Claire makes Regions in her 500 freestyle!

 We could not be more proud of Claire and her determination yesterday at the CyFair High School Varsity Divisional Swim Meet! She was fired up and determined to place in the top 8 so she could get a letter jacket for sure, but her ultimate goal was to place in the top 6 so she could advance to Regions Swim Meet in two weeks. We loved to see this fire under her and determination to rock her 500 freestyle! Claire dropped 3 seconds and brought home a personal best time! She is in lane 2 with the silver swim cap on (lane 1 is closest to the camera).

After so many years of hard work and dedication to swim, it was such a blessing to see it pay off! Claire came in 6th place and is advancing to Regions on Feb 9! Praise God for answered prayer and for helping Claire to be successful!

Claire walking up to get her ribbon and take her place on the podium!

Claire and Abigail...it is so awesome how supportive these two are of each other. They each have events that they are stronger in, and I love that they can be happy for each other and their successes!

Claire, Knox, and Abigail...it has been fun watching Claire's friend circle grow over the course of the swim season. The girls have lots of fun with the other swimmers and went out for dinner and ice cream after the meet. I am looking forward to watching her swimmer friendships grow through her high school  swim career! 

Winter in Texas!

 When you only get "snow" and sleet once every few years, it is a big deal for kids! I loved watching the innocence and excitement on Claire's face as she enjoyed the collection of ice/snow/sleet on the trampoline! 

Jeff's windshield when he went out for his lunch break the other day after it had rained and then we had below freezing temps! Of course, no scraper to be found because we live in TEXAS! Thankfully no trouble starting the car. I definitely do not miss this kind of weather!

Lunch date with friends

Maddie, Abigail, and Claire went out to dinner the other evening. It was the first time for them to be dropped off and do dinner without an adult staying around! They got dropped off, did some photos, went to an Italian restaurant for dinner, and stopped for ice cream before calling for a ride home. The girls had a great time together and I am certain will want to do this kind of independent activity many more times in the near future. Time for Mom to start to work on cutting the cord I guess....

 

Happy New Year (a little late)

We had a very low key New Year's Eve since I had to work the next morning. We brought out our bag of Minute-to-win-it games and had a good time!

We began with transferring candy canes from one bowl to the other, only using the candy cane that is in your mouth...

then we stacked bolts on top of each other...

Since we didn't have any cookies, we used pretzels to move down our face to try to get into our mouth without using hands...

then on to cotton ball toss where one person tossed the cotton ball over their head and the other person had to try to catch it!

We then moved on to the ball toss and got creative by making a row of cups and having to toss a ball into each cup, in order...we all got to 13-15 cups!

The cup stack went well and we were all able to complete it in the minute...

the ball roll was tough as our table was not flat and the ping pong balls had their own ideas of where to roll! Jeff was definitely best at this game!

Instead of just putting the pantyhose on our forehead, Claire had to make it interesting and make us cover our entire face with the pantyhose! It was pretty funny to watch!

This was a tough one...you had to hold a spoon in your mouth and transfer ping pong balls from one bowl to the other bowl. It was difficult to keep the ball on the spoon when trying to get it out of the large bowl.

Finally, we had to move a ping pong ball from one cup to the next (which are full of water) simply by blowing the ball. As you can see, it was very messy and we got water everywhere! However, it was pretty funny to watch and Claire was able to move the ball quite far!

 So thankful for the many, many, many blessings we were given in 2023 and looking forward to what God is going to do in 2024!