Djanuary

(I don't know why I called it Djanuary. But I was thinking about books my dad read us when we were little. And one of them was "Djingo Django" by Sid Fleischman. Maybe I was remembering that.)

January usually seems so LONG! And maybe it did this year too. I really can't remember, now that we're halfway through February and I'm looking back on it. Now it seems like it flew by! Here is a very assorted assortment of pictures. First, some of the snowflakes which we are all so busily working on in the picture above. (We did them during the week after Christmas this year, and it was fun.)

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Our New Year's Feast was a New Year's Eve Feast this year, due to Abe's work schedule, and it was a great success. Lots of helpers preparing lots of good food.

Filling wontons

Watching New Year's Eve fireworks from the edge of the Daybreak hill

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Ice cream at Macey's, celebrating something. But what? Oh yes—Ziggy's first day of piano lessons (Daisy is teaching him!) and the girls' and Teddy's first day of choir! Our schedule is interesting and different this year. We are back in the children's choir for the first time since 2020. It is the 40th Anniversary of Miss Asay's choir and it felt like the right thing to do. And our dear, beloved, wonderful piano teacher (my cousin Heidi) closed her studio! Oh, that was a blow. I felt so despairing over it. But we found the girls another teacher closer to us, and we like her so far, and Daisy is teaching Teddy and Ziggy and so far it is working remarkably well! And while the older kids are at choir I take the three littles on a "field trip," which has been amazing. I love it and they love it. They ask me every day, "is it Tuesday? Is it our field trip day?" When I'm with just the three of them, I feel I've gone back in time and am a young mom again! (Except that all the other young moms we see at the museums seem ages younger than me. Eons younger. Like they could be my daughters. So the illusion does not hold. It's okay, because I would not want to trade places with them! [Except maybe for their babies…I wish I had a few babies.])

Malachi looks utterly dejected about having this Dole Whip

Here is Zig-Vadar having the aforementioned piano lesson

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Family Home Evening foosball tournament! Very intense.

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Goldie's first time at the temple! Malachi baptized all his sisters and that was really fun to watch.

Abe and Seb didn't come to the temple, but we took pity on them and let them come to our celebratory lunch afterwards.

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Seb swallowing Clementine into a blanket-hug

Unauthorized digging into the Halloween Costume box (cute enough to document even though they were roundly scolded—I hate it when the contents of that box get all spread over the furnace room😡)

Clementine's cute brown eyes

A huge pile of blankets and stuffed animals and nothing else…or is there something else?

Aha!

Ziggy the day after we watched "Wall-E" for Family Home Evening

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Seb gave Sam and me a 3-D puzzle of the Château Frontenac for Christmas. I have never done a 3-D puzzle before and thought it would be hard! But it wasn't terribly hard, with everyone working on it. It was really quite fun. We got it done in one (admittedly very late) night. And I love the way the finished building looks!

It's so detailed, even getting all the inner courtyards and buildings right. I didn't know about the little garden area shown in the picture above! It's up above the ground level so I guess I just never saw it!

But look how similar this part looks to the real thing! Here is the courtyard where you drive in for valet parking, and where you can enter the revolving doors to go in for the restaurant. Above is the puzzle. And these two pictures below are of the real place!

Puzzle again. :)

Revolving doors

Archway to the outer street

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Another fun thing we did during the post-Christmas week: go to the Ballet West "Nutcracker"! It was really fun to take the girls, and we even got to talk to Elder and Sister Uchtdorf while we were eating at City Creek food court before the ballet! Sister Uchtdorf complimented Junie's gloves and we talked for a few minutes about the ballet. ("Such beautiful music," said Elder Uchtdorf.) It was so fun to meet them!

The ballet was good too but the Uchtdorfs were the real highlight of the day. :)

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Our beloved Sister Veenker came home from her mission in Quebec! We went to her homecoming talk and to her house afterwards. It was so wonderful to see her again and meet her parents!

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Clementine dresses EVERYONE in dresses these days (and then dresses herself to match, if possible)

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A pretty evening at Grandma and Grandpa Nielson's house

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Relief Society service project making wigs for kids with cancer. We just added the hair. Later people will come and braid it and add flowers etc. to make them look like Elsa or Ariel or Rapunzel or other characters. It was fun! Daisy and I want to start making the beanies too.

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Zig's latest obsession is languages, ALL languages. He just loves them! He asks everyone we meet if they speak any languages and always wants to hear some words they know. He pores over this Atlas we have that lists all the world languages and flags. He wants to see samples of written languages, especially "weird ones" like Chinese or Arabic or Russian or Hindi. He says he wants to beat the record (once held by our primary president's nephew, apparently, as Zig learned while he was chatting with Sister Petersen about his favorite topic) for learning to speak the most languages. He can tell the difference between written Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and doesn't hesitate to correct his brothers and sisters when they are wrong about it. :) He's so funny and cute!

Zig and his pet huskies

Gus and his new huge Macaw which we found and couldn't not get at Walmart—and whom he has named, oddly, "Ma" (pronounced "muh," as in "Muh-caw")

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Goldie got her first pair of pointe shoes! She would have gotten them last year, but we were in Quebec, so she was relieved to still be on track to get them now that we're back! Daisy and Junie tell me proudly that Goldie has "very strong ankles" and is the most beautiful-looking pointe dancer in her class! :)