Happy New Year!

Last night someone on the Buy Nothing Group offered up some NYE balloons, available after noon today (since they were throwing a Noon Year's Eve party at their house, wouldn't need the balloons for the evening, and wanted to spread the joy). I wasn't selected to get the balloons.

But! The person who was selected messaged me to say that she only wanted the word balloons (that spelled out "Happy New Year!") and since I live just around the corner...did I want to come pick up two big garbage bags of white and gold balloons? 

We had just finished preparing all the pirogies, but they were in the oven warming...so I said yes! We could come right now! So we got the balloons and then had our dinner. 

After dinner I set up a balloon drop in the living room:

 

The last shall be first and the first... (Or: Oh, Phoebe!, part II)

Phoebe woke up just before midnight and she was not happy about it, but we invited her downstairs to ring in the New Year with us anyway (even though we'd already done that with her earlier in the evening).

Stats

Last night I asked Andrew to pull together some statistics for my blog. Like, I could tell that my total posts per year had gone down over time, peaking at 539 (in 2008, the year I was raising only one baby and moved to Egypt) and dropping down to 231 (in 2022, the year I was raising my sixth baby and finishing my master's degree). There are many other reasons for my total number of posts dropping over time, especially since 2010—Rachel offered the fact that I've had, like, four babies between 2010 and now (and mentioned that she was going for an absurd number of babies...but then realized that four was accurate in my case) and Andrew offered the fact that we moved from Egypt to, uh, Orem (which kind of dialed back our "excitement" level). 

Still, I wondered whether my post length had increased (it had) and whether that would even out my total word count—like, I wanted to know whether I was writing fewer posts (obviously) but ultimately hitting the same word count annually. The answer is, that my post length is up on average but my word count is trending downward.

Oh, Phoebe!

This morning Phoebe lingered in her pull-up. 

She has been particularly difficult to potty-train, as far as my kids have gone. Probably the second hardest kid (next to Benjamin, who wins the title of Moste Difficult, hands-down). During the day she's really pretty great, but she simply will not consider nighttime potty training.

Alexander was probably the easiest kid to potty train at night. I told him he needed to stay dry and he was like, "Got it. Consider it done."

That child has wet the bed twice. Like, from the moment I took him out of diapers. That's it. 

With the girls (and Benjamin) I would wake them up in the night to go potty around the time they would typically wet the bed so I could intercept them to take them potty before they wet the bed. For example, if they usually woke up at midnight...wet and sad...I would wake them up at 11:00 or 11:30 to take them potty. And then eventually they'd start waking up proactively to go potty at that time, so I'd stop waking them up to go potty. And then eventually they'd just...stop getting up to go potty.

(Oh, who are we kidding? They still regularly get up to go potty in the middle of the night when they need to (and sometimes when they're just bored of sleeping, I guess)).

A beautiful day in December

We got out for a healthy dose of Vitamin D this afternoon. The kids chose Jones Bridge Park. We've been avoiding that park lately because they've been doing so much construction there, but I figured we could check out the progress. Turns out it's still...undergoing some serious construction.

They're redoing the water drainage in the park to help with erosion, since it's right by the river and the river tends to...eat away at it. I guess. Something like that.

Memorized Scriptures 2024

We had 22 scriptures on our list of scriptures to memorize this year and while I'm not sure everyone memorized every scripture, we certainly made a valiant effort. We officially crossed off 19 of them and are still working on 3. Perhaps we'll cross off more tomorrow.

Phoebe the photog

Phoebe has figured out how to take pictures with tablets and phones and things and some of the devices are linked to my account (I don't know how these things work)...so I end up with picture after picture after picture like this on my camera roll: 

A few of our favourite things

We opened our gifts days ago and I'm...still talking about it...

We had quite a stormy night last night—on a tornado watch all night long, but no tornadoes for us (thank goodness)—and the morning was absolutely dreary when we woke up. Things were still drizzling when we went to church, but when we came outside after church the sky was a brilliant blue and you'd hardly know it was the end of December!

Zoë was excited to wear her new (with a heel!) shoes to church. She chose to stand with this holly bush behind her (because it's so Christmassy).

Christmas Train and Christmas Stockings

Phoebe succeeded on sleeping in the basement on Christmas Eve...but only because Andrew went downstairs to sleep with her. She woke up at 2:00 am buzzing with anticipation and didn't fall back asleep until around 5:00 or so. So we didn't get up particularly early. 

Here she is ready to assemble the kids at around 9:20 am:

Silly Rachel stories

Everyone got new highlighters in their stocking (except for Phoebe who abuses highlighters). Rachel pulled out her highlighter and fiddled with it for a while before saying, "This button does nothing! How does this highlighter even work?!"