February 2021 Roundup

The major cold storm was the main story for February, but we did have lots of other little things going on before and after everything was buried in snow for a week. We had lots of park days (hard to believe we had days close to 80 and days -11 below all in the same month), lots of fun at the Discovery Center, we took a day trip to Lubbock, and watched the Super Bowl with friends. 

The Panhandle area (Amarillo + surrounding counties) also moved from Level Red to Level Orange for covid!! In practice nothing much changes, but Level Orange does mean our hospital numbers and the daily new cases numbers are both low.  Things here spiked out of control around Thanksgiving, and it's been so encouraging to see things finally moving in the right direction again. In fact, this was the first month that I didn't get a covid letter from Sophie's school!

Charlie building big towers while Davey was at school and couldn't knock them down

Some girls had brought their pet bearded dragon to the park and let Sophie hold it for awhile. She keeps wanting to go back to that park to see if they will be there again with the lizard. 

Sophie's dream is to take care of animals

Davey wanted to stack the Legos until they were taller than he was. We had to build the towers in the very middle of the table where the Griffin Grabber couldn't reach them.

This is Charlie's treasure box that he keeps in his crib with all his special things. Can you guess his favorite color??

Sophie loves sleepovers with Emery. They beg us to have one pretty much every week and sometimes we let them do it.

Poor Charlie didn't make it home from church awake

We have no loyalties to the Chiefs or Buccaneers, but Davey loves pirates so for the Super Bowl we were Tampa Bay fans. Shockingly they won!!

I got this photo of Davey from his preschool on Valentine's Day

All four kids playing peacefully at the Discovery Center

We had fun at the Science Spectrum in Lubbock on a day off school. This was the first day of freezing cold weather and we debated whether or not to go down. I'm glad we did because after this the kids wouldn't leave the house for the next 8 days.

I took the boys for a walk around the pond once the weather warmed back up. We had to walk to the far side where some ice had melted to get to the ducks. Most of the pond was still frozen solid.

Sophie built Griffin this house of magna tiles at the Discovery Center. It took him about 2 seconds to flatten it after we put him inside.

Smallwoods had a great sale on Valentine's Day so I ordered these giant frames of the kids. They turned out so good and it looks so nice to finally have some pictures on our walls that have been blank for 3 years.

Both kids deny adding "Stinking butt stupid face" to my shopping list, but I did find it hilarious that Alexa categorized it as "meat"

February 2021 Video Clips

Griffin at 11 Months

This busy boy is 11 months old. Griffin is loud, messy and leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes. I've found him in the dishwasher (he pulled out the bottom rack) and at the top of the bunk bed ladder. Heaven help us when he starts walking. He loves people, eating all the food, rummaging in cupboards and snuggling with soft blankets or animals. When he gets really excited he says "ooo!" and bounces up and down. We think he is just the cutest and love him to pieces

Griffin at 11 Months

• Sophie makes him practice standing every day and he's getting really good. I think it will still be another few months before he's walking though. He can crawl really fast and doesn't seem to motivated to try taking steps.
• He has discovered "heads"  (the kids water bottles) and knows how to drink from them. He will often cruise around the house looking for one lying around that he can finish off.
• He loves to be near his siblings and will seek them out when he can hear them playing in another room. Sometimes they welcome him into their world, and other times the door is closed in his face, which prompts him to come crawling back to me cyring. 
• We are getting ready to drop the dream feed I've been giving him around 11 pm each night, to cut back his feedings to 4 per day, and to work on sleeping through the night. It's a hard one to drop, because with it he reliably sleeps until 7:30 each morning with no night wakings, but I know he's old enough to make it through and so it's probably time to wean him off. 
• One bottom tooth finally emerged! I was starting to think he would be all gums forever. We can see three more that are close that will hopefully break through soon. He's been crankier than normal and it's probably because his little mouth is hurting. 
• He knows his name and will turn to look when he hears someone say it, which usually happens because he's up to some sort of mischief.

He had a bad week where he tried his hardest to convince me that he only needed one nap. It was rough on both of us, but luckily he is back to his usual schedule of naps at 9:30 and 2:00 pm.

He had so much fun gnawing on these giant strawberries, and ate them leaves and all

My monkey pushing boundaries

 

Every room he visits ends up looking like this. He loves to empty cupboards, drawers, shelves, baskets, garbage cans, etc... and then once it's completely destroyed he moves onto another room.

His classic "ooo" face - this time he was making it because he learned how to race hot wheels cars down the ramp and thought it was so exciting!

Surviving the Arctic Vortex

In the middle of February a massive cold front from Canada pushed down through the US bringing a week of freezing temperatures and snow to much of the country. Texas, however, was hit especially hard because the state never sees sustained weather like this and the power grid was not able to supply in pace with the demand. The ERCOT energy crisis was the national news story all week. 

Fortunately, Amarillo is one of the few areas in Texas on a different power grid, so we did not have to suffer through ongoing outages in below freezing temperatures that many of our friends and family did in other parts of Texas. Poor Grandma and Grandpa Howe had their power off for up to 8 hours at a time. In addition to losing electricity and heat, we also knew people with frozen swimming pools, burst pipes, unsafe water or no water, food and gas shortages, and sky rocketing energy bills. Poor Texas!

While we faired the storm fairly well, here are some things to remember from that week:

• I was glad I decided to stock up on groceries on Saturday, because we didn't end up leaving the house for several days. Our stores did stay stocked when we did finally venture out. In Dallas the shelves were completely empty.
• School and work were cancelled for the entire week to help conserve energy.
• We did have one 2 hour outage, and when the power was restored it fried the circuit board in our garage door and we had to have it replaced.
• The combined snowfall from the storms was over a foot in Amarillo. 
• Temperatures were in single digits, or below zero, for a few days. We did not let the kids go outside to play in the snow until about day 5 of the storm when it had a chance to warm up some.

The artic vortex arrives in Amarillo - everything started freezing, and then snow would come a couple days later

Griffin developed a croupy cough on Friday night. It was bad and I thought we would have to take him in to the ER, but the extra cold air helped keep it in check. We probably looked crazy walking the neighborhood when it was 15 degrees out. 

On Sunday we woke up to our first round of snow. It continued throughout the day and church was cancelled. It was hard to measure because it was extremely windy. The rooftops were bare, but then parts of the yard had drifts over a foot deep. 

We did lots of crafts and puzzles over the next few days to keep busy

By Monday I was really craving snow cones and we finally found a store that was open and had syrups in stock! Dave braved the arctic to get them for me :) They did not have any blackberry flavor, but he did find my second favorites!

The next day I put together a little snow cone kit to share with our neighbors and Dave walked it over to their house. There were no car tracks anywhere because no one had been driving. The wind had also blown the snow perfectly level, so Dave said he almost fell when he got to curb because he couldn't tell where the sidewalk ended and the street started. 

When he got back home he brought in these giant icicles that were growing by our front door to show the kids

On Wednesday it finally warmed up enough (20s) to go out and play. The trampoline park was having a contest on Facebook for the best snow creation. We submitted this photo of a "Snoa Constrictor" and won a $15 gift card!

Finally enjoying the snow that they had been staring at for the past three days

By Friday things were finally started to melt out a bit! Scary Frog popped out again in the front yard, and you could still see Dave's frozen footprints from his walk to the neighbors house 3 days before.

I shoveled out a path to our door so Amazon could start bringing us packages again :)

The lovely aftermath of snow play. They always talk about what an ordeal it is to get kids dressed in snow clothes, but I think the clean up is worse.