Our Blog is coming out of hibernation

My New Year's resolution was to blog once a week. For those of you who noticed that it is the second week of the year, and this is the first blog, stop sniggering.

Here is a rundown of our past week+:

We spent the first day of the New Year at Grandma and Grandpa Willmore's house at their Christmas party. Elliot and the boys watched a lot of football. Audrey and Dad ate a lot of cake. Cecily played with cousins and Clara took a little nap. Mom made some black eyed peas for everyone to eat at the lunch for good luck in the new year, but there weren't a lot of takers. No one wants to be lucky this year!

I got a really bad head cold that night and stayed home from church the next day.

Then the school week started off for all of the kids. Cecily was really excited to go back and brought her binoculars to show and tell. Audrey and Elliot weren't so excited.

On Thursday night, Three Kings Day!, we had my friends Taira and Esthela and their families come over. We had dinner and Taira and Esthela looked through my Spanish class materials and we had a Rosca. Esthela's two sons got the babies that were in the Rosca, so they are going to make us dinner the first week in February. We fixed ham and funeral potatoes for dinner and Taira and Brandon, who had come with Esthela's sons, were relieved to hear that funeral potatoes were called such because they are often served at funerals, not because of anything that happens after you eat the potatoes....

Clara has been picking up some new tricks. She's learned how to go down the stairs, and now she likes it a lot more than going up the stairs. If she is trying to get upstairs, the routine is usually to go halfway up, slide down, go up again, slide down, and THEN make it all the way up the stairs. She is blowing kisses and playing peek-a-boo with her hands. She also points to her toes and says something that sounds like 'toes'. She still doesn't have any more hair, though.

Cecily gave a talk in church today. She showed letters and cards that she'd gotten from grandparents and cousins and then showed the scriptures and Conference report and said that even though Heavenly Father doesn't send us card to tell us he loves us, he does send the scriptures. She had to stay home on Friday from school because her stomach was hurting. At 10:30, though, she started feeling better and the rest of the day was miserable for her because I told her she couldn't go back to school. The day wasn't much better for me...

Here's Cecily wearing what she calls her, "dazzling coat of many colors." My Grandma Farrer made it for me when I was her age, I think- either Grandma or Mommy.

Elliot was upset this week because one of his classes acted up for a substitute (he wasn't one of them, he points out) and when the teacher came back, she was really upset. Elliot said he'd never seen a grownup so angry in person. She made them all write a 4 page essay on being good. To top it off, Elliot was chewing gum on the day the teacher came back. Wrong place at the wrong time, buddy.

Audrey's trying to get over a cold. She's been sniffling a lot and taking long baths.