January

I took a walk this morning and Caleb fell asleep (much to my surprise), so I'm blogging solo today. It's a little easier without having to jump up every few seconds to rescue Caleb from some situation he's gotten himself into, or rescuing some item from Caleb. That kid is fast.

Some pictures from our family fun day on Sunday. We decided to head to a nearby state park to walk on the lake. There were quite a few ice fishers out--there were at least 15 shelters, and pretty much each shelter had at least two people in it. Here's one of the abandoned holes. It looked like the ice was about 8 inches deep. I told Scott I wanted to take a picture of the boys standing in front of the dam sign (whenever I say that, I think back to the time we were driving around Taylor's Falls, MN with Scott's family, looking for the road to the dam, and my mother in law said, "so where is this dam thing?" Sooo funny. We got her a dam shirt when we went to the dam store. I don't know if she still has it). I meant the diamond shaped DAM sign that you can see from the water. Oh well.Yes, Cody is licking the sign, but this is better than the other one where for some reason Logan put his hands in front of his face right as I pushed the button. I wonder if I can cut Cody out of that other picture and paste him into this one...

Here are Cody and Logan checking out the rushing water. It seemed like there was more water going over the dam yesterday than there usually is during the summer. I had visions of all of the water draining out from under the ice, leaving just an 8 inch shell of ice above.

Here are Daddy and Caleb wondering if there are any fish down there.

After walking on the lake and checking out the dam, we headed over to do some extreme sledding. It's a pretty steep hill there in the state park, and since it's been very cold, but with little snow fall, the snow was packed and slick. Very fast. I hear the boys were doing some sort of curvy track sledding after Caleb and I left to get warm in the truck, but once again we were having camera issues, so no pictures or video. I guess we'll just have to go do it again sometime.

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We're going to Florida on a real vacation and our flight times keep changing. As of Saturday, we were leaving Daytona to come home after our trip at 5:30 in the morning! Now we were a little concerned about our tight connections, and the new flight times ease our worries, but that is not quite what we had in mind.

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I'm happy to report that the credit showed up for that cute little penguin ornament. Whew. What a relief to be done with that mess... Remind me to order personlized things from that particular company blank.
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In the middle...

You may remember me talking in a previous post about middle children, how I can see why they might have issues. I've been thinking about that more, probably because my husband accused me of being a middle child myself. (While it is technically true that I am a middle child, I have always considered myself to be a youngest, and my younger brother to be an only, since he was 13 years younger than me. All those birth order books say that if there's more than about 5 years between kids, the birth order thing starts over).

So, you know how when you're with 2 friends, everyone wants to be in the middle, and it's an honor, really, to be in the middle, because that means that two people want to be near you: you get to sit or stand or whatever next to everyone. Our middle child, simply by virtue of being born not first or last, gets his wall portrait hung in the middle and higher than the others. It really looks like a place of honor. Our middle child gets to do things at a younger age than our older child did. And you know it seems like everyone gets along with the middle child--he can play with the oldest or the youngest, because he's halfway in-between. The birth order people say that middle children are often peacemakers (I don't see this happening with our middle child, but perhaps he'll mature into it).

So it's not all bad, being the middle child, and it's not all sweetness and light being the oldest or the youngest, either. This year I almost bought those ornaments for my kids. You know the ones: they say "oldest child", "middle child", and "youngest child", and they all say "Mom's favorite" underneath. Because they are all my favorite.