Hicks catch up

I've been waiting to post at a time when I could add pictures. However, that doesn't seem to be happening so I'm just going to write down a few things and post pictures later.

December was fairly busy for us. Charlie finished his masters program (finally!) and I finished up my semester. I lost my 4.0 finally in my financial management class (of all classes to lose it in). I got an A- in that class so my GPA is now a 3.98. I know, how terrible, right? Charlie keeps telling me it's not a big deal, but I have to admit I was pretty proud of my 4.0 and that I'd been able to keep one for so long. Oh well, all good things come to an end so they say. The kids had a ton of holiday concerts. They all did well. I have video clips of a few of them, but I probably won't post those. Video takes so long to upload. We had a nice quiet Christmas as a family. Then Mom came for dinner along with Charlie's sister, Jocelyn and her family. It was very nice. I will post pictures of Christmas morning later. We didn't do anything special on Christmas Eve. I didn't even remember about the puppets. I felt bad after I saw Jana's cute family pictures doing the puppet show. Oh well. We always play "find the pickle" on Christmas morning, but this year Charlie put a bit of a twist to it. He did a scavenger hunt to find the pickle. The kids worked the clues out together and had a blast. Chelsea was the first one to actually lay hands on it though so she got to open a gift first. We did a small Christmas this year. Initially because of our upcoming Utah trip, but then we ended up buying the new van and so really couldn't afford big anyway. It worked out good that we had already warned the kids not to expect a big Christmas. They loved what they got though, and seemed to enjoy themselves despite it being small. We got each kid one big gift and then a few smaller gifts. Lexi got a guitar, Merrit got a board game called Munchkin Quest, Makayla got a used Nintendo DSi (which we only helped her buy since she had been saving up for one), Chelsea got a night in a hotel room with a pool (she had asked for this to share it with the family and we thought it would be good to use while we were in WV anyway), Jaxson got a remote control car.

We went to WV over the new year. We hadn't intended to, but Sabrina announced at Thanksgiving that she was going to schedule her son's baptism for the 31st. So we thought we should make the effort to go. And it is an effort when you have as many animals as we do to find someone to look after for you. But we found (or suckered) a nice young man from our ward who came and fed our animals, including our little baby goat who still gets fed three times a day. He was such a good sport about making the time to help. We really owe him! The trip was fun and just the right length. There were 25 people smashed into Charlie's parents' house. Their house is probably about the size of Mom and Dad's, maybe a bit bigger but not much. So you can imagine what it was like. Fortunately, the days were on the warmer side so the kids were able to play outside a lot. It was nice to have that one night away. We did it Friday night and went up to Pittsburgh. We found a really good deal online for a 2 room suite (which fit us perfectly) and there was a children's museum not far from there to boot. So we went swimming Friday night and Saturday morning and went to the museum for a couple of hours before going to the baptism that afternoon. The Pittsburgh trip broke up the weekend very nicely. I had never been to Pittsburgh either. Although, I don't know that I'm in a rush to go back. The roads are set up not very nicely. We drove home Monday morning, on the 2nd. The roads were snow covered and very slick. We almost slid off the side of the road on a very steep incline (because Charlie's parents live in the mountains). We slowly made our way back to their house and regrouped. We left a little later and by then the roads had been salted and were much easier to drive on. We felt very blessed to have been watched over in such a way.

Now everyone is back to school and not very excited about it. I think we are all looking forward to spring break already. I have two classes again. Both are on Tues and Thur. One is Management Information Systems and the other is management science. I had toyed around with taking one more class. It was an elective that the school doesn't always offer but I have to have it at some point. I'm glad now that I decided against it because the two classes I have appear to be on the difficult side.

Lexi and I have started a challenge together. We are working on developing healthier habits and so are challenging each other to see who can do the best in three different catagories: exercising at least 30 min a day Mon through Fri; drinking 8 cups of water daily Mon thru Fri; going to bed at 10 pm daily Mon thru Fri. So far neither of us have had a perfect day and she is actually beating me overall so it should be interesting to see how things end up. We are going to try to go through the end of June to make it 6 month from now, but it might be hard once school gets out and we are off to Utah. We'll just have to play it by ear. So we hope that you all will cheer us on.

I have also decided that my kids need to start learning how to cook. For a long time now each of our family members has been assigned a day of the week for which they are to offer all the family prayers during. Monday is Lexi, Merrit is Tues, Makayla is Wed, etc... So I've decided that those are the days that each child will cook dinner, whatever they want. So I made up a calendar so they could tell me what they are fixing and when, and we wrote it on the calendar. That way I know what I have to shop for. They are pretty excited to do it and I'm excited to teach them so hopefully one day they will be able to make dinner more often than me (without my help). The only rules are that no one can make the same thing as someone else in the same week, you can't make the same thing yourself twice in a row and you have to include at least one vegetable with your meal (but veggies can be repeated as many times as wanted throughout the week). They were good with that. The first couple of meals they have picked are all easy ones like macaroni and cheese, ramon noodles and pancakes, but I hope that as they get more comfortable in the kitchen they will branch out and try different things. Otherwise, we may be eating mac n cheese a lot over the next few months. I'm excited to see where this takes us.

That's about it. Sorry this has been so long. I'll try to post more often so I won't have to write a huge tome next time.