New year, same mess

School started back today- PRAISE THE LORD!!!! We all survived it, which is honestly sort of surprising and cause for celebration. We will likely celebrate with a king cake soon.

total madness!!

While the rest of the country got pounded with snow and negative temps, we hibernated when the weather dipped into the 20s and 30s. I know we regularly faced negative temps in Minnesota last winter, but something happened to my body during this Louisiana summer. It went soft? Weak? Warm? I'm not sure. It's definitely soft though. That could be from wine or humidity, the jury is still out. We would venture out in the afternoons for an hour or two tops before running back inside and trying to warm up.

My attitude towards cold weather here is drastically different as well. Basically if a hoodie can't keep me warm, I find the outside offensive (THIS IS LOUISIANA. COME ON.) and want nothing to do with it. I refuse to pull out legit winter bundling items. Thankfully it has been steadily warming up and I hope it continues to do so. These children were made for the outdoors and I was not made to pile on layers of clothing for all of them (so helpless!) so warm weather works well for us right now.

We had a couple play dates with our friends from Korea. One morning at our house and the next morning at theirs.

On Friday night, my friend texted and asked if we wanted to do something on Saturday. The weather was supposed to be amazing, so I said I'm up for anything as long as it's outside. We agreed to go to the zoo. We had the whole place to ourselves for quite some time and it was a blast!! The kids sufficiently wore themselves out.

Super creepy how this lion just kept staring at us. I bet Hank looked like a tasty little butterball to him.

a very unfortunate tree branch under that location tag

Fun fact: the two little boys are both William. Mine is Will, hers is Liam. They were born two days apart from each other.

Seems I took an overwhelming amount of photos of just Will, but to be honest, he was about the only one I could keep up with between lugging out my camera and pushing Hank and trying to keep eyes on the other kids. It's a wonder there are any photos at all actually.

Hop on in, I'm driving Mom insane

watching monkeys

While we were initially only planning on staying two hours, the kids were having a blast and we stayed three. Everyone started slowing down towards the end though (as evidenced above).

We ended with a train ride, and Will, being obsessed (OB-SESSED) with all things choo choo, just sat quietly and soaked it all in.

I ran out of bottles for Hank and instead of eating at CFA, I decided we'd just head on home and eat CFA in the car on the way back. I've been back there (past the front seat) recently- a little fried chicken could not possibly cause more damage and destruction that what has already been done. But my friend offered to take the two big kids with her, and with that, we were off!

Creepy burning on the way home- not sure if this was happening on Ft Polk or not.

We spent the last part of our weekend playing outside and taking down the Christmas lights.

They only worked for the first half of the first week that I put them up but we looked festive in the daylight at least. The entire time I was balancing on a stool and taking them down, I kept thinking about how happy I was that Steve was going to be in charge of this next year. I have no business doing stuff like this. Because after it starts getting hard or ugly, I stop caring and just slap it up there. Better done than perfect! Steve would argue that, of course.

My neighbor and I started jogging again this morning. Between the holidays and traveling (her) and being sick, we hadn't been in a few weeks. We went this morning and I wish I could say it felt better but it hurt just as much as it usually does. Endorphins were nice. And only dealing with two children was reeeeeeeel nice, Clark. Merry Christmas to me. I hope your resolutions are still holding strong one week into the new year as well.