February

The month started out with a seemingly "relaxed" schedule.

The only activity we had was Kenai's Basketball!!  He tried wrestling last year and this year he wanted to play another new sport for our family.  He LOVED playing.  His team split their season with wins/losses and Kenai never did score a basket, but he had several assists, tons and TONS of great defense (steals and forced turn overs) and only a few fouls.  He was so excited that he was playing with his best friends from school, too.  I'm guessing this will be another sport to ad to our list of activities to plan for next year.

 #20 getting the ball and dribbling down court

 The night of the player appreciation movie Kenai won a TABLET.

 Well, he actually won a mini-drone and then traded another kid for the Tablet.

On the 5th we attended our church meetings as we do each week from 11-2.  This particular Sunday I had a (Relief Society Presidency) meeting right after the 3 hour block.  We finished about 2:30 and I drove straight over to my parents' place where we were to have dinner with them (before the Superbowl).  I got to their home (3 miles from ours) and Jeremiah called in a little bit of a panic saying how he thought Mocha was dead.  I left Kotah and Kaiya (Kenai wanted to change his clothes) and drove home to find Mocha's little lifeless body laying on the back patio where it appears he somehow hung himself from his tie-line.  I rushed out there, barefooted and all, grabbed him and thought, "ok, if I just warm him up he will be fine" a proceeded to wrap him up in his towel that he slept on.  He was frozen, and he had probably been gone for at least an hour, but in my mind I JUST HAD TO SAVE HIM.

I started crying and Jer got a little choked up and we wrapped his little chihuahua body in a blanket to take him over to my parents' place to tell the other kids.  Mocha was Kaiya's puppy.  We had only had him 2 years.  When we arrived Jer went inside and asked them to come out for a minute because we had some sad news to tell them.  Kaiya was devastated.  She grabbed his body and just sobbed into it until we convinced her to let the boys each have another turn holding him and then we were going to bury him back at our place.  She ran inside and just cuddled up with grandma and continued to cry and cry.  Kenai was a crying little mess also, but NOT Kotah... he seemed to hold it in as long as he possibly could, which was when I handed Mocha to him one last time out back of our place before we placed his body in the ground beneath a tree where he would never be too hot or too cold.  He finally let out his sorrows and cried like the rest of us.  That was a hard thing to go through, but little did we know it was a "practice run" if you will for another death we knew was coming.

The night of the 15th Kotah was able to perform and present with his 5th grade class a "Living History Night" where each student dresses up as and pretends to be various historical figures.  Kotah was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  They had been given their assignments back at the beginning of January and been working on not only this aspect of the assignment but also an English presentation for the classes and a Spanish written essay about their person.  He was a little disappointed that they didn't allow him to be one of the few Native Americans, but as he began researching he liked learning about all the stuff schools don't teach (like his involvement with The Black Panthers, and how he was NOT exactly a stellar husband) and he was excited to share that with his teachers and classmates (and YES, many of them were offended haha, but he simply sighted his references and that was that).