Winter in Utah

It has been cold, cold, cold. Work has been busy lately too with so many meetings, paperwork, scheduling on top of therapy. But of course that's all part of the job, even though the best part is the actual therapy. Today was a fun day. A paraeducator, Melody, who helps me has made a couple hundred speech bucks. Each of the students (not the preschoolers, they're a bit young) gets one speech buck for coming on time to speech. They also can receive one for completing and retuning their homework. At the end of the month, they can use their "money" to buy from the Speech and Language Store!! Yipee. They can buy marbles, small erasers, tiny pieces of chocolate, jumping frogs, chinese finger traps, mini frisbees, mini candy bars, etc. It is kind of fun. It seems that this system has been the most motivational. Kids were getting bored of the stickers. One even said, "no thanks," last week! I laughed and knew the stickers had to be done away with! Funny. The kids at school are great to work with. They are all making progress.

What else has been happening? I learned a good lesson on bargaining last week. It is worth it! Ask for discounts and deals, and then bat your eyes girls!!! Getting the Nissan an oil change, manual transmission fluid change, tires rotated, etc looked to be pretty expensive. But just asking to have discounts sure did the charm, and then pulling out my nifty Jiffy Lube VIP card for an additional 15% discount was AWESOME. Seriously, you can save a lot of money by just asking.

A Kenmore sewing machine was a big present for Christmas this year. Yes, I am a sewer now. The last quilt I made was in high school, for one of the 20 hour Young Woman Medallion projects. Mom helped me make a couple dresses, skirts, blouses, then too. This week I got all the fabric to make a quilt. It has black and white prints, with different patterns along with blue prints. It is going to be great. The only setback I have had was a few days ago, when I was ready to thread the bobbin, I realized I'm missing the accessories pack, which has the parts to help you work the machine. It'll come in the mail.....

Finally, other exciting things going on are the two babies on the way in the family. My sister-in-law is having a C-section this weekend, and my sister Kelsey is already 18 weeks along with her first. It is an exciting time.

Here are some other pictures of the happenings here:




We built a snow fort. There are still remnants of this fort six weeks later. Yes, this is basically the same photo!


Giving Vance a haircut. Kelsey looks happy, I'm interested, and Vance frightened, and rightly so when I had the scissors! In the end, it was a VERY good haircut.



Also, two weeks ago my family and I met in Orlando, Florida. We spent the entire week at the DisneyWorld parks (Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom, and Epcot. The 50-60 degree weather was nice too. It was a fun experience. We stayed in a nice condo in Orlando on some water, went out to some nice restaurants in the evening, slept well, etc. Could you ask for a better vacation? Pictures will come soon.

Update

Wisconsin must have gotten more snow in December in nearly 100 years. Snow covered our mailbox by at least an entire foot the 2.5 weeks of being home. Of the three Sundays I was in Oshkosh, church was cancelled twice, ironically not due to the amount of snow, but because of the extremely cold and icy road conditions. Mom made home beautiful with her nativities, the Christmas tree, wreaths around all the windows, and other decorations. Her cooking and baking was top notch as usual. Someday I'd like to be just like her.

There was plenty of time to participate in all the fun winter/family activities like sledding, carving a cave inside of a huge pile of snow, making snow angels, playing lots of Wii, board games, making caramels (sadly, my first try was not edible), making and decorating gingerbread houses, shopping, sewing, etc. The Kindt family is growing as well! We've got two more neices and nephews coming this month and in July! Yay! It is amazing to see these miracles...