Whittling Chip

On Tuesday, January 30th, Landon earned his Whittling Chip in Cub Scouts. This means he has learned to safely use a pocket knife and is allowed to bring it to Cub Scout events.

He LOVED finally being able to have a pocket knife. Oh the perks of being a Cub Scout!

Family Fun

Without all of the obligations that we have with the kids' sports in the fall and spring, winter gives us time on Saturdays to just have some good old family fun time. 

One Saturday we spent the morning at our local library to check out books and play in their fun kids area. Jason and Nolan worked hard on this block castle.

It was even big enough to fit around Nolan!!

Later that evening we were all invited to a birthday party at Monkey Joes. This place is not one of my favorites but the kids love it so we usually go when there is a birthday party for someone we know.

Maylie had a grand old time in that crazy jumping place!!

Pinewood Derby 2018

On Friday, January 26th Landon had his second Pinewood Derby race. He had worked the previous two days on his car along with Jason and ended up with a pretty good one!

Here are the little kids ready to start watching the action!

After a while all the littles ended up over here instead!

All the Cub Scouts were up on the stage, watching and cheering their cars on...

All of the boys did a great job and there were some pretty impressive looking cars on the track that night. I think this is the most exciting event of the whole year for these boys!

They had four cars that dominated the whole night and Landon's was one of them. They had a race off among these four cars and Landon came in 2nd place. He almost came in 1st though (they actually didn't record one of the final races where he came in first and when they redid the race, his car came in last, pushing him from 1st place to 2nd place.) This was a bit disappointing in the moment, but he was super excited about earning a trophy and is even more motivated to earn the 1st place trophy next year!

Go Flaming Fury (that was the name of Landon's car!)

Little Baker!

We had the sister missionaries over for dinner on Sunday, January 14th and Abby tried her hand at making her first lemon meringue pie.

It looked beautiful and was so yummy. Abby loves to bake and try out new creations. She's got quite a talent for it too!

Our Little Elsa!

Almost every morning this little girl has to put on her Elsa dress while I workout in the basement.

She twirls around, dances on a stage (my gym step), and sings in front of the mirror.

It sure is fun to watch!!

Snow tubing!

On Thursday, January 11th, the whole family went snow tubing for the first time at Whitetail Ski Resort, located about 30 minutes from our house. We haven't had any snow so far this winter, but fake snow seemed to work just fine!!

Maylie wasn't allowed on the regular tubing hills but she enjoyed the toddler hills, especially since Jason, Abby and I took turns doing all the work to get her up the hill and then push her back down again.

Abby was so excited when some of her friends from her Paramount days showed up and she had fun tubing down those hills together.

This was Nolan's first time tubing and he LOVED it!!

Doesn't she make a cute little snow bunny?!?!?!

Here is the last run that Jason, Abby, Landon, and Nolan made together before it was time to leave.

On some of the runs, you were allowed to hook up to four tubes together to go down which made it a lot of fun.

Geography Bee

On Wednesday, January 10th, Landon participated in Paramount Elementary's Geography Bee. All the 4th and 5th grade students took a written test in early December and the top 10 scores from both grades were the contestants for the Geography Bee. Landon was one of only three 4th graders who made it in and was pretty nervous on the big day!!

He did really well and was the last 4th grader to get out. He almost made it into the top two which would have earned him a trophy but his answer was "South Korea" instead of "North Korea!"

He did tie for 3rd place overall and he was pretty happy about that!

Way to go Geography whiz!!

Landon's Projects

Landon worked on some chain reaction projects at Scouts on Tuesday night and then immediately set to work on creating some of his own designs at home. Some of them worked out pretty well, some of them didn't!

But he had fun exercising his brain powers and problem-solving skills in the process!

Meet Your Teacher Breakfast

On Saturday, January 6th, our ward held their annual "Meet Your Teacher" breakfast for all the Primary kids and their new teachers for this year. This was our one and only year with all four of our kids in Primary!!

Abby is in Valiant 11 with Sister Planer which she was pretty excited about. She is counting down the days until she turns 12 in February thought and gets to start going to Young Womens!

Landon is in Valiant 9 with Sister Waltz who is also his Bear Den Leader and he just adores her!

Nolan is in CTR 6 with Sister Trinidad. She helped him get some breakfast during the activity!

And our little Maylie started Primary this year, becoming one of the new Sunbeams with Sister Griffin. I can't believe she is old enough to be in Primary already!!

Here's to a great year of Primary for our children!

Our New Year's Eve Adventure

You may be wondering why the only picture I have from New Year's Eve is of our dog, Cooper but he was what made New Year's Eve 2017 so memorable!

We had invited another family over for New Year's Eve to help ring in the new year with games and yummy food. About 20 minutes before they were scheduled to arrive, we noticed that Cooper was missing. Our other dog Maya was in the house but as we searched the yard (in the dark) and all over the house, we became worried that somehow Cooper had gotten out. Our neighbors were setting off fireworks already which had really spooked both dogs so maybe Cooper had tried to get away. Jason took Abby and drove all over our neighborhood looking for Cooper, but to no avail. Our friends came over and I was trying to play a good host but was worried about our crazy dog. I posted a notice in our neighborhood Facebook page that our dog was missing and someone sent over a link to a Facebook page for missing pets called "Lost and Found Furbabies of Washington County, MD." I immediately checked it out and someone had posted about 30 minutes prior about seeing a Lhaso Apso running around outside near an intersection about a mile from our home. I immediately knew this must be Cooper. He had never been outside of our neighborhood before and actually hated being outside but somehow those fireworks spooked him enough to make him run for it. Jason went out driving around again, this time with the other Dad from the family that came over. They searched all the surrounding neighborhoods, but came home empty-handed. It was a very cold night so at this point we thought maybe someone had pulled him into their house for the night and we might have better luck in the morning. Lots of tears were shed and prayers were sent up for our Cooper!

Then around 9 p.m. I got a call from our neighbor. They said they had seen our Facebook message and just couldn't sit at home so they went driving around looking for Cooper. They had spotted him and he almost got hit by a car as he crossed the road right as I was talking to them on the phone! Jason, Abby, and I immediately jumped back in the car and went to join our neighbors in an area about 1.5 miles from our house. At this point we could see a little dog hiding out under a shed right near a busy road. We started calling out "Cooper, Cooper" and when the dog came out from under the shed, we realized it was our dog!! He barked at us from a distance for a while but eventually made his way tentatively over to Abby where she scooped him up and we brought him home.

We were so thankful to our neighbors who had taken the time on a cold New Year's Eve night to go looking for our Cooper. He was so cold and scared when we found him, but he was safe and unharmed and we felt so very blessed. New Year's Eve could have ended so tragically for our family but instead it ended in a miracle!!

We spent the rest of the evening playing games, eating, and having fun with our friends with Cooper right by our sides. Thank goodness for tender mercies from Heaven!