Weird and Wonderful Week

The week in between Christmas and New Years is weird and wonderful-- just like these two! 
Seriously, it is about the best week of the year.  We play a lot and eat a lot and waste a lot of time.  By the time it's over everyone is starting to lose their cool and is ready to buckle back down to the beautiful grind of regular life. 

We enjoyed a night out to eat with the Utah Fox siblings. 

We invited ourselves over to the Schramms to play games with them and their family from out of town.
Good friends can always invite themselves over:)

Friends on a double date downtown.

Kids played with neighbor friends almost every single day for hours and hours and they were all so happy.  George and his friend made this robot with Christmas box trash.

Peter and his best friend playing Bey Blades.  \

Greta moved out of her crib and has not been very good about staying in her bed.  I found her sitting in Faith's closet eating Faith's M&Ms without even a snitch of remorse.  

We spent way too much time working on a ridiculously huge 2000 piece puzzle.  A couple times it was just Abe and I listening to music and puzzling together and it was delightful!

VICTORY!

Another New Years Eve with our wonderful Johansens.  I think we figured this was our 11th year on a row of New Years Eve game nights and it is hours and hours of games and junk food.  We both have missionaries out right now and it was so fun to talk about our recent Christmas phone calls with them and how they are doing.  It's fun that Clark and Kara are good friends who regularly write to each other.  We'll look forward to both of them being home next year.

Michelle has been one of my homeschooling mentors and I am so grateful for their friendship.

Peter was so cute on New Years trying to stay awake.  He came to us and showed us how he could prop his eyes open to stay awake.  From the look of this picture, his plan didn't work.

They introduced us to a really fun new game called "Sushi Go".  Thank goodness you don't have to like Sushi to enjoy the game:)

Elinor will shortly be turning 16 and she recently asked a boy to an upcoming school dance with this geeky chemistry code.  It's just so Elinor!

He answered back with a gingerbread volcano, complete with gummy dinosaurs.  It's a match made in heaven!  

What kind of homeschooling family would be if we didn't attempt to erupt the gingerbread volcano.   It was fun.  You know what else is fun?  The week between Christmas and regular life.  I dare say it's almost too fun.