January

Around the first of the year, I set an intention to slow down. The universe got a nice little chuckle out of that and said, "Um, no." Home life went at its usual pace, and admittedly, there's only so much room to slow down when people still need to eat daily and occasionally get clean and wear clean clothes. But everything else sped up. A lot. Despite the madness, we still had a lot of fun, and everyone managed to stay relatively healthy. Phew.

So here's a little from our January:

Our passes to the The Children's Museum of Wilmington were expiring, so we squeezed in one last visit.

The black light reduced Mike to nothing but a pair of socks.

We made it to the 100th day of kindergarten! Where substantially more effort MAY have been invested in "family projects" for her older siblings, youngest child was reduced to wearing a last minute outfit made from a hand-me-down shirt from her brothers and leftover puffy paints from her sister's 9th birthday. Thankfully, someone didn't seem to mind.

We saw ice! Outside! And not melting in a drink. The kids deemed this photo-worthy and checked on the frozen drip at the end of the down spout every time they went outside for 48 hours.

Someone had a birthday. She insisted on making her own cupcakes. I was only allowed to turn on the mixer, use the oven, and fill her piping bag with icing.

For Natalia's birthday, in lieu of having a party, she asked to go to Raleigh to go to Marbles Kids Museum and stay in a hotel with a pool. I spent about 13 second debating before realizing that going out of town with 6 people was substantially easier (and possibly cheaper) than hosting a birthday party for a six-year-old.

So January may not have gone as planned (actually, I never had a plan - maybe that was the problem), but at least when it came to my family, I enjoyed the ride. However your year is going, I hope you are enjoying it too!