My February and March

I'm finally sitting down to look back on my February and March ...
Sarah started back to swim practice.  For February she was on pre-swim team; she moved up to advanced pre-swim in March.  She has improved by leaps and bounds, but seems happy to hang out at this level.  Its hard work for her, but she wants to do it and she needs the activity.

Nicholas turned 15 on March 8.  He had a camp-out the two days before, so we had a small family celebration.  We're not big on cake around here, and Nicholas recently discovered lemon meringue pie ... so that was his birthday treat.

Also Sam, Nicholas and I went on a 15-mile bike ride the last week of February.  We rode the bike trails along the Willamette River from our house out to Valley River (mall) and back.  Nicholas beat Sam & I home by about 20 minutes; he rides like a maniac =)

Also, on March 8, Sarah went to regionals for Oregon Battle of the Books representing her middle school.  The girls on her team were a mix of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders and they called themselves the Otaku Sisters (which does seem somewhat fitting for them.)  The team was started by the 3 in the middle who were on the cross country team together last fall.  They did so well.  They almost made it to the second round, but a confluence of bad decisions favored the other teams they were playing.  I am SO proud of them!  Then the next weekend Sam, Nicholas, Sarah, and I volunteered as score keepers for the elementary school regionals.  That was a lot of fun, too =)

February UFO Blocks

I'm doing better on menus, too.  I've almost worked back up to planning a month at a time.  It's a little hard because of the changing seasons, so some of our cold-weather favorites are about ready to be put away for a few months.  I found an old file of freezer meals, so I'm hoping to work more of those back into the schedule, especially on swim nights.  Sarah's new favorite meal is fish sandwiches.  I just buy the crispy frozen fish filets and she cooks them up. We put two on a hamburger bun, top with cheese and tartar sauce, and we're good to go.  This month we made champaign salad (not actually champaign, but a family favorite =) and had carrots and cucumbers to go along with it.

March UFO Blocks

I finished both of my ALOYF goals (here and here) and my Stash Bee blocks (here and here.)  My UFO project blocks and New Bees blocks for February didn't acutally get finished until March 1, but they did get done before I started on March's projects.  Our Queen Bee asked for heart blocks of any design and these are what I came up with:

March is my month for Queen Bee with this group and I'm excited to start getting the stained glass blocks back.