Recently

Stevens' been playing a lot of basketball. 

We've switched to 9am church, which is giving us more time together for things like board games. Carmen won Monopoly (Alberta-opoly, actually). By the end of the game she owned every property and had a hotel on each one.

Grandma (my mom) gave Jaclyn a bell from her collection. This is the beginning of a new tradition (Jaclyn is the oldest grandchild) for grandchildren to choose a bell from Grandma in their last year of high school.

For Chloe I was going to share that she quit violin this month, but it would be more accurate to say that I quit. Chloe is remarkably compliant considering how strong-willed she is, and would have continued for as long as I told her to (probably). Basically, between Christmas and mourning we went for a month without practising the violin and I didn't miss it. In fact I realized that all violin was doing was stealing time from piano and Chloe clearly prefers playing the piano.

While we were quitting things, Carmen quit Irish Dance. The end was near, anyhow, because Irish Dance lessons directly conflict with Young Women's activity night and Carmen is nearly 12 years old! 

It hasn't been all quitting. Jaclyn is starting her new tutoring job today and Carmen began voice lessons yesterday. (Poor Steven. He already thought Carmen did too much singing around the house. He wouldn't mind having all sisters if they would just. stop. singing.)

First lesson.

I should have done video and then had you guess at Mrs. Stephen's age. I'd say 75 years old. She's very nurturing but also very proper, which will be awesome for Carmen. (Video also would have been amusing just to capture the vocal warm-up exercises.)