February

February.  What a dreary sound.  Some people may think of  LOVE and HEARTS.  All I can think of  is just how much longer there is of winter!  And what about that stupid GROUNDHOG!?!?!  He ALWAYS sees his shadow.  Grr!  In fact, this year I have NO idea just how that rodent saw a shadow!  It was pretty cloudy here.  It's all a sham, folks! 

And then there was the sickness, a horrible sinus infection lasting upwards of two weeks in which I lost my voice for a few days (which if you know me at all, you know that is torture for me LOL)!  Ugh!  Followed a week later by the worst migraine I've had in nine years.  So I spent quite a bit of time  like the picture below...

In my JAMMIES, with some tea, reading a book!

So not ALL of February was bad (even if I was sick)!  We celebrated the Sammy Boy's Birthday!  What a hoot!  He had a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse birthday, and Danielle had these adorable cupcakes that looked like Mickey ears.  Skyeler bought Sammy a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse tool set.  Aly got this picture of Sammy in the hat, safety goggles, and drill.  The goggles were the best LOL!  Aly 

I wasn't the only one sick in February!  Cheryl was too!  Yet she loaded up the boys and came down for a visit over the President's Day weekend!  Yaroo!  She is MUCH better at sucking it up than I am.  I am a wimp and a baby.  (And proud of it)!  So they came, and we vegged, um I mean sat, in our office...aka the couch...for the whole time.  Well, except when she drug me (read guilted me) out in freezing cold wind chills to go to the thrift store.  Though she did reward me with Starbucks :)

They Yahoo's found ways to keep themselves occupied, they always do!  But first we have to mention a truly MOMENTOUS occasion!  Are you ready for it?  Skyeler drove ALL of them to get donuts!  It's the first time Skye has driven the Yahoo's anywhere!  God is good and brought them all back in one piece :)  

Our favorite donut shop is AWESOME!  Bryce was dying to have their Maple Bacon Donut.  He posted it on Instagram LOL!  With other flavors like Oreo Cream-filled and Creamsicle,  and the best Long Johns....my mouth is watering just typing about it!  

Bryce also was not feeling great.  He only went outside with Aly and Carter for a little bit.  Aly is obsessed with climbing trees (even when it's freezing outside).  After hearing Bryce say that Aly said she needed help, I was a little worried about what kind of help.  Sometimes Aly needing help means that she may be hanging upside down from the tree!  So I get out of the "office" and go peek outside the front door.  What do I find?  This...

I'm not sure they are appropriately using the garbage can :)

And they wonder why we call them Yahoos!

They also played a lot of a game Bryce brought, Last Word, as well as consumed not only donuts, but Valentine's candy, Starbucks frapps, and Uncle Dan made them Fried Oreos.  All in one day!  I am thrilled that they still enjoy getting together so much!  We always have fun, even when we are sick!

February is also Oscar's month.  I kind of unknowingly started a tradition where we watch these every year.  Skyeler has taken the tradition a bit further.  She sees it as a time to stock up on all of her favorite candy to enjoy while watching the Oscar's.  We were not as familiar with this year's movies so it took some of the fun out of it.  I actually went to bed early.  But the candy was enjoyed either way :)

The snow finally started falling in February, though for most of it it was too freezing cold to get out in it, much to Aly's dismay.   In fact, Skyeler had a whole week off work due to snow and below zero wind chills.  Dan was sick that week with the stomach flu and so we spent the week holed up in our electric blankets watching episode after episode of 24!  At the very end of the month, we finally got a snowfall that was not also accompanied by the bitter wind chills, and Aly went out to build.  Last year she made a Dalek Snowman.  This year she was going to try and make a Cyberman but the snow just wasn't the good packing type.  

My Bible reading was a bit sporadic this month due to all the sickness.  And my devotional book that I've been using didn't have the gems this month that it had so often had in previous months.  I did start getting caught up on my reading of the New Testament.  The church is reading through the New Testament in 2015, and I was a bit behind.  I made great strides catching up this month and hope to be fully caught up by the end of March.  Reading the Book of John and Acts much like a short story helped me.  I realized that more often than not I read for depth, but in doing so I miss some of the flow of the context.  It's been good for me.  

I don't think I added anything new to my Bible Journal in February.  Not good! But if I would have, I would have added this quote I found in my Well-Planned Day Planner.  I found it to be profound...

"People do not drift toward holiness.  Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.  We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith.  We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated."   -D.A. Carson

I find this more and more common in our youth today, and surprisingly, I'm also beginning to see this among adult Christians.  Why we feel the need to step away from God's Word, and try and make God and the church like the world, cater to the world, I don't know.  I suppose it is because we are children of sin.  And sin  is "fun" and "easy."  Lining ourselves up to Christ is hard.  I sometimes feel that I'm hanging on by a thread to all that many would call just "tradition" of church.  But I see our time in church  as so much more.  A disciplined life, a giving up of my time, a respect for God's Word, showing my children that God comes first.  I continue to struggle to get my daily Bible reading and Prayer life in balance, but I pray that I will grow in the continuing and come forth as gold.  

Here's looking forward to March and Spring!