Hi there! Here we are, at the end of 2018, after a year filled with my failing to blog regularly AT ALL. There's no way to actually catch up, but i WILL attempt to sum up the past year as best i can.
January: Katrina and i started making sky scarves, whereby we did one row of crochet every day, to match the color of the sky. We did pretty well, too, for half of the year, then did sort of okay for a couple of months, and then fell into "Crap...weeks have gone by and we haven't done anything...." So the second half of the scarf will not be as accurate as the first half, but it's honestly a pretty accurate representation of us.
My last living grandparent, my dad's dad, died on the 16th. It wasn't shocking, and he was 98, but it was still sad. His funeral happened to be on the same weekend that Katrina, Zane, and i were at Winter Camp with the youth group from church, but it also happened to be not terribly far away from the camp we were at, so we dashed up there for the funeral, which was kind of a weird way to do the funeral. There just wasn't as much time to think about it as i'd normally have before and afterwards. So that was...good? Bad?
February: We celebrated Katrina's 14th (!) birthday and Juanito's 46th. (How is everyone getting so old around here?!) Everyone got very tired of the cold and the snow and winter in general.
March: We celebrated Houston's 16th (!!) birthday. Katrina got her letter of acceptance into City. She also received the "Be Nice" award, because she is super nice. Houston finished building his computer made of old random computer scraps and presented it at the school's ... thing. One of the other students' project was learning how to do henna, and Katrina decided that that was the best thing ever, and she's been drawing henna-ish designs on herself ever since.
April: We celebrated Easter with the family at my parents' house. Spring break happened, and we went nowhere, but we did do a few fun things in town, including Meijer Gardens for the butterflies and the Public Museum for the Unicorns and Dragons.
May: I had my birthday and turned super old. Katrina and i (with a bit of help from others) painted the bathroom. It hadn't been painted since we painted it when we first moved in 19 years ago, and while i liked the yellow, i love the new color. Beth and i went to see U2 in Chicago, and they were amazing (as always) and it was a super fun weekend. We spent Memorial Day at my grandpa's beach, wanting to use it as much as possible before it was no longer ours to use.
June: Katrina graduated from 8th grade, which was fantastic but also super sad for her. She left behind the only school she'd ever known, along with almost all of her friends that she'd had there, some of them friends since kindergarten. The kids spent the first few weeks of summer vacation collapsed around the house, sleeping and reading and generally doing nothing much. There were days i'd come home from work at 2:00 and would have to wake Houston up.
July: My brother Rick's family came to visit for the first week, and during that week, we spent a few days at my grandparents' beach - the last days we'd ever spend there, since it stopped being "ours" near the end of July. When we weren't at the beach that week, we were all together playing cards or hanging out or shooting off fireworks.
We went to Pittsburgh for a week to spend time with our friends Travis and Brooke, who just moved there from New Zealand, and with with Karen and Amiya, who we hadn't really spent more than a few hours with since Amiya was a tiny baby.
August: We celebrated Zane's 12th birthday. Juanito's sister Phoebe and her husband Dan came to visit us for a week, along with Juanito's mother, who came for a few days. It was fun to get to spend time with Dan and Phoebe especially, because we don't get to see them much, what with them living in England and all. The kids really enjoyed getting to know their aunt and uncle better.
School started at the end of August. Katrina started high school, and somehow managed to get what i am pretty sure are the very worst teachers at City. She loves the people, but this year has not convinced her to like the school. She immediately (like, the first day) started getting loads of homework, and it has not abated one bit. Houston is a junior now, which is insane. And Zane is in 7th grade.
September: We went camping for a weekend with my parents, which was really fun except for the thirty billion mosquitoes that decided to all come out that very weekend. (It was seriously the most mosquito-y weekend of the entire year. Even people who weren't camping were exclaiming over it.)
The city came and cut down our huge, beautiful maple tree in our front yard for absolutely no reason and with no warning, and yes, i'm still a little bit bitter about that. We now have a stump, just to sit there and remind us of the tree that we used to have.
And then ArtPrize started and that was pretty much the rest of September and some of October.
October: Our cute little Kia Rio, which Juanito and i bought new back when i was pregnant with Houston, finally died completely. Juanito declared it unfixable. We were all very sad to see it go, and it was especially sad that, since it didn't run, we sold it to the junk yard, where it would just be getting smashed to bits.
Juanito, Katrina, and Houston were zombies for the zombie dash again, along with a group of friends. It was freezing and rainy, and so Zane and i were smart and stayed home and watched a movie instead, where it was warm and dry.
Halloween happened, and this year our kids were a weird horse guy (Houston), the Greatest Showman (Katrina), and a glowing stick man (Zane).
November: The second Fantastic Beasts movie came out, and we had a giant party at our house before we all went to watch the movie. Beth and Katrina did nearly all of the planning and creating, and they did a fantastic job - everything was amazing.
My parents were off on a cruise on Thanksgiving, so for the first time ever, we just did our own private Thanksgiving here at our house. It was delicious and quiet and ... kind of nice to have it be so relaxing.
December: We did lots of Christmas-y type things. My brother Rick's family spontaneously decided to come for Christmas, and so we spent the week before Christmas with family. Every day, from Monday to Thursday, we went to a different person's house - Jill, Jim, Jackie, and us - for dinner and to hang out, and then on Friday we went to my parents' house and had an early Christmas party. It was super fun and we loved seeing everyone, and by Saturday, the kids and i just completely collapsed and didn't do a single thing all day.
We opened our own presents on Christmas, and since then, Katrina (who got a ton of new books) has spent every single minute reading, and i have been begging everyone to play a game with me (mostly Ticket to Ride, which we just got and i love). The boys have spent a lot of time on screens so far, which...
