A little stress relief

 A BB gun + a work award + a plaque to celebrate a promotion (which didn't include a promised pay raise) = a nice little diversion to take Nate's mind off his broken leg. 

Eagles

These are two of Toby's friends from church.  Both of them just earned their Eagle rank at a Court of Honor a couple weeks ago.  Toby is right behind them.  He earned his Life rank at Christmas time and is now finishing the last few required merit badges and will work on his project.  There is a light at the end of the scouting tunnel.  I'm glad that Toby has such great friends who are good examples for him.  Congratulations to Dallin and Harrison.

Isaac and his junk collection

Since we ar moving, we have been going through all the closets and getting rid of the junk.  Isaac loves junk.  He had 4 or 5 dead RC cars in his closet that I wanted to chuck.  He wanted to keep them.

 As a compromise, he asked if he could take them apart and then throw them away.  Me?  Okay.  I get what I want.

and Isaac is kept busy and out of mischief for...a while anyway.

Then he wanted to keep the tires. 

I am afraid he will one day turn up on Hoarders if I don't keep this in check.

Snow day 2011

They say our winter is probably over here in Austin.  At least we actually got snow this year.  In the 13 winters we've spent here, we've only had snow maybe 4 or 5 times.   The kids are out early in the morning, in whatever cold weather gear they can find, and play until it melts away.  With the golf course in our backyard, we usually end up with a few extra friends to sled or make snowmen or have snowball fights. 

I'm glad that I didn't leave all our gear in Utah like I thought of doing at Christmas time.  (It's such a pain to pack that much gear across the country.)  They kids had a great day.  It was really really cold for Texas:  in the single digits at night with the wind chill.  We had rolling power outages across Texas to help with the overload.  A few of our pipes froze.  We enjoyed many fires in our fireplace.

But I'm ready for some springtime.  It's supposed to be back in the 80's by Monday..  Thank goodness.  I'm ready for sunshine, flowers, and green grass.