February

We celebrated Chinese New Year towards the beginning of the month. Because my mom is still recovering from her bunion surgery, Christian and I were supposed to be in charge of making dumplings this year. I prepared all the filling for the dumplings at home. It is an unbelievable amount of chopping to make the stuffing.

But of course, my mom still made some steamed cake earlier that week and she still made the daikon cake before we even got there so she's still been up and about more than she was supposed to be preparing for the day.

Our niece, Lauren, brought her boyfriend to join in and meet everyone. I guess she's been dating him for a significant amount of time now. I think he is her first serious relationship. That was interesting since I don't think anyone else has done that yet.  I guess Jared has dated for longer and technically my mom has even met a couple of them but he seems to have a new "serious" relationship every year or so. Wendy's boys were not able to make it as Christopher had made other plans for that day and Jared had decided to wait and join his brother the next day before he found out we were making dumplings the day before their trip. And of course, our girls are stuck in Idaho for school. 

Incidentally, Caitlyn is also dating someone right now. We don't know a lot about him yet but he seems to be a fairly decent match for Caitlyn in the things he is interested in and in temperament. He's actually also from Southern California so I guess it will be interesting how that goes.

Wendy and Tommy flew in that afternoon as was able to join us but we were so busy that I didn't get my camera back out to take more pictures after we got started.

While we were there, we also received news that our Nephew, Austin and his wife, Natalie, had their second child. A little boy this time, named Grant. We are very pleased and excited for them.

After I got back from helping my mom at the end of the last month, and while I was driving around collecting supplies for the dumplings, I ended up with my check engine light on. Christian discovered that I was having problems with my oxygen sensors so we are going to have to fix that.

Christian has spent a lot of this past month fighting sicknesses. He spent most weekends trying to fight off or recover from one sickness or another in order to return to work once more at the beginning of each week. He is exhausted most of the time. On top of that, tons of other teachers have been ditching work as well. I'd like to say that they have been calling in sick but since almost all of them don't ever bother to request substitutes, I think it would be more accurate to say that they've been ditching work. On one of the worst days, there were 48 teachers out at the same time. All the other teachers have to scramble to cover for the rest of the teachers, along with some of the administrators, taking in additional students and also covering other classes during their prep periods. Christian sometimes has all his classes as well as having to sub during his prep period and since he normally tries to go in early to avoid traffic and get some work done, he ends up covering some zero period as well...so not only does he have to have seven periods a day, he has absolutely no time to prepare for his actual classes and students.

We've also had a bunch of rain lately. Christian had hoped that they would call a "snow day" for the kids since they have that option and so many of the roads around the school was closed due to flooding but they didn't bother.

Towards the end of the month, Christian's dad and his dad's wife, Jackie came up to visit. So we had lunch and got a chance to catch up a little since we have not seen them since December.

Christian's mom has her birthday only on Leap Year's so she is 18 this year! ｡ﾟ✶ฺ.ヽ(*´∀`*)ﾉ.✶ฺﾟ｡