I have a little over four weeks left of school, and then I will be halfway through my graduate degree program. (Sidenote: it’s a three-year program, I’ve been going two years in, and I still have three years left. That’s how it’s worked out with balancing my school on top of my family schedule. And it’s okay. I”m making up for getting through my undergraduate degree in three years.)

I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned how to make fancy graphics pretty quickly. Example:

I’ve also learned how to meet deadlines without staying up late or letting school take over my life. My tips are don’t procrastinate, and be okay with work that isn’t perfect or even the best you can do. Good enough usually is just fine. I actually had one assignment with two parts. I loved the first part, hated the second. The second one got me a better grade. My perfect is different than someone else’s and trying to spend all that time to reach that perfection level is a waste.

One of the most interesting things I learned is sometimes less instruction and guidance is better, especially when it is mirrored with high expectation. It’s super annoying: I would rather a nice rubric with all the instruction on how to get there. But sometimes without that, it forces you to try harder, motivates you to learn how to teach yourself things, and helps promote creativity. Grading rubrics don’t exist in the real world.

I’ve learned it’s important to segment my time and not let any one thing take over my life. It’s good to have a lot going on: school work, home, self-care, family responsibilities. And it’s good to sit down and just focus on one of those things instead of worrying about everything at once.

First up, Curtis had a birthday. We had two parties, one for friends and one for family, and probably the highlight of everything was the Creeper pinata that Joe made.

He asked for one thing: he wanted an Alexa. So we have one. It’s kind of annoying most of the time, sometimes useful.

At school, we sometimes learn about things like adventure playgrounds. And unlike most of my classmates, I get to home and do it.

Finally, we took a spring break trip to Moab.

They have a shooting competition for Junior Jazz. Peter loves basketball so much, I wanted him to do well.

And he did! He placed second in his division, which means he gets to move on to regionals.

We went on a hike to the waterfall, and it was beautiful. Zero kids wanted to go, and all three enjoyed it.

We also went to our local, amazing art museum. For the rotating exhibit, they had a display of costumes from theatres nearby, and a rack to try on. Everyone tried on something, even Peter who had no interest in going.

This is from Peter’s scouts. He has a hard time with scouts, it’s on a Thursday which is Peter’s hump day. (Wednesday has the advantage of early out.) But his answers describe him quite well:

Another basketball season has ended. Here’s my collection of pictures of the kids thoroughly enjoying themselves.

My house looks like this all the time: He loves comfy things, and it’s worth the mess.

We went sledding on a huge hill in Mantua. 

We hung up a swing upstairs in our house. Six kids on it at the same time was not a good idea, so we took it down and built a new swing set outside. One of the posts is the tree. I always have weird ideas like that. 

We finished up our Junior Jazz season. The kids rarely won. But they had a good time anyway. Peter scored over 20 points in a couple of his games and is an all-star player. We normally talk about not being a ball-hog and passing and such, but his team….Well, one day, two other kids were waiting to dribble the ball down the court, and the kid throwing it in threw it over their heads to Peter, who was being nice and running down the court to let someone else take the ball. Stuff like that was common. Peter is good at basketball and the other kids know it and want him to take all the shots. 

For Christmas, Peter received a pair of Jazz tickets. We let him pick if he wanted Mom or Dad to go with him, and he picked Mom. (Dad went with him the last two times he went and the Jazz lost, so he thought I would be a better luck charm.)  

We had a lot of fun, and the Jazz won. It was a fun evening, although I must admit that I don’t love going to games. And the popcorn was terrible.

The game was done, and we packed up all our stuff and headed back to the car. When I got to the car, I realized I didn’t have my phone. It was late and I still had a drive in front of me, so I just decided to call the next day and see if someone turned it in. And they did. The phone was recovered.

We had to drive back down to Salt Lake to get it, and while we did we went over to Salt Lake City Library and quite enjoyed ourselves there. I love libraries, and the children also enjoyed playing on tablets, reading books, and going up and down (too much) on the elevators. Although the glass elevators made me motion sick after a few rides.

Otherwise, we have just been busy with school and normal life.

I’ve been enjoying this semester because we’ve been getting into design more and creating things like this:

It snowed a ton. So much snow. Lots of shoveling, and fort building and fun.

The pond froze over, but I kept the fountain going and it was awesome. It made an igloo of ice. 

We have gone to Mantua three times in the last couple weeks. It’s a fun place to go with the lake frozen over. The first time was for our New Year’s hike. Then I did a school project out there, where a couple of my classmates and I needed to make some land art.

School’s back in session for me, keeping everyone a bit more busy. I’m enjoying my classes this semester, but there is also a lot of work. But fun work, so I don’t mind.

Also, happy new year! We had a party at home. It was low key but still fun.

The lake near our home freezes over early in the season. It’s fun to take the children up there to see. We don’t actually ice fish, but we still enjoy walking around one the ice. It’s a fun and beautiful place to go walking as well.