Battle of the Books and Valentine's day

For the second year in a row, Maggie's team won their school's Battle of the Books competition.  They are required to read about 20 books and then answer questions about the books while competing against another team.  Maggie was so thrilled! Last year when they won, she was unable to go to the district competition because her sister was getting baptized at the same time.  This year, she's in!  Congratulations girls!

The final competition was against a team of boys that came in wearing mustaches and sunglasses.   Not to be outdone, the girls whipped out pink mustaches of their own.  They are so cute!

Valentine's day is always kind of a non-event in our family.  We never make a really big deal about it.  We  did take the kids to Carl's Jr. for  dinner...romantic, I know.  Casey brought home some flowers for me though...good man!  

His tradition for Valentines is to buy each girl a Trader Joe's chocolate bar.  They nibble away at these bars for weeks before they finally disappear.

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Along with the bars, he bought the girls a card.  Maggie and Charlotte are making funny faces because as a joke, he bought them a One Direction and Justin Bieber card.  Yeah, they were pretty embarrassed by those cards but it was funny!

In other news, Charlotte accompanied the choir for the first time on the piano yesterday.  She is doing so great on her piano.  Of all my girls, she plays it for the sheer joy of it.  The others just kick out their 30 minutes a day and want nothing more to do with the piano for the day.  Charlotte will play for hours just for fun.

Also, Casey and I have been doing a weight loss program called "Game On" for the last few weeks.  We are a member of a 4 person team (Maria and Kelly are our teammates)  and there are 6 or 7 other teams competing against us.  We have to drink 3 Liters of water a day, exercise for 30 minutes a day, follow whatever dieting regimen we have chosen and we have to eliminate one bad habit and add one good one.  At the end of the 6 week program, the winning team (the one with full points) gets a sizable chunk of cash.  Let me just say, I have never been so motivated to get healthy in my life.  My bad habit is eliminating my need for diet soda.  (This is major for me as I have never deprived myself of my "big Pop"...ever, since I was in my teens.  I would have one daily.)  Casey's bad habit was eating after 8 p.m.  The habit that we added was companion scripture study every evening...which we have been almost perfect at and has been wonderful!  The massive water drinking was tough at first but has gotten easy and the exercise is now almost addicting.  So far, I have lost 9 lbs and Casey has lost about the same.  We have 2 more weeks to go with this group and then plan to start again...if any of my readers are interested in joining, let me know!

Here is Casey, showing off his shrinking body.  He is rocking the exercise...he just got back from an almost 6 mile run as I write this.  Good job Casey!