With the Halloween, Thanksgiving, three birthdays, Christmas craziness behind us, it was finally time to breathe. After getting home late on New Year’s Eve and staying up to ring in the new year, we took it easy on New Year’s Day.

I woke up and made cinnamon rolls from scratch. I realize that doesn’t sound like taking it easy, but I find it pleasant to cook when there aren’t a thousand other things I should be doing instead. I didn’t get out of bed early, and I made my coffee before I started and it was probably 10:00 before we were eating breakfast, but no one was in a big hurry. If anyone’s interested, I used this recipe, and I quartered it.

Maya and Ian didn’t go back to school till January 9th, so they had plenty of time to work their way through some of their Christmas gifts at a leisurely pace. They stayed up late and slept in and seemed to take full advantage of their break.

We lost access to Netflix DVDs and Blue-rays toward the end of last year, so we’re still trying to mentally transition to not just adding things to our Netflix queue when something interesting comes out. Given this, we hustled out to catch Wonka at the theater before school started not knowing whether we’d eventually have access to it via one of our streaming service. I really enjoyed the movie. Certainly I have a soft spot for the original, but this one’s a contender.

Back in November, I had broken down that big ribeye roll. I was determined not to let any of my investment go to waste, so I had ground the meatier trimmings for use in burgers later. Alas, that was going to be way, WAY too fatty for pleasant consumption, so we got a small hunk of brisket and ground that up to mix in. That has made several delightful meals of probably still slightly too fatty burger. The kids love them best if they’re not served on a bun.

Mid-month, the weather forecast was calling for a pretty hard freeze coming up. There was no precipitation called for really, so as long as the power grid held up, we figured it wasn’t too big of a deal. Still, it prompted the bringing inside of tender potted plants and the protecting of hose spigots and our beloved palm tree. When Sean did our regular weekly grocery run, he said things were pretty picked over. Luckily, we weren’t really needing any of the staple items that the panic-buyers scoop up in such strangely large quantities.

For a couple days, it didn’t get above freezing. The kids had a delayed start at school for a couple days. Generally, it was fine. Then things started thawing. Sean had just taken the kids to swim class, and I was just settling in to cook dinner and figured I’d roll in our trash cans so I’d have easy access to the compost bin. As I was rolling the compost bin into the back yard, I heard a weird noise, very much like rushing water.

And that’s when I noticed our new fountain! We have this oddly-placed spigot in the middle of the back yard. It had been covered up, but apparently not sufficiently for it not to freeze and break (we figure it had been stressed in previous freezes). I tried and failed multiple times to shut off our water to the house (we have the correct tool now) and ended up calling an emergency plumbing service to cap the pipe.

During all this hubbub, we were also becoming educated on middle school class selection. Maya is a little nervous but also very excited about middle school next year. The fifth-graders had already gotten to visit the school back in December. We went again as a family one evening this month to talk to the different teachers and understand about some of the different math and foreign language and fine arts classes on offer.

Maya wasn’t sure whether she’d rather be in choir or band. In elementary school, in both fourth and fifth grade, she had a lot of fun in the after school choir group, but they put on a production of a musical each year. We were sad to find that the middle school theater group didn’t do musicals. We went to talk to the choir kids to see if they put on musicals. Maya asked them if they did anything other than just sing. The young lady who talked to us was clearly very fond of choir and happily explained to Maya that no, they don’t just sing, they dance too! Maya audibly noped out of choir at that point and our conversation was over. Luckily, she seemed to find her people in the band group.

I went to a very small school up through eighth grade, so all of this is amusingly new to me. However, I just can’t believe the pressure that’s put on these kids already in middle school to think about attaining high school credit. And then I attended a phone call about how things play out in high school and was astonished at how hard they pushed the kids to start attaining college credit in high school. Sean has looked into it some and has found that entrance into the UT college system can be extremely competitive, even if you’re in-state, so possibly all this fervor is well-placed.

Maybe it’s easier to see at my advanced age, or maybe I’m just not keeping up with the times. Life is short, childhood especially so. I refuse to put pressure on our 11-year-old to take the toughest course load that she’s capable of carrying, and frankly I’m a little put off by the parents who do that to their kids. I’ve even gently suggested that Maya doesn’t have to take the hardest courses, that she’ll want time to play her instruments and hang out with her friends, to read, to be a kid. We’ll see how it goes.

Ian has chosen to be in the after school choir group again this year as well. He participated last year as well and seemed to like it well enough. Plus one of his best friends joined with him, which I suspect is the main motivation.

Maya had signed up for the UIL competition this year. She’s never shown any interest before (her latent competitive streak seems to have been unlocked this school year), and it’s up to her whether she participates in these things, so it’s nothing we’ve pushed. Her fifth grade teacher seemed astonished that she hadn’t been part of UIL before this year.

UIL stands for University Interscholastic League and at the grade school level offers a handful of academic contests for area schools. Maya chose to participate in oral reading, where she would read a couple of poems out loud, and number sense, where she would have to very rapidly do math in her head.

On the day of the North Austin competition, which was held at her elementary school this year, we headed into a very loud and crowded cafeteria and waited for her specific events to start. Her oral reading was first, and it kept dragging on and on. Her number sense competition had already started when she finally got out of the room and headed down for that next event.

After she came out of number sense, I had asked if she wanted to wait around for food and for the awards ceremony. She told me she didn’t think she had done that well and that we could go get something else to eat. I was content to leave because by then I was finding the crowd overwhelming as well, and also, given her heretofore noncompetitive nature, I was inclined to trust her judgement on how she had done in the contests.

We left. We took the kids to have lunch at one of their favorite restaurants (Freddy’s) and then we headed home to relax. The UIL competition was just a thing that we had tried out, and now we were on to other things. No big deal. And then, Maya’s math teacher texted me. Maya had won first place in the number sense competition. She’ll go on to a district-level competition in March.

Since we didn’t stay for the awards ceremony, Maya received her ribbons in school on Monday. It turns out, she also placed 5th in the oral reading competition. Only first through third place go onto the district competition, so she will be competing in number sense but not oral reading. Still though, for a kid who thought she hadn’t done very well, it seems like she made out all right.

In other news, around the 21st of January, the kids started work on their Pinewood Derby cars for Cub Scouts. They even let Maya participate in the sibling’s competition, much to her delight. Sean was hard at work getting kids to start making design choices for their cars so that at the January 21st build meeting, he could have someone with a bandsaw actually cut the cars into the profile the kids wanted. Much, much more work was done on these cars, but I’ll cover that more in the February post, since that’s when they actually raced.

Toward the end of the month, Ian, who is becoming quite the artist, started attending an after school art class once a week. He refuses to show me any of his work, but he tells me he enjoys the class, so we’ll lean into that.

And that’s our January! It provided the slow re-build we needed following our insane October – December. We took things so slow that we didn’t even get our Christmas tree denuded and out to the curb till mid-month, and I don’t even care. It’s been nice to stop and smell the cinnamon rolls.