Adventures in La La Land

1. Here we are . . . 2025. We rang in the New Year in our usual fashion - at home, without much fanfare. Our kids have no problem staying up til midnight, so they all stayed up and played games with me.  First up: Levi's new Dude Perfect game. It was fun! Not at all as obnoxious as I was worried it'd be. 😂 Then we played Lucy's Hues and Cues game . As you can see, hilarity ensued.  We also played Lena's Poetry for Neanderthals , but I neglected to take pictures of that one. Obligatory selfie at midnight! (Lucy straightened her hair just for fun and doesn't even look like herself!) 2. I made some decent progress on my cleaning projects over the past two weeks. Of course I didn't get even close to everything done that I wanted to, but I tackled some big projects. A lot of things depend on Justin finishing his "man cave" in the basement. Right now, everything that will eventually go in there is shoved in a corner of the playroom. Once that stuff is out ...

Another year in the books. Here are the highlights and lowlights of 2024 . . . 1. Thanks to a couple of books I read, I was very convicted about my kids' screen time. You wouldn't know it based on the past two weeks of Christmas Break, but for most of 2024 we made serious strides to cut back on their incessant media usage. We'll be going back to the regular rules once school starts next week: no screen time on week days, lots on the weekend. But I might even rein in the weekend screen time as well in 2025. They're going to hate me so much. Lol. 2. In lieu of screen time, Lucy read or slept almost constantly. Lena and Levi spent lots of time playing outside with the neighbor kids while the weather was nice. They got really into football (both watching and playing), and went through phases of playing with Perler beads and drawing with Art for Kids Hub on YouTube (yes, technically screen time, but for a purpose). Lena got really into Adventures in Odyssey, and Levi binged ...