The Kolariks: February 2016

So thankful that this year is a Leap year... I just couldn't make myself sit down to write our family update this month - partly because it's always hard to find time, and partly because I just didn't know what to say. The extra day sure helped! Despite lacking enthusiasm about the task from time to time, I'm so thankful I've been committed to documenting our family's adventures in this way because it's been a great record to look back on.

To celebrate the Leap Year today, we had a "LeapFest" with several simple leaping games, and then we also wrote down a list of current "favorites" that we'll check back on (if I remember...) next Leap Year.

leap frog over Daddy is a little tricky!

relay hop!

How high can you leap? Chalk high fives on the fence!

How far can you leap?

Abby has been quite the hopper lately, so she ate this up!

Topped the night off with trampoline fun at our neighbor's house until nearly dark!

Other Highlights and Kidbits from this month:

We all took turns getting sick! February really is our month for that... This year though, (thankfully??) it wasn't the typical cold-allergy-sinus junk that bogs us down for a couple of weeks - it was a nasty 24 hour-ish stomach bug instead. Lots of loads of laundry... but we survived.

poor guy...

My mom came for a visit! She was solo this time around, but we'll take her any way we can get her! And this time I was especially thankful for her company because I inadvertently scheduled two doctors appointments for the week she was here. It was nice having her around to watch the kids so Charlie didn't have to figure out how to take time off from work to help out. And in between appointments, we made sure to squeeze in a trip to Ozzie's for breakfast! We also put the kiddos to bed and left Charlie to keep an eye on them one night so the girls could hit up the casino! We've never had the opportunity to take my mom to visit the casino here in town, so I told her that's what I wanted for my birthday. We weren't big winners (although at one point I had doubled my money), but we still walked away with some of our money when it was time to go home. She was also around to celebrate Mardi Gras with us to kick off the Easter season!

decorating our King Cake for Mardi Gras!

Charlie did quite a bit of traveling for work this month and was swamped with stuff to do when he was in town. We really appreciate how he sacrifices for our family though, and is home by dinner time every night he can be, knowing full well that means he'll be up past midnight night after night keeping on top of things for work. We really have ourselves a great guy!

I turned 34! And I had a really fun birthday! When Charlie asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate this year, I was so excited that the dollar theater in town had recently reopened, and I got it in my head that it would be fun to take the kids to see a movie in a real theater (they've never been) and then get gelato next door afterwards. Well... unfortunately nothing was showing that seemed appropriate for them to see... so we tried to go out to dinner at a restaurant instead, only to find out after driving around in crazy in-town traffic for an hour that the particular place we were looking for didn't exist (long story) and ended up at Cane's for chicken fingers instead... We'll have to take a raincheck on the movie theater I guess! Charlie and the kids worked on decorating a special birthday cake for me though - complete with Star Wars and My Little Pony additions! (Abby insisted the ponies eat the carrots.) And Bruce was adamant that I should get a new pair of sharp scissors for my birthday. Nice.

On top of that, a good friend of mine from college called me up to make special birthday plans - so we met halfway at a wildlife rescue zoo to see a bazillion tigers close enough to touch their whiskers, along with a few other animals. Fun day!

is it just me? or is this a hunting glare?

thankfully this baboon saved his vulgarity for after the kiddos moved on to the next enclosure...

A bear - oh my!

Hey Abby, look up at the camera!

never mind the fact that we were surrounded by tigers and have a sandbox at home...

Chick-fil-a!!!

In addition to birthday good times, for the first time in over two years - I feel amazingly healthy! Without getting into too much detail, I've been dealing with some health issues for the last couple of years. On a scale from 1 to cancer - we're talking barely a 1 - but still, it's been significant for me. It's been manageable, but miserable. BUT, I finally bit the I-hate-confrontation-of-any-sort bullet and found a new doctor, who gave me a new diagnosis, with new medicine, and I am a new person. It's been so, so good.

Bruce continues to learn more and more details about Star Wars every day - the kid can't get enough. I think we have every Star Wars book every library in a fifty mile radius had on its shelf thanks to interlibrary loans. He spends nearly all of his free time pouring over the Lego Star Wars visual dictionary books trying to find things that he can build - and he's getting so good! He still enjoys when we help him, but he's made several little things on his own just by looking at the photos in the books.

In conversations with him, he wants you to be ridiculously and impossibly quantitative about everything. Everything. All of the time. "Do you like what I made?" "How much do you like what I made?" "Do you think this is cool?" "How cool do you think it is?"

He loves to break apart and rebuild the few Lego sets he has, and usually only needs a few, if any, guiding remarks while reading the instruction booklet.

He also joined the Lego Club and went to his first meeting at the Lego store in the city. Totally worth the 45 minute drive once a month. You're supposed to be at least 6 years old to attend, but they let Bruce slide in under the radar, and I think he fit in just fine. All the kids work on building the same mini model at the beginning of the meeting, and then they get to pick out a small box full of additional bricks to customize their creations. At the end of the meeting, all the kids take turns sharing in front of the group what they made - and can you believe our shy little Bruce volunteered to go first??? So proud of that guy.

eeek! He's talking in front of the whole group! Yay!!!

they told the kids to make a garage for their snow mobile - this is Bruce's, complete with a garden!

I want to save up my money thiiiiiisssss....

While the fellas were at the club meeting, Abby and I took a wagon walk to the Donut Palace!

She discovered they have PINK milk! And MoMo had to come with us, and brought his own donuts...

Abby, Abby, Abby. That girl has my heart. It's a good thing, too, because her usual 5:30 wake up call has crept closer and closer to 5 am sharp, and even held at a steady 4:45 for about a week this month. Yikes! I am not a morning person! I do love her morning couch snuggles though, so I'll try not to complain too much... This morning she slept until 6:10 though, and we'll see if Daylight Savings Time helps her some in a couple of weeks.

Even with earlier mornings and unfortunately shorter afternoon naps, she still maintains a great disposition throughout the day!

She is almost always all smiles - unless you tell her it's time to do something, like come eat lunch, or leave to pick up Bruce from school, and she's not done with her "tower" yet... Whenever she gets into reading-mode, she has to make a stack of books next to her, and it's a very particularly stacked stack of books, and she calls it her "tower." She'll pick a book off the top of the tower, read it, then begin a new tower of finished books. She absolutely cannot move on to another activity until she has read every book in her tower. And heaven forbid the tower knocks over...

She has some other typical, unpleasant two-year old behaviors - but for the most part she's a real gem and a lot of fun to be around.

I don't know if Punxsutawney Phil was correct about Spring being just around the corner - forecasts seem mixed still - but we're going to just keep telling ourselves that fat little rodent is right. We have had some beautiful days, some of our hens have started laying eggs again, and we got the beginnings of our garden planted. What more could you ask for?

after tilling the garden, Charlie built a Sarlacc Pit for the kids!

dead Boba Fett

Bruce collected some Wisteria beans to plant in his pit to make the sarlacc tentacles...
Don't think they'll sprout, but thought it was pretty clever

We put a few planks across the dirt in hopes to keep little feet from running amok before the plants get bigger!

Currently there is a huge thunderstorm letting loose outside, but we closed the month with a perfect weekend. Saturday morning we drove to OKC to play at the children's garden playground park outside of the Myriad Gardens. Love that place! Then we went to see the aquarium at the Bass Pro Shop, took a stroll down the river walk, and had lunch at a Sonic that you could actually sit inside of! The kids were really excited about that for some reason! Afterwards we headed home for naps, and then went for round two at a local nature park with walking trails and a disc golf course.