Pictures from January

Well, I haven't loaded pictures from Christmas or anything yet, but here are a few current pictures of the kids. This is them the first Sunday after Christmas that we got to go to church (sick kids over the holidays) and Jacob has been crying (can't remember why). You can't see Lottie's barrette and hair elastic in this picture, but her hair is finally long enough to actually try to do it. She pulls everything out if she isn't distracted by something else.
Here are Jacob and Lottie playing in the laundry basket. This is still one of the kids' all time favorite activities. The boys like to turn them over and crawl around pretending to be turtles.We finally got a snowstorm the first or second week of January. It was only about 6-8 inches, but the kids were so excited to have snow to go out and play in. Grant had a couple of 'snow days' but it was actually for the cold, not the snow.

This was Lottie's first time out in the snow. Last year she was still too little. She's dressed in her cousin Maggie's old snowsuit that's just a hair too small and her cousin Connor's old boots that are a little too big. Here's her reaction to snow.I was shoveling the driveway and Grant wanted me to bury him in the snow so I did. Grant's school has been raising money for new playground equipment and they had a chili feed and carnival at his school a couple weeks ago. Jacob and Lottie were a little too young to really enjoy the crowds so I took Grant and Jared stayed home with the little kids. Grant was excited to get his face painted. He got some prizes for some of the games (threw the football through the tire swing on the first try). That's what he has in his lap. He told the teacher painting faces that he wanted tiger stripes.Nothing like a picnic in January! I took this picture last Friday when it hit 72 in Wichita, breaking the previous record high of 68 degrees. The kids enjoyed it and we spent lots of time outside (Jared washed the truck in the driveway after he got home from work). Then this week we got a cold front behind a huge winter storm and were shoveling out 3 foot drifts of snow in some places. Grant had 2 more 'snow days' one for snow and one for 20 below temperatures! Crazy Kansas weather!!Lottie's new favorite activity is playing the piano. She loves to sit on the bench and play and then she reaches up and turns the pages of the songbooks and plays some more. She's a natural!!