our new year celebrating...tiny apartment and sick kids

our first week of having jacob home for Christmas vacation was great. Christmas was great. then saturday night ammon and abe got really bad coughs. by monday, ziya had one, too. we had some fun invitations for new year's eve, but we had to stay home so as not to share all of our lovely germs. we still had fun, though. we watched movies (underdog is a huge hit with our boys! thanks little grandma!), had a special dessert, and almost made it to midnight. on new year's day, we stayed in our pajamas until about 4 p.m. we just played and played and played. we really wanted to go out and sled, but all three kids were just coughing too much. jacob and i both felt like we had to make it up to our kids (they'd been so psyched about going out to our friends' cabin to be with a bunch of their friends and play in the snow and now we were making them stay cooped up inside our tiny little apartment instead). so we built a fort in their room, had a family battle with some really cool ball shooters that we got for Christmas and then made and ate caramel covered apples while sitting in the fort. it was sooo much fun. we didn't get very good pictures of the fort, but i'm including some pictures of the candy apples.

that about covers it for our new year's celebrating! we were then on to our fourth day of staying inside! lots of hanging out in pajamas and lots of sleeping... like this.


talk about bouncing off the walls??? how about jumping off the couch? usually this is strictly prohibited, but we made an exception. after all, we'd been inside for how many days now?
today, i finally got fed up with being inside. i took the kids to the public library while jacob had basketball practice. one of the librarians kept giving us "the look" every time she heard one of the kids cough, but i just ignored her. she had no idea what i'd already lived through for about four days! (lest you think i'm a horrible mother, i honestly don't think my kids are contagious any more... they just sound like they are!) then we went to a cool little diner called sal's for dinner, hung out for about 1 1/2 hours at fred meyer and finally the highlight of the entire week... we went roller skating! much to our disappointment, they didn't have skates big enough to fit jacob (having a size 16 foot really stinks sometimes!), so while i fed ziya, he went out on the rink in just his shoes and did his best to teach our boys to roller skate. what an adventure. it really is a miracle that we made it through the evening without any broken bones. the coolest part of the evening is that we had the entire rink to ourselves (i guess roller skating just isn't a cool thing to do on a thursday night?). i was extremely nervous about trying it because of my weak ankle, but i got restless and finally convinced myself that an empty rink really was the time to try to skate again after at least 15 years of not having done it. whoa! i might have to sneak out on thursday nights from now on. talk about exhilarating! i absolutely loved it. i only fell once (ammon and i tripped on each other's skates) and i actually got going pretty fast! if we don't manage to do any more fun things during this two week break, at least i got to roller skate!!!

please pray for improved health for us!