Tappana Times: January Hair and Snowstorms

January can be such a blah month. But looking back, we seemed to keep things alive.

First, Kendrick was starting to look like a girl with hair that was so beautiful as it curled around his ears and on his neck. I waited as long as possible to cut it, but I had to admit that everyone calling him "she" when we went out, was starting to become warranted.

These pictures don't really show of his pretty curls, but they are the before shots before madness ensued.

Here are a couple more pictures of his longer hair on a day that eating chocolate cereal made him look like a homeless boy.

Have you ever tried cutting a one-year-old's hair? So not fun. I was just going to do the most BASIC trim. Around the ears and neck, and about a half-an-inch off the rest. But with every snip of the scissors and sudden jerk of the head, suddenly a chunk was lost here and a chunk was lost there. By the time I finished "evening it out," he looked like a cancer patient.

I have never cried about a haircut. Not for any of my other children or even for myself. But for this hair cut, I cried. Boy did I cry. His beautiful hair was gone and it was a crappy cut-job to boot. The back was nice and even, but the rest....I was glad it was winter so I could cover it up with a hat. You should have heard the collective gasps at exercise class the next day I took the hat off. Literally, the whole group of ladies gasped and exclaims of "his hair!" and "what happened?!" had me almost in tears again.

Once again, these pictures don't do the terribleness justice, but just take my-and the ladies from bootcamp-word for it. Luckily, it has grown out and looks somewhat better. But it definitely has lost the baby-fine texture. He weirdly has very wirey, stiff hair now. I THINK his curls are coming back, but it's too early to tell. I mourn the day I decided to cut those baby-fine curls.

Besides haircut drama, my other two had crazy hair day at school.

I did waves of braids down Lydia's head, and then messy buns at the end, because we totally ran out of time to finish with anything cool and she almost missed the bus as is.

Poor girl didn't even get to see what it looked like before I was shooing her out the door and yelling at her to pick up the pace before the bus left without her.

It was fun to have Ammon be able to join in on the crazy hair fun this year.

Of course, there's not much you can do with shorter hair, besides dyeing it, so spikes it was. He thought it was awesome.

The weather in January was very bipolar. We'd have freezing weeks and then weeks where it felt like spring was on the way. One of the warmer weeks, I walked with the kids to the park and Kendrick enjoyed his first time playing at the park.


At first he just tried to eat the rocks, and was thrilled to finally be let out of his stroller. I could tell he felt like such a big boy. He was so happy.

Soon, Lydia and Ammon were taking turns sliding down the slides with Kendrick. They really are such good siblings. Kendrick adores them.

Does it get any cuter than that?!

From enjoying a warmer day at the park, sliding on the slides one week, to a very different scene the next week. Here is the park a week later:

We had one of the biggest snowfalls Washington has seen in a very long time. A couple inches is a big deal for us, and this was over half a foot!

Everything was shut down (people here are just not prepared for this kind of weather), and so we enjoyed a family day playing in the snow.

 My family met up with us and we took the kids sledding at the park. It was the first time my kids have ever been sledding and they had a blast. Only a few tears were shed at the end, due to some freezing feet.

By time we got home, the kids were done with the cold and wet and had no interest in building a snowman. Being a snow-lover myself, I was not even close to being done enjoying all the fun, and so I went out and created Cupid - my snow woman of love. The older kids happily played inside while Kendrick sat at the back door and watched me.

Brigham would have helped, but he had driven back to the park to help ferry people home. We walked to the park, and tried to drag Kendrick behind us in both a wagon and a stroller. We made it with the stroller, but realized we did not want to repeat the process home. Luckily, our car has 4-wheel drive and so it was no problem on all the hills.

When Brigham was done ferrying, he created giant snow balls that he left randomly in the yard.

It's been a crazy winter weather. After the two days of snow, it warmed up and rained torrentialy for a week. With all the rain and melting snow, tons of falling trees and mudslides have left the area in a mess. I find it all kind of exciting, probably since it hasn't negatively impacted me very much. It's nice to have a change of pace to keep away those winter doldrums.