Accomplishments!

This is a fairly random post about some of the things we've been able to accomplish lately. Just a jumble of brags to be honest! On Wednesday of this week Drake and Garrett competed in their school spelling bee. They had already both won first place in their respective class spelling bees and then made it into the top 12 of all the 4th grade classes (they didn't narrow down to a winner in that one, but neither one missed any words.) In the school spelling bee they competed with a total of 24 4th and 5th graders. Drake ended up getting First Place! Garrett did incredibly well but ended up with 5th place due to adding an "r" in microscope (microscrope.) He knew it was wrong as soon as he missed it but of course couldn't take it back. Oh well, he did great and now knows how to spell some really amazing words. Drake is moving on to the District Bee where he will compete against all the area elementary and middle school winners. He has a whole new list to learn and it is a pretty intimidating undertaking! 1150 new words, some of which mom can't even pronounce! This morning I went through the list and picked out the 500 easiest ones and we will start with those and see what happens. He only has until February 15th to work on them.

Lexi and Zac (and Mom!) have been working tirelessly on Science Fair projects. Lexi did hers on blood spatter patterns and Zac extracted DNA from an onion (my house stunk for days!) They spent 4 hours at the venue to be judged last night and we will find out tonight if they won anything. Zac is dying to go back to the district fair in Cedar City because he loved it so much last year. And he really wants Lexi to go too because he's excited to have her experience it. So, keeping our fingers crossed! Either way....it is finished! I thought they looked super cute in their matching dressy outfits. I had to buy Zac a new shirt because he's grown out of all of his, and when I saw the blue one I was thinking how nice it would match Lexi's dress she wanted to wear. Twinners! Now moving on to working on Drake and Garrett's projects for their Science Fair in a few weeks. I'm pretty sure Science Fair takes up all my spare time this time of year! And probably some of my not-spare time as well!

My accomplishment was finishing my Blog Book for the years 2015-2016. It is 256 pages of family history and lots of memories bound in a hardcover book. It takes a lot of time to do this blog, but when I see how much the kids love the books it makes it totally worth it. And there are so many small details that I would have forgotten if they weren't written down and like the song "I don't wanna miss a thing...."

Other accomplishments have included keeping up on snow removal this winter. We have gotten hit with several crazy storms since Christmas and it has been a lot of work to keep our big driveway cleared off. This picture is from when it snowed about 6 inches in the course of just a few hours and we wanted to shovel the driveway before it got too thick (even though it was already dark!) so we could still get out to go to work in the morning. The big mound behind them became an epic snow fort!