January 2014

Hey y'all!

Here are a few pictures of our January to enjoy. 

Preston and I take a lot of selfies while we are waiting in line to drop him off at school in the mornings. We drop off Ashleigh first and then he and I have about 20 min in the car waiting to drop him off. We chat, he tells me stories, we watch funny videos of animals on youtube, he plays games on my phone or the Ipad, or we take Selfies. I love our morning time together!!

Preston got his New Years Eve mask out and pretended he was a green super hero.

We decided to make a "thankful for..." jar for 2014. For the first week or so the kids put a ton of notes in there, but then it kind of tapered off. I keep meaning to put some in, but I forget. nick too. We suck at follow through. It will be interesting when we open it up this New Years Eve and see the minuscule amount of things we put in there.

Ashleigh got a pretty cool magic kit for Christmas. She and Preston and the Mooney cousins play with it a lot. They are so cute and have learned nearly all of the tricks.

The beginning of the year is always my busiest month of the whole year at work so one day I brought the kids in with me and I put them to work! Preston worked for about 30 min and then got bored. Ha. But Ashleigh worked really hard for 2 hours strait and earned herself $10! I was proud of them both! Their help definitely made the other things I needed to get done easier.

We went on a hike near Camas on a nice day in January. I don't think we'll ever go back to this particular place again. The walking paths and hike itself were great. Good weather, easy paths. The kids and I had a great time.... until......

we get to this bridge. There's fast moving water underneath that about 30 feet away turns in to a waterfall ish rapids type of area. Very scary if you're not purposely trying to go down it....

These pictures...the one above and the one below seriously haunt me still to this day. I took these pictures literally just before Ashleigh turned and slipped on the rock she's standing on in the above picture. She slid off that rock, down on to the other rock that's in front of her in the above picture, and kept going down towards the water. I jumped and fell to her as quickly as I possibly could, while still keeping some sort of footing on the rocks so we wouldn't both go in the rapids. We were both scared and cold and wet and muddy and we both cried once we were back to a safe ground and I realized just how close I was to losing my daughter forever!!
so, while I love these pictures, I also can't fully appreciate them because of the seriously scary memories that come with them.