Glasses!

Well, it turns out my children are all blind.  Poor little dears.  Tyler made it longer than anybody, to 5th grade, but Ella is pretty young to get glasses.  Not as young as Spencer was (Kindergarten), but still young.  Here's how it all began.  Ella came home from school before Christmas saying, "I need glasses!  I couldn't read the words to the Christmas sing-along!"  Oh boy.  So I figured I'd make an appointment for her over the break.  Then Tyler started doing all this weird blinking, and I worried that he may have scratched his eye somehow.  So, might as well take him along to the doctor!  Well, sadly, they both needed glasses.  Tyler has an Astigmatism in both eyes, as does Ella, and Ella is also near sighted.  We hit the store, tried on a million pairs of glasses, and ended up with these cuties.  Ella has been wearing pretend glasses as an accessory for fun, so it hasn't been hard to get used to her new look, but Tyler is just so active!  His glasses won't last a year, I'm sure of it.  I think he'll probably get contacts in the summer before starting middle school.  But they both love them, and are so happy to be seeing better!  I guess the countdown in on until Ruby is in glasses... :(

Christmas Vacation

Having a break from life is the best!  We enjoyed a long Christmas vacation, with school not starting back up until the 7th of January.  We had a great time.  First I'd like to report that after hours spent slaving over a new puzzle we got for Christmas, I finally finished it (myself!).  I'm sad to say that so far nobody in my family has inherited my love of puzzles.  I think that Ella and Ruby have a chance, since they like smaller puzzles, but this particular puzzle ended up being my own personal project (with kids stopping by here and there to check my progress).  But I finished!  Santa brought the kids passes to go Ice Skating, so we took an afternoon and went during our vacation.  We had a great time.  The boys were really good, and even the girls were not bad.  Bryan was terrible.  The girls fought to skate with me so that he didn't hold them back!  :)  Bryan's parents came into town, and we did a little shopping with them while they were here.  Ella bought a new suitcase, and Ruby loved trying on a cowboy hat.  Then the real fun began - The Great Wolf Lodge!  We drove the 5 hours up to Dallas, where we met Jani and her girls there.  We had a wonderful time swimming and water sliding in the middle of winter, and the highlight was once again the enormous breakfast buffet.  We had a great two weeks off of school, and are now counting down the days to Spring Break!