Snippets from the past few months . . .

Joseph and Dan attended the basketball game between BYU and Portland State. It was a tough loss for BYU, but the boys had a great time!

 We love our frequent facetimes and calls from this cute college girl.

 I have continued to ruthlessly clear out stuff. It feels fantastic! This was what I got rid of just from the bookcase in the "homeschool" area. We have a lot of books! I gave many away to friends, sold a few, and gave the rest to charity.

 A friend made a "heavy blanket" years ago for her sensory son and she passed it on to us. Joseph likes the feeling of cuddling up under it.  This is him "reading" scriptures with us one night.

 Dan was in charge of the Yule Ball for our stake the end of January. As always, it was an amazing night for all involved and Dan was the best deejay in the world. Aubrey and I attended the dance to "help" Dan. Really, that meant that we watched and enjoyed the ambience while Dan did all the work. Aubrey missed the cutoff for the dance by one month!

 The deejay was unusually relaxed and found time to waltz with his beautiful almost-16-year-old daughter

 and with me!  (Very blurry picture, but I had to record the moment . . .)

Gas is crazy cheap.  Seriously?  This price was with 20 cents off with my Fred Meyer card, but even the normal price of gas is lower than I remember since before Aubrey was born!

 Joseph had to create a game using math facts for his math class, so we tried it out for FHE a few weeks ago.  We all found that the double digit multiplication and decimal multiplication was harder than we remembered!

 The next day I was able to play some of the games with the kids in the math class. It was fun!

 I really should do an entire post about the things I don't like about getting older, but one of them is the increasingly urgent need I have for reading glasses, especially late in the day or in dim light. And reading scriptures absolutely requires glasses these days. Sigh. It's such a bummer. I hate taking the glasses on and off when I read and try to interact with people sitting more than a foot away from me.

Funny story about my glasses. After I had my eyes examined I was uncharacteristically pressured into buying some glasses from the attached optical shop.  And I was in a hurry and didn't really scrutinize them well. They look very nice, but I didn't realize until picking them up that the earpiece is a woman's leg and high heeled shoe. How bizarre!

 Spirit Day at Aubrey's school - she had to wear as many patterns as possible together.  In the picture you can't see that the tights are also patterned.

 Aubrey helped a leader do all the decorations for New Beginnings, which was mid-February. It looked lovely, but not as lovely as these girls!  And, note Aubrey's new very cute glasses! She has a very light prescription and really only needs them for sometimes seeing the board in class, but she likes them and likes the preciseness of the vision correction, so she wears them most of the time!