January 2014

On the evening of January 1st, my work went "code red" which requires us to do mandatory overtime. I jumped on the phones around 9 pm because, although I had through 11:59 pm 1/2 to complete it, they were paying double time for OT instead of time & a half. 

Because of the system glitch, that cancellation notices were not emailed out as expected and there were so many of us working that we had many minutes between calls. We got silly on our Facebook group page and started posting pictures of ourselves. Here is mine with my work buddy:

Someone even put a whole bunch of our pictures together into this collage!

it was a fun start to the overtime, but over the next few days he got very old and I got very tired with all the extra work and stress of trying to get customers where they need to go when so many flights were canceled.

Here are the photo Christmas cards we received this year:

and I loved Sarah's! On the front was the family picture from their cruise and inside was the picture of their kids' swimming with dolphins adventure.

Some kid art from our wall--Christian made this devil with a sword,

Faith made this great nutcracker at school,

also at school Buddy made this ladybug

and elf.

The second week of January had a few super foggy days. We could hardly even see across our backyard.

Faith made this cool car out of a box for her sixth-grade right of passage "drive in movie" at school. I love the sparkly silver peace sign steering wheel and that the most important features for her were a cup holder, snack tray, and trunk to hold all of her snacks.

Sirui got the news that she had to move in with a different host family on the 21st. We had only signed up to have her for one term and her program encouraged schools to move the volunteers around to experience American life with several different families throughout the year. We were sad to see her go, but it did feel kind of nice to have our house back to ourselves. Tony especially is loving hanging out in his underwear :-)

Skittles had to her old rubber chicken completely apart into two pieces, so we went to PetCo and got her a new one. She loves it!

January 27th was the kids' parent teacher conferences. It's funny that I got the same information about both kids: they are super smart and doing great, but don't turn in their homework!!

In art class at school Faith carved this turtle out of a bar of soap.

And for Chinese new year on the 31st we made sushi for dinner. Christian made this roll all by himself!