Twins

A few weeks ago we went in for the 20 week ultrasound of our little girl.  The ultrasound tech said she rarely gets images this perfect, that everything looked like what you'd see in a textbook.  The baby appears to be very healthy, in spite of Liz's "advanced maternal age".  That's what the doctors call it, her paperwork more bluntly listed her as "elderly multigravida".  Did they really just call her elderly?  She's still in her 30s for crying out loud!

Fortunately, and in spite of the title of this post, the ultrasound tech did NOT discover that we're having twins.  However, lately Spencer and Michael have tried acting like twins.  Spencer will sometimes try to walk like Michael by taking a few drunken steps and falling down.  He tries to talk like Michael by speaking in a halting monotone.  He likes to put on Michael's coat and backpack.  Whenever he can he tries to dress the same as Michael, including wearing their matching Sunday clothes.

Can you tell these twin boys apart?

A few weeks ago it was nice having a day off work for Martin Luther King Day.  This is the first year Intel has given us the holiday off of work.  It's one of their ways of trying to be more diverse and celebrating people of different races and colors.  That day in our bathroom I came upon Brooklyn celebrating people of color in her own way:

I'm pretty sure this is how mommy puts on her lipstick

Don't I look so pretty?

A week ago Sarah and Whitney had a school choir performance at the upscale Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs.  This is the first time their elementary school has been invited to perform.  They took the bus down to Colorado Springs that morning, and the rest of us drove down later so we could spend a few hours there and pick them up when it was over.  The room they performed in was small and we weren't able to get tickets to see it, but fortunately we saw the performance a week earlier when they performed here in Fort Collins.

While we were in Colorado Springs we went to one of our favorite places, Garden of the Gods.  Although it was a sunny January day, the wind was ferocious and the dirt and sand blew hard at us.  So we didn't get to stay as long as we would have liked, but it was certainly an adventure!

Michael and Brooklyn taking shelter from the wind at Garden of the Gods

A really nice Brazilian family moved in just a few doors down from us.  They go to our church and we've enjoyed meeting them and starting to get to know them.  I served a 2 year mission in Brazil, so it's been fun to brush up on my Portuguese with them.  Right now it's summer in Brazil and winter here, so they're still getting acclimated.  We received over a foot of snow this last week, and we saw their 12 year old son out there shoveling snow from their driveway with some of his new friends from church.  He came by the next day and helped us with our driveway as well.  Our kids tried to "help" too, but mostly they just enjoyed getting sprayed with snow from our snow blower.