Jan - Mar

In January Mimi had a meeting in Virginia, and he was able to extend his trip by a couple days to visit us in Maryland.  We were excited to spend time with him!

 

January and February also brought much more snow than usual. The entire last week of school in January was cancelled due to snow and because school and neighborhood sidewalks weren't cleared.  I didn't think it was that much snow per se, but after about 8 inches of normal snow, the weather turned to freezing rain.  The freezing rain on top of the snow turned the snow to 'snowcrete', aka snow concrete.  Basically, even I could walk on the snow the following days without leaving footprints.  The weather stayed very cold as well, which didn't help.  

These photos are from when the snow first started on Sunday morning.  Nate started shoveling the driveway and Derek and Karina went out to help.  Nate then decided the snow was a great chance to meet new neighbors who had moved into a house on our street earlier in the year but we hadn't done more than wave at them.  Nate, Karina, and Derek went to get started on their driveway, and they were appreciative of the help and a little surprised when they came out to join.  The group kept the service going for another neighbor who was struggling to shovel his long driveway alone.  It was good exercise and a nice way to meet our neighbors.

Late February and early March each had a snow day as well.  In total, the school district had used too many inclement weather days, and didn't have enough back-up days built into the school calendar in June, so they decided to eliminate a day of Spring break, convert another random day off school to a half day, and convert a couple half days to full days.  And high school still didn't quite have enough hours, so they also decided to add 2 minutes to the high school school day until the end of the year. Maryland requires high schools to have 180 days of school per year and 1170 hours per school year, and adding the 2 minutes per day somehow let them meet the 1170 hours. 

Karina and Lydia had a fun activity at church in February too.  It was Murder Mystery night, which is like a live action game of Clue. It means someone bought a murder mystery game kit, and everyone was assigned a character who they dressed up as and acted like during the evening.  And then everyone had to solve clues to figure out who the murderer was.  The theme was a circus, and Karina's character was a trapeze artist, and Lydia was a sword expert. 

Derek turned 10 in March!!  He is now double digits!!   

He requested an Oreo pie as a birthday cake.  The one I made at Thanksgiving was so delicious, and I thought I used the same recipe, but apparently I didn't, because the one for Derek's birthday was ok but not fantastic.

Mid March brought strange weather.  Wednesday March 11th had sunny weather in the 80s.  Then the next day on Thursday, we literally had 2 inches of snow!  It was so crazy with temperatures flying all around. 

Nate had a birthday with German chocolate cake later in the month. 

I also got a call out of the blue from the lady who adopted the first dog we fostered, named Harley.  Harley became Latke after he was adopted.  The family who adopted him was a 30-something couple with a 1 year old.  Now 2 years later, one of the women was in the hospital being prepped for hospice care, and the couple now had 2 kids, ages 3 and 10 months.  Anyway, the lady was way too young to be in hospice care, and I was asked if we could watch Latke for a few weeks.  Because Spring Break was coming up and complicated things, we could only watch Latke for a week. 

I liked Latke much better this time.  He was cute and a good boy!  Age and a family had calmed him.

Latke was kind of clingy and liked to be glued to me.  Here he is hiding his head under my arm.  It didn't look comfortable.