Valentine's Day in Orcutt with New Traditions, Ben's basketball game, Impromptu Trip to LA, STEAM Night, and Annabelle BYU Bound

The day before Valentine's day, I surprised Sarah with a card that I made for her that has two snippets from a much larger Peanuts comic where Sally true to give Linus a heart shaped card calling him her Sweet Babboo. Linus retorts by saying he isn't her sweet Babboo, and Sally angrily puts the card in the tree. Woodstock stumbles upon it. And tells Snoopy about it and the ensuing reply comes from him. 

With the card, I also bought a questions for couple game that divides questions into Ice Breaker, Deep, and Deeper cards.  We have left it in our car and have been playing a lot. I took Sarah on a hike by Stillwell Rd in the Orcutt Hills called Black Oak Loop. We answered some questions and Sarah got a call from her mom. We also got some nice pictures. Before the hike we went to Nena's Kitchen, near the Dollar Tree and Coldstone and I tried a really great California Burrito. Sarah got Carne Asada fries. 

For Valentine's day day, we decided to make treat bag's for our ministering families and deliver it to them. We delivered to Kirsten and David first, then from the basketball game championship which Ben won, I made a route of the several people we were going to deliver to. We delivered to Sis. Smart, Sis. Kearns, the Carroll's, and Predazzis.  We had conversations with Laura from Coastal Voices who calls me her son, Sis. Rollins, and the Banks family. At the Banks', Wes played several songs for us that he made on the guitar. It was cool. He also showed us a coin he was proud of collecting. Also cool. 

Here is a cute picture from a few days earlier where Sarah tried on a Valentine's hat at Walmart while looking for Marcus' valentines. And some more pictures of Ben's game!

We helped Uncle Ken get out of the hospital, got him some food from Subway and Albertsons, and when we took him home, we were working on his computer to hook up his printer when we promptly spilled water on his computer. We freaked out because his plug wasn't working and the computer died. So we went to go buy him a new computer only to find out that when we returned, the computer's plug was working. Crazy. so we took it back. Here are some of the balloons we got him. It was also a rather impromptu trip to LA. I was able to go to the Newport Beach Temple with Helen while Sarah helped out Christina at a competition for her students.

The week before mid-winter break at my school, Sarah helped me participate in STEAM night at the school. I was in charge of making jars that sounded like different notes. We were up the night before working on it and David helped us by telling us to put lids on the jars. We were able to make a chromatic scale from F6-F7 on the piano, but on jars. Crazy. We mostly did it by ear because we didn't have good tuning implements.

We had between 20-30 kids come in. Sarah's activity that she worked on was musical tambourines out of paper plates. She did a great job.

On our way to an event we saw what we mistakenly assumed was a stork. We took it as a good omen, and jokingly (halfway) texted Kirsten the pictures and how this might mean babies in our future. She said it could possibly be an omen for babies, but that she "regretted to inform us that [she] believes that it is an Egret" we saw. It was still very pretty.

Lastly, we are excited to announce that our niece, Annabelle is "BYU Bound!"  Not only did she get into BYU, but she got into all the colleges that she applied to. We had a mini celebration for her after FHE, where we ate a beautiful cake that she made. Kirsten, if I'm not mistaken, divided the cake into quarters and trimesters and asked us what kind of term we wanted. Of course, I chose the biggest of the two.