good.

Some daycare days are extra fun when your good friend is there.

Oma and Opa visited in February to watch Jeremy and Timothy, but we got a few days with them too!

Our costume for a friend's 40th, dressed as the title of a song...Get it?

Olie bollen!

And these really fun fancy cookies. Also delicious, but I'm seriously questioning this as a winter tradition. Every year it's in the teens when we do this.

We loved watching some of the winter olympics. What the medal ceremony looks like in our house when  the US takes the gold.

The barely controlled chaos of preschool Valentines parties.

Building with Oma.

Our Valentines fondue tradition. We lost one kid but picked up four more, so it all works out...

...why we do fondue at home...

We used our long Presidents' Day weekend to go to Ann Arbor to see these dear friends, Callie and Jesse from my years at Calvin.

Callie wrote about our weekend much more eloquently than I can, so I'm including a couple quotes of hers here... "So we take the girls we have, the girls we once were, and the girls we are now, and we walk them around campus."

"We show them the law quad and they call it Hogwarts, and we whisper, “Yeah,” and everyone’s quiet looking at these buildings like cathedrals and standing in a cloud from the snow that’s melting upward and breathing in the battle Spring and Winter are having with each other."

We did later learn from our friends who went to UM Law that the law library was the inspiration for the Great Hall in Hogwarts. Or maybe that's just what every law library across the country says... (Doesn't this picture make you miss being a student?)

At the Creature Conservancy, where that puma is just waiting to pounce on those girls. Harper looks like she knows it. And, yes, naturally Annika wore those glasses the entire weekend.

There were sloths. Just hanging from the ceiling. No big deal.

 

A shire horse, who was massive, and given away for being the runt...

The porcupines were named Bedhead and Lady Gaga. And we think we need a pet porcupine.

We went to this super cool bookstore with a real typewriter, where everyone can just add a line to a story. (We think we need an old typewriter now too.)

There's something about sitting in a bookstore, when little independent bookstores don't seem to exist much anymore.

We had fun. Lots of it. We went to lots of places, saw lots of things. But this is one of my favorite pictures from the weekend, because this is one of my favorite things. Sitting around and telling stories, continuing the twenty-four year old conversation.

"A friend who knows you before you were a “Mrs.,” before you were a mama, before you used words like “vocation,” and “time management” comes to visit, and it’s not that all these titles and concerns go away, but who you used to be, a laughing girl, a bit of a careless, reckless girl, wakes up. And well, she joins the conversation."

By the way, I'm going to recommend a book to you. Callie just got it published and it's amazing. 

Here is a review from the back of the book: 

"This is a book about being a teacher, and about being a mother, and, in its way, about being a writer. But it is most fully a depiction of living with a work of literature, about the conversations literature can spark and the memories literature can hold and reconfigure. The acknowledgments suggest that writing this book helped Callie Feyen remember why she loved teaching. Reading it made me remember why I love to read." —Lauren Winner, bestselling author and Associate Professor, Duke Divinity School 

It's available on Amazon.

What it looks like as the pilot lets your kids sit in his seat and push all the buttons. Almost all the buttons. "You can do anything you want as long as you don't touch these three." Did he not read Genesis? Does he not know how that's going to end?

And you start to get really nervous when your five year old, who just left said cockpit, takes a keen interest in the safety instructions.... Like she knows something you don't know.

Naomi was super psyched to get tickets to hear Dr. Mae Jemison speak at the University of Colorado. Her claim to fame is that she was the first woman of color in space (in addition to being a physician).

Because that's not enough to accomplish in a lifetime, she's now heading up the Pentagon funded 100 Year Starship, an organization with a goal to create an avenue for interstellar travel within a hundred years. Certainly some of the talk was over her head, but it was so cool to see the admiration in Naomi's eyes to just share a room with one of her heroes.