Heather & Jared's Family Blog: Spring has arrived!

Spring has been coming to Athens for several weeks now. The trees are all blooming, the sun is shining, shirt sleeves are comfortable, sunglasses are needed, and I need my daily hay fever meds. We experienced one more snow storm early in March, but it was nothing like the other one we got. (Yes, it snowed twice here in Athens this winter.)

I had spring break early in March and my wife’s parents came out for a visit. We picked them up on Monday and had a wonderful week full of good food (provided mostly by my wife) and activities. We visited a lot of the old homes here in Athens and showed them the UGA campus. We took them down to Madison which is one of the places that General Sherman didn’t burn so there are still a lot of homes from pre-Civil War. We toured the Mayfield Dairy and got some ice cream for a treat afterward. My wife’s parents also watched the kids for us a couple of nights so the two of us could go out, which we enjoyed since we don’t get out together very often without the kids.

School has been consuming me as usual, but it is all good since I will be mostly done with my coursework after this semester. We have big plans for the summer which include going back to Utah to spend time with our families, I head to China for a couple of months to do research there, and then my family is having a family reunion in Nauvoo, Illinois.

We are working on potty training the two youngest, so wish us luck. My son is now three and he understands the mechanics of it all, just needs to get the psychology of it down (if you don’t know what I am talking about then you probably haven’t done any potty training). My youngest daughter shows interest in it and may get trained before her older brother. She is also into clothes a lot and my wife tells me she loves to change clothes all day long, and she is not quite two. My son is a sponge and soaks up everything his older sister comes home with from school. He knows his alphabet, his numbers, and loves to play on the computer. My oldest daughter is loving kindergarten, she has improved dramatically and I had an excellent parent-teacher conference. The teacher said she could not recommend my daughter for testing into the gifted program, I told her I was okay with that. (Are you kidding me? A gifted program at kindergarten? Lets let the kids develop a bit more and have some fun before we turn the screws on being gifted!)