I did not have my camera from right after Christmas to a few days ago. I will try to remember and recap our new year:
New Year's Eve was spent at my parent's house. All of us siblings, spouses and cousins (except for Rylee) were together. We had a great time eating, visiting and playing Rock Band. We all spent the night and woke up to go to breakfast at the Wayside. The kids loved breakfast and thought this was fun. We had a great time just being together and visiting.
I am amazed it has been a year since Ryan's death. Time has gone by very quickly and as we reflect on the year we were blessed in many ways. On the 'year' after Saturday our ward had a temple day at 9:30 am. This was perfect because we had received the call at 9:15-9:30ish a year before. I can't think of a place that would have been more comforting to be than the temple. It was a great experience and such peaceful, content feelings. After the temple session we attended Megan Miller's wedding which was so nice to be able to witness. Then we went home and hung out for a while, we got hair cuts (I cut off my hair - it feels so great), and helped with Megan's wedding reception. It was a wonderful day and I'm so happy that we were able to stay busy. He actually died on the 4th which would have been the following day but last year the call came in on a Saturday morning - so I convinced myself this was the day to keep busy.
We have been cleaning up our basement from a flood. We had so much snow and then it melted within a couple of hours. Apparently lots of basements flooded. We had Stilman's company come and clean it up and they did a great job - it just was inconvenient not to have the basement for a week (my camera was packed up in a box) anyway, we have recovered from this and have nice, clean carpets.
On Thursday, we had scouts planned at the church. The carpet layers showed up early (they were supposed to be there on Friday) to stretch the carpet so I called all of the boys to change scouts to our house. After the boys all arrived and we were getting ready to start Scott's brother Breck and Dixie came to visit. Luckily, the great other leaders took over so I could visit. Scott came home and we all went to dinner. It was fun to visit and a fun surprise to have them stop by. It was a crazy afternoon with so many different things going on in the house but it was fun.
Friday, the girls and I went to my mom's house to can applesauce. We enjoyed our time visiting and made lots of good applesauce... and, it only took about 4 hours longer than I anticipated :) Towards the end we convinced Nathan and Heidi to make apple juice to speed things along. I had 6 boxes of apples. Feel so domestic.