Wrapping up 2013

It has been a wonderful final month of the year. The first week of December came with an ice storm. When that happens here in Dallas, everyone just stops everything until it warms up and melts. That meant that Jarom got to work from home and we got to spend about 4 days sitting around the house together. The kids seemed to enjoy the ice in 10 minute spurts, so Lix would bundle them up, they would head outside and slide around the yard for a bit, perhaps knock down some icicles or something, and then come back inside to crawl under a blanket and watch a show. Fortunately nothing on the house was damaged and nobody wrecked a car during the freeze. After a long week of painfully slow commutes and slush on all the roads our wonderful Dallas weather returned and we saw some days back up in the 60’s, just in time for the arrival of Jarom’s parents.

 Brrrrr.....

 When it is too cold to go outside you pretend to be afraid of Mitch on the stairs 

and turn pantry doors into snowmen

Bruce and Nancy came for a 12-day stay that would be split between our house and Nate’s. Nancy had been here once for Callie’s birthday, but this would be Bruce’s first visit. The day they arrived was lovely, so they grabbed some dinner and headed out to the park to enjoy the sun and let the kids swing and play. That became the theme for the next few weeks. Grab some food and go somewhere so the kids can play. It was great. Grandma took the kids to see Frozen, everyone went to see ICE at the Gaylord hotel, the Moms got to go shopping together, some golf was played, there was bowling, Alixa and some recruits did a great job singing in the ward Christmas program, BYU lost their bowl game, the zoo was visited, the adults had a nice dinner out with no kids, Jarom and Nate avenged an early season loss in their rec league, and somewhere in the middle of all that we managed to celebrate Christmas.

 Enjoying the 9 degree temps at ICE

It was wonderful to have grandparents around to play with the kids and spoil them. Christmas was mostly sponsored by Grandma and Grandpa. Bo got lots of Planes gear, from the movie to toy airplanes to pajamas. Jenna got a new pillow pet, because she has been sleeping on Pete for almost 4 years and he is starting to look his age. So now she has a unicorn named Violet. Emily got to chew on some wrapping paper and found some stacking blocks and rings underneath it eventually. Alixa got a few house cleanings and Jarom got a new set of golf clubs. And the entire family is getting a trip to Disney World at the beginning of February. The kids have paper chains that they can use to count down the days. In terms of presents, it was a wonderful Christmas.

 Emmy is pretty much crawling now, although not very quickly. And Bo wants a puppy. Great.

Enjoying the beautiful weather

 Experiencing Build-a-Bear for the first time

A few days after Christmas Alixa got a bonus present. She has been asking for a new ceiling fan in the family room for a long time now, but Jarom has dodged her requests. But in an ill-fated (or not, depending on your perspective) attempt to change the bulbs in the old light Nancy managed to short out the fan, thus requiring a new one to be purchased. It is now bought and installed, and Jenna commented this morning on just how beautiful the new fan is. I even got into the Christmas spirit by sparing the life of MousySkunk, the friendly black and white rat that Jarom tried to feed me. After letting him hang out for a day he let him go outside, where he will have to take his chances with the hawks.

 Old people and less old people, doing fun things

 Grandma and Grandpa did some leaf bagging while they were here. It was a wonderful favor, and a much bigger job than they thought it would be when they started it.

  

But it isn’t all good news around here. Alixa ended her fantasy football season by losing to Jarom in the playoffs in both of their leagues. Jarom followed that by losing in the finals in both of the leagues, to Abe and Bruce. He did get to try his new golf clubs, and they are a significant improvement over the old ones. After playing hundreds of rounds with his old clubs and never damaging any of them, he made it all of 18 holes with his new ones before misjudging his follow through and bending his 5-iron on a tree. But tonight he gets to take out his frustrations by playing dodgeball with high school kids. Happy New Year everybody!

Jenna gave her first talk while all her grandparents were at church with her. 

This is obviously not at church, but it is the same talk.

What we are thankful for

Jarom is thankful for a brother who comes up with silly athletically themed ideas. You would think that Jarom would be the one coming up with these ideas himself, but it seems like Nate always proposes them and then Jarom makes them happen. I guess it is a good system. Last year it was the half marathon. This year Nate decided that he would like to play basketball in a local rec league. So Jarom got signed up and put a team together and they have started playing. The first game they played was a seeding game. They were matched up against a team that was noticeably darker in the ‘skin pigment’ category and significantly superior in the ‘ability to dunk a basketball’ category. It was a fun game, but they lost badly, which sent them to the bottom division. That’s probably a good thing. After a disappointing last-minute loss to open their regular season they have run off a couple of solid victories and are having a good time doing it. Alixa even came to watch one of the games and got some mediocre footage of each Winn scoring a basket.

Bo is thankful to be potty trained. We are approaching the two-week mark and he has been amazing. On day 1 he had a couple little dribbles in his awesome new unders, but was able to stop and hold it until he got to the potty. It took a few days before he figured out going #2, but on day 3 he got it and he hasn’t looked back. It was a pretty easy process with Jenna, although there were a few ‘cold bath’ incidents along the way. I don’t want to jinx it too strongly, but it looks like Bo has figured this thing out and will be even easier than Jenna was. He has some awesome sticker charts with all his favorite characters (Lightning McQueen, Mater, Dusty Crophopper, Raphael, and Guido) and he is very aware of the treats that he gets when he successfully uses the bathroom.

Emmy is thankful to not have to share diapers any more. That’s right, our ½ year old is so fat she is using the same size diapers as her 30-pound 2.5 year-old brother. She is also very thankful for visiting family, because it is always nice to have someone new fawning all over your cuteness. The crew celebrated Thanksgiving over at Nate and Kenzie’s, and were joined by Mikah, Mimi, Opa, Grandpa Brig and Grandma Dawnene. That’s a lot of aunts and grandparents to take turns holding a kid that sometimes resembles a wrapped butterball. She is starting to move herself around now. She spends a lot of time sitting up in whatever room Lix and the kids are in, and sometimes you leave the room and come back to find her a few feet away wedged under a piece of furniture. I’m sure she’ll be crawling soon.

Jenna is thankful for an Opa that takes her to see fun movies like Free Birds and Frozen. She has been really into arts and crafts lately. She has done a lot of neat things with her preschool group and loves learning. Mimi bought her an art class a few weeks ago and she painted some pretty cool things. She and Bo have also started to decorate my cage with pictures drawn on post it notes. It started with a picture of a worm (don’t ask me why) and grew to some more abstract images. But I am working on my art appreciation, and it gives me something to look at when things are slow.

Alixa is thankful for a husband that gets yard work done. It usually takes about 6 months longer than she would like, but you can’t have everything, can you? Recently she asked him to trim the trees in the front yard because the branches were too low and were blocking the view of house from the street. So Jarom spent a few hours one Saturday up on the ladder cutting down branches. Then he spent another Saturday cutting up those branches into smaller, manageable pieces. This also gave Alixa a reason to invite some friends over to enjoy a bonfire. For the first time ever, the weather cooperated. It wasn’t raining and it wasn’t hot. It was a chilly evening that was just perfect for sitting around a nice warm fire and roasting some marshmallows. Alixa is also very thankful for the gym. She continues to work very hard at her classes and is still losing weight and looks great. Jarom is going to feel very badly about himself when they go on their cruise at the end of January.

We are all thankful for each other and the wonderful blessings that our family has. We are thankful to be living in Texas and for the great friends that we have made here over the past few years. And I hope that each of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving like we did.

So that’s why Jon and Kate broke up

I’m kidding of course. Everyone knows that the reason Jon left Kate is because she is a crazy, demeaning, controlling, psycho-lady. But even if she was a saint they would have had a tough go at marriage, and sanity. This weekend Alixa signed us up to watch two Combs children, whose ages match up with Bo and Jenna. So for a long weekend we had two sets of twins and a baby. Any of the 5 children measured independently would be fine, but collectively it becomes quite challenging. And it is always a struggle to deal with other people’s children. You learn how to understand and interpret your own, so that even when their words don’t really make sense you know what they are saying. Not the case with someone else’s 2-year old. Much of the weekend was spent asking Reese to repeat herself or trying to get Kyle to translate. And every kid has their annoying quirks, even though you tend to get used to your own kids less-than-ideal behavior. Kyle and Reese are actually really good kids and able to do a lot of things on their own to greater degree than their Winn counterparts. But Reese is amazingly loud, almost like she has earplugs in or is in a very loud dance club and has to yell to be heard. And Kyle seems to have a very strong attachment to making fart noises. A lot of fart noises. But Reese is potty trained, and Kyle tried to make his bed after getting up and getting himself dressed, which was awesome. The weekend was actually pretty fun and the crew did some very entertaining things, but it did test the limits of everyone’s patience. It’s hard enough to be patient with your own kids, who you presumably love. It is even more difficult to do it with other people’s kids, who you probably love less.

 Just some cute pics of Emmy

 All the kids at the doctor getting flu shots/autism

So the name of the game was to fill the weekend with as many things as possible so that we weren’t stuck in the house. Kyle and Reese showed up early on Friday, and Lix promptly took all the kids to the park for a few hours. Then she left them with Jarom (who was working from home) and ran off to have a lunch with some of her buddies. The afternoon brought more troops, as Kenna and Callie showed up for a few hours. There was some time spent outside raking leaves, walking up and down the block, and playing in the back yard. The kids got quesadillas for dinner and Jarom went to Chipotle to get a special treat for Alixa for not killing any children.

Saturday began at 6:30, because as soon as the first kid is up, they are all up. A movie was probably put on, but who can remember at this point? It’s all a blur. Around 9:00 the car was loaded up and everyone headed off to Sharkarosa Wildlife Ranch. It was a great place to spend a few hours with too many kids. They had some black bears, kangaroos, lemurs, and a great petting zoo full of friendly goats and sheep. We got to take a safari ride through horses, camels, pigs, emus, zebras, llamas, and a few other animals. The kids got to ride on a barrel train. We even got to meet an albino monacled cobra. After everyone got their fill of the wildlife we drove to bustling downtown Aubrey for a wonderful lunch at Mom’s diner, which is exactly what you are imagining. When we got back home Lix decided to walk all the big kids over to Warren Park to watch a soccer game and run around some more. It finally got dark and cold, so everyone came back, had some pizza for dinner, and went to bed. The second night did not go as smoothly as the first. Bo had fallen asleep on the way back from Sharkarosa and wasn’t tired, so he was making noise. Reese missed her dad and was screaming about wanting him, so she had to be separated from the rest of the herd. Eventually we got those two to bed, but then Reese woke up screaming around 2am and Lix had to go sleep by her to keep her calm.

 I guess they don't get enough of snakes at home?

 Jarom was growing a beard for Movember. It annoyed him (and Alixa) so it is now gone

  

Sunday morning meant a great pancake breakfast cooked by Lix for everyone. Everyone got ready for church, but there wasn’t ever really a chance that they were going to make it on time. Realistically Jarom and Alixa were only concerned about getting there for Primary/Nursery, so that someone else could watch the kids for a few hours. As soon as Jarom dropped the kids off at their classes and headed off to teach his own he saw Alixa’s face in the window beckoning him. He needed to take Emmy because Alixa’s zipper on her skirt had torn and she needed to run home to change. It was a pretty amusing situation. After Lix made the kids lunch Jarom sent her to her room to take a nap and tried to get the kids to watch a movie. But they couldn’t agree on what to watch. Bo wanted Mulan and Jenna wanted Bolt, and they both tried to get the Comb kids to join their side. We settled on Pocahontas, which didn’t please Bo, so he caused trouble which made Reese cause trouble which made it tough for Lix and Emmy to enjoy their naps. After another late afternoon trip to the park (at least the weather was nice all weekend) they sent Kyle and Reese home.

 The sponsors of the trip, Mimi and Opa

 The prettiest zebra at the park

 This deer had been hit by a car. The lump on the right side of his face is his jaw. He was creepy.

 Yumm, chocolate!

 Here are the kids after the safari park. It is also a metaphor for Jarom and Lix on Sunday.

It was definitely a memorable experience and it is always nice to be able to help out a friend, especially since so many nice people have helped out and watched our kids and had to put up with all of the little annoying things that they do. But it was also very nice to be able to sit down and take a deep breath when it was over. I guess there is a reason why people typically only have one child of each age. And why animals that have litters kick their offspring out so quickly. You can only handle listening to so many arguments between two-year olds before your head explodes.

The most wonderful time of the year

It had been a little while since that storm blew down our fence in the back yard and Bo and Jenna would frequently remind Jarom that it was still broken while sitting at the kitchen table. So a few weeks ago Jarom enlisted the help of his brother Nate to put in some new fence posts and reattach the segments that had come down. Putting stuff up was actually the easy part of the task. The difficult part was digging up the old posts that were set in about 2 feet of concrete. It took several hours of digging to finally get them out. There are still a couple of slats that need to go back up, but at least it is repaired enough to keep the HOA off our backs.

Emmy isn't as excited about this as Bo is 

Sometimes Bo wants an applesauce and nobody is around to help him get it

Our friend and occasional babysitter Kelsie Ogden has started to take up photography so we decided to be her subjects for a school project and get some low cost family pictures at the same time. You may have noticed some of them on the sidebar. At one point during the photoshoot it became apparent that Jarom was really bringing the picture quality down, so he was asked to simply turn around. That way he was still technically in the photo without having the chance to ruin it. Apparently that is his good side.

To complement the new fence and family photos, Jarom decided to get a new job. Well, he didn’t so much decide to get a new job as much as he was forced out of his old one by his jerkface brother. A few months ago Jarom and Nate were working happily side by side as coworkers on the same team. But then their manager left for another position. Nate applied for it and was offered the job. Good for him, but unfortunately Parkland has a corporate policy that prohibits anyone from directly reporting to a family member, which means that Nate’s first act as team manager was to fire Jarom. Bad for Jarom, but it should keep all the other employees in line. They did actually try to figure out a way to keep him around through some convoluted reporting scenario, but HR wouldn’t have any of it. So in the end Jarom got moved to the Health Information Management team, where he will continue working on some of the projects that he is in the middle of and will start to learn some new things as well. Jarom is handling the transition pretty well. Alixa is currently holding a little bit of resentment towards Nate, but that should dissipate over time.

 All set for a long car ride

The trip was worth it for this alone 

And she didn’t have much time to feel bad for herself, because while all this was happening there was a very tragic passing of an old family friend in Atlanta, the man who was Alixa’s bishop while she was growing up. Alixa and her mom decided to make the 12-hour drive to Atlanta for the weekend to attend the funeral. While nobody was happy about the circumstances surrounding the visit, it was nonetheless good to get back and see so many of her friends from the past. They took Bo and Jenna with them, leaving Emily and Jarom. They split the drive into two days because Jarom wasn’t with them and the ladies are sissies when it comes to driving. While in Georgia they got to stay at the Brooks’ house, which is a nice house built in front of an amazing back yard. There is a putting green, sand trap, a big hill, and lots of grass and trees to run around. Jenna and Bo could have stayed there for the rest of the year and still not get tired of it. They were great hosts and we are all very grateful for their kindness and generosity. While in town Lix took the kids to the house she grew up in, and the current owners were even nice enough to let them come in and take a tour. It is no longer pink and there were some other changes, like the removal of the beer that was hidden in the basement ceiling where Alixa’s older brother had his room. She also drove by her high school on the way to the funeral, where she ran into a concrete barrier on the side of the road and blew out a tire. A nice man who was jogging by helped her get the spare on, but she still missed the majority of the service. She got to attend her old ward on Sunday and see lots of familiar faces. On Monday before they packed up the van to head home Alixa dipped her toes into the CrossFit waters at a friend’s gym and loved it. The workout didn’t last very long, but she was sore for a few days after, and has since taken to doing the occasional Workout Of the Day here in Frisco.

 This is where Alixa grew up

 Donna Robbins, one of Alixa's favorite people

 Doing Crossfit with Lindsey

The best part of travelling? Continental breakfasts where you can have as many things as you want

When the plan to go to Atlanta was first hatched, the biggest problem was what to do with Emmy. Jarom would have to work on Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, so some babysitting was needed. And in stepped Christie Halverson, who has been bugging Alixa for months to watch Emmy. The Halversons have some teenage kids, and they seemed to all fall in love with Emmy immediately. She took her baths in the hot tub, enjoyed hanging out in a house nicer than her own, and was only put down when it was time for her to sleep. The original plan was for Jarom to pick her up for the weekend, but when he called to make arrangements they asked if they could just hold on to her. Since Jarom isn’t great with the babysitting anyway, he was happy to oblige, although he did at least head over for some supervised visitation. He ended up picking Emmy up on Monday evening and working from home on Tuesday while he watched her. In his family’s absence he was able to get a few things done around the house. At the top of that list was Alixa’s request that he unclog the drain in her bathroom sink. It has been clogged since we moved in, but Alixa has never been able to muster the courage to deal with it, because it is clogged with other people’s hair and junk. She was wise to ask Jarom to do it while she was away, because it may have been the most disgusting thing he has ever done. He took apart the pipes under the sink, and had to pull/scrape out a whole lot of deteriorating, stinky clumps of hair and unidentifiable goop. But he didn’t throw up, and now the sink drains as it should.

October ended as it always does, with one of our favorite holidays and a bonfire with some friends. As usual here in Dallas on October 31, the weather was very warm during the day and cooled down to just about perfect by trick-or-treating time. This year Jenna went as Merida from Brave, complete with a functional bow and arrows and fire-red super curly hair. She looked perfect. Bo went as one of her little brothers that was transformed into a bear. It was a simple brown sweatsuit and a cute hat with ears. Lix tried to paint his nose, but he had a violent reaction to that. Emmy was a ballerina, although for trick-or-treating purposes she was just a passenger in a stroller. Alixa cut up and sewed a few shirts together and went as a rainbow. Before going out we had hotdogs and chips and roasted marshmallows in the firepit out back to make smores. This is the first year that Bo has really seemed to understand Halloween, and it is a lot of fun to watch. He couldn’t get over how awesome it was that everyone would just give him candy. And as is the case with any cute two-year old, they don’t just give you one candy but tell you to get as much as you want. In about half a block his bag was already too heavy for him to carry. So Jarom helped him out. All night he kept saying to Jarom “It’s such a nice night outside!” and he couldn’t have been more right. After getting more candy than they could ever eat Jenna and Jarom  went through the haunted house that our neighbors set up in their garage each year and then went back home to regift some of their haul to the trick-or-treaters who rang our door.

 Ballerina

 Rainbow

 Merida

 The whole crew

 A little brown bear

The kids got to bed late that night, although that didn’t change the time that Bo woke up and came into Mom and Dad’s room in the morning. He asked for breakfast and was told by Lix that he would have to wait until Jenna got up. He walked away, and Lix assumed he was going into the toy room to play as he usually does. A minute later she started to hear yelling from the kids’ room. “Jenna, wake up!! Jenna, time to wake up!! Wake up, Jenna!!!” She hustled in there and found Bo at the top of the ladder, driving a car on Jenna’s back and yelling at her. Jenna was still asleep. I guess that’s what happens when you tell a little boy that breakfast will be served as soon as his sister is awake. Those two have the most hilarious interactions these days. They are the best of friends, but fight often. They love each other, but try hard to annoy each other as much as they can. Today after church they were playing in the other room while Jarom and Alixa sat at the kitchen table. Both parents’ heads perked up when they heard this exchange, and they just looked at each other and laughed.

Bo: Jenna Marie, you put this headband on right now!

Jenna: You’re not my dad, you can’t tell me what to do!

It went on for a few minutes, but was just more of the same. Mostly it was funny that Bo middle-named Jenna. It sure isn’t dull having these three hoodlums around here and watching them grow up. 

 Carving pumpkins (unsuccessfully) and eating apples (even less successfully)