Moving into March Updates, but with some Editorializing and Some Delays

The ironic thing about me staying away from my blog for so long is that I deeply love writing, and I love thinking about my family. This should be a match made in heaven, and it was for years. I don't know what went wrong. Maybe it was that I was finally able to text pictures and videos with family, so I felt connected? I don't know, but I do still care about preserving our family history, so here we go, yet again.

I have accepted a 21 day challenge that starts today to increase my temple attendance and family history work. The first thing I want to do is update my family blog (which was one of my New Year's resolutions), and then I also intend to go to the temple once during the three-week period and visit FamilySearch.org to get a better handle on what temple work and family history have been recorded/need to be recorded.

So, back to last March:

 . . .  and let the irony play on. We got a new computer--a very cool Mac desktop--that won't let me look at most of my pictures by date. So I have hundreds of photos on a USB that are no longer sorted by date, and that means I have to work on this later. For now, here's a little peek at pictures from March:

This caption is "Catching Kayla". I shared it with my students because Kayla's story is incredible. She was diagnosed with MS when she was in high school, and she decided to begin running cross country. She was incredible--and she couldn't feel her legs as she began to race. She had so little control that her coach had to catch her at the end of every race and get ice packs on her legs to help her feel them again. It scared her during each race, but she kept working hard.

Lucy got a Barbie camera for Christmas--so strange. It really is a Barbie doll, but the lens is on her stomach. So here are some of the pictures Lucy took from The end of December to March.

This was our happy and welcome addition to our house in March, thanks to our tax return. We got a used Wurlitzer piano that has been so wonderful. We paid $1,200 for it.

And this was the saddest aspect of 2015. Lucy and Brooklyn got molluscus. We think Lucy got it during swim lessons, and then we discovered that Brooklyn had it in November. We couldn't have the girls take baths together and I had several doctors and neighbors prescribing all kinds of medicine to try to make the moluusca go away. The treatments were so annoying for me: "Apply this at night. Then, 15 minutes later, apply this." Nothing worked. Lucy's skin got more raw and she had hundreds of mollusca. Brooklyn  maxed out at maybe 14. When we switched to Doctor Marshall's office, he recommended a "beetle juice" that created blisters on top of the mollusca. Brooklyn didn't seem to mind the treatments very much, but they created enormous blisters on Lucy. She couldn't walk or sit down, and it was so sad. Now  (in February, 2016), more than a year after Lucy and Brooklyn got mollusca, Brooklyn has one mollusca and Lucy has 4. A doctor identified mollusca on Cason, but it hasn't spread or become significant. We apply a lot of  lotion on all of them, and we don't do anything extreme anymore.

In March, I also said goodbye to my blonde hair and became a brunette again. It was kind of a bummer. I liked all  that  sunshine, but it was too high maintenance for me. 

Definitely a let down to go back to boring brown. Doug likes it, though.

One of my favorite things in my home is when I mop the kitchen and every surface in the kitchen is scrubbed. Ah, what a thing of beauty. 

Yum. . . another thing I love. A full fridge with delicious produce.

This is a flashback to Cason's birthday. We went to the pet store to celebrate, and Cason was entranced by watching a huge dog get its fur trimmed. 

We snuck a trip to Utah in during spring break, probably. 

Isaac got the privilege of sleeping on the couch. 

And the weather was good! We went to the petting zoo at Thanksgiving Point. As I'm writing this in February 2, 2016, I know there's a foot of snow outside. The weather has been so brutal.