January Birthdays!

We have the fun of celebrating two birthdays now in January with both Mom and Sadie celebrating another year of life!  With Karis' annual men's ski trip happening late January this year, we didn't get a chance to get together though until the first part of February.  That worked out super well as Amy's aunt Ev from Canada (Jeff's mom) was here, so we got the chance to visit!

A whole 2 years old!

Happy birthday with a lemon fruit tart!

Always so great to see family!

In surprising news, Zachary's back has been hurting since early January after a soccer game - to a fairly high degree of pain.  After coming back from skiing in Colorado, we decided that it was time to go to the doctor as it had been 3 weeks.  He ended up with an MRI and we discovered that he has a pars defect (spelling?) in his L5, and there are tiny fractures in his pedicles.  According to the doctor, it is hard to say whether he was born with the tiny fractures or whether they just occurred but clearly something has been inflamed in there now.  He also has a bulging disc because of the muscle spasms.  Poor kid - with that news, he is now sidelined per doctor's orders for the next month while we attempt to let it heal.  He is feeling MUCH better as the weeks go, so we are pleased about that but are praying that he has a full recovery.  We aren't sure what this will mean for his back over the longer-term for his life, but are hopeful he won't deal with too much back pain.  So for now, no soccer, no running, no sports.  You can imagine how happy he is about that - but we are trying to remember that four weeks for a proper healing and less life-time problems is a fair trade-off!

In other fun events, we had the chance to go to the Cochrans for the super bowl, which is always fun. The men/teen boys watch the game while the kids play and the women chat - win-win for all!  Reminder for next year, don't stay the whole game as the kids have a VERY hard time getting up for school the next day!  Bad parenting fail there! :)