Time To Play Catch-up... (foreseen as a reoccurring theme)

Wow, has the time flown by… It’s been almost 2 months since we did our last (first post). We’ll try to catch up without boring anyone out of their minds.

This year we spent Thanksgiving up at the Lake with Darren’s family. It was fun, the cousins enjoyed playing together. It isn’t too often that all of Darren’s family is able to get together at the same time, maybe once every 3 months or so.

Black Friday- Darren went to Walmart to try and get a new Kitchen Aid mixer, our first one lost its first gear and they were selling them for $125 regularly priced $250+. He showed up 30 minutes before the doors opened and got in line at the back of the building. It took about 15 minutes to get in once the doors opened. He went to the appliance section and couldn’t find the mixer so he asked an employee who didn’t know where they were. Another employee was helping someone else find them and was going to take them to the spot but the lady wanted to go back and get a friend. The employee ended up leading Darren to the location, and he ended up getting the last one. (He feels somewhat guilty every time he shares the story.

In the middle of December we went through about 2 weeks of snow fall and it was probably the most snow to fall in the region in 15-20 yrs. School was cancelled or delayed and since Dean has AM kindergarten, he missed quite a few days leading up to the Christmas Break.

We spent the Saturday before Christmas up at the lake with Darren’s family and had a blast. His brother’s brought up Rockband 2 and they played that for a few hours. The evening was cut short because another snow storm started and everyone needed to head home.

Christmas eve we did our traditional, Christmas story reading from the Bible and acted it out with the nativity set. The boys got to open a present and get new pajamas.

Christmas day- we spent the morning at home and then headed up to Mount Vernon to spend the evening and next day with Mary’s family.

Mary’s brother, Robbie, had his missionary farewell talk the last Sunday of December and he did a great job. He is going to the Mesa, Arizona mission. He entered the MTC on January 7th and is expected to head to Arizona on the 26th.

New Year’s Eve, Mary’s family came over to celebrate Mary’s birthday and ring in the New Year. We ended up getting Rockband 2 for our family and we played it for about 4 hours, trying to unlock all the songs, we only got half way through…

January 4th we said good-bye to Robbie as he left for the MTC after sacrament meeting. We are confident that he will make a great missionary. Being there for his setting apart really brought back many mission related moments and I was glad I was able to be there.

Recent flooding in western Washington has really impacted Darren’s commute to work. With the flooding in Carnation, Duvall, & Snohomish all the traffic came through Monroe and down HWY 522 which led to a lot of traffic.

Mary is the 2nd councilor in the young women’s organization and she really enjoys having some girls to be around and teach, they seem to pay more attention than the boys (including Darren). J

Now to update you on the boys…

Dean is back to school after about 4 weeks of either vacation or school cancellations/delays. He is getting back into the swing of things and the daily routine is once again getting established. He really enjoys playing with his friends at recess and his friends in his class have created the “buddy table”. His Kindergarten class doesn’t have assigned seats, you can chose a different one every day. He and his friends pick a table to sit at and if one of the buddies doesn’t have a seat, they move to another table. It is fun to watch Dean interact with one of his best friends, Bo… they are always looking out for each other and have a lot of fun together.

Evan really likes to follow his big brother around and play with him and he misses Dean when he is at school. Evan is warming up to Owen, for the first month or so, he wasn’t so sure about having a little brother but now he likes to give him hugs at night before he goes to bed.

Owen, is growing, he just had a well-child checkup and got a few shots. He is still eating really frequently, about every 2-3 hours and doesn’t sleep very well. Yesterday was probably the first day in a long time that he really didn’t cry from gas pains and was happy all day. We are trying to figure out if he may have an allergy to something…

Darren is staying busy with work at Microsoft. The snow really affected some of his project’s schedules but things seemed to all work out, it just took a little more effort and time to manage.