Free Range Family

Well I finally did it! I cut and donated my hair! As of this Sunday, I had been growing my hair out for donation for two years and nine months. I donated a total of sixteen inches to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths Program. I chose to donate through Pantene this year (I donated through Locks for Love after I had Alan) for a few different reasons. Around the time I had originally planned on donating, I had heard some negative comments about Locks for Love. I spoke with my boss, who also runs the Livestrong Program at the Y, about other options and she introduced me to Beautiful Lengths. Pantene joined with The American Cancer Society to develop this program in 2006. They have since donated more then 500,000 ponytails! That is 24,000 wigs! :D They also are a bit more lenient on their donation requirements, which is more realistic to these days with how many women dye their hair. This was the program for me. If you have never heard of Beautiful Lengths: (Taken directly from th

I love my job, for sooooooooo many reasons! One of them is my Y family! The people that I work with aren't just coworkers, we are a community, we are our own family. Our children grow up together, we celebrate holidays and birthdays together, we support those who need it and praise those who have succeeded. I wouldn't want my little family to grow up anywhere else! :D Speaking of Y family members, one of Alan's best buddies had his fifth birthday this weekend. He just happened to have it at the Y (as do most staff kids, our birthday parties are so popular!) and he invited Alan. We all had such a wonderful time! The party was football themed and there were several of Alan's classmates there as well. Anna tagged along for the party, she did pretty good too, considering she was the youngest in the whole group! :) She hung out with Tucker's teenage sisters almost the whole time lol. Already such a diva… Thanks for inviting us Tucker! We had a wonderful

BIG things going on for me in 2015, big and exciting things! :D I had a wonderful weekend with some friends who were town, who are very well known choreographers in the dance world. And I had two super cool things happen to me at work as well. Yes! I am so happy and cannot wait for this year! After all the hard work and the rough year we had in 2013 and 2014, I know that wonderful things were bound to happen this year! I just hope that a new house for our family is ALSO in the cards this year. I will keep praying and keep spreading that good karma! So we will begin with the work news: I was offered to join the YMCA's annual campaign this year. Our annual campaign raises money to provide more memberships, scholarships and healthy lifestyle programs for our community. All of our annual campaign donations help with either our preschool or afterschool programs, our scholarships to families and senior members, our Livestrong program, our Get Started program, our aquatics and sport

Alan has his winter break from school until next Monday. With the snow finally falling in MT (after almost having a brown Christmas here, yuck) it makes planning activities to keep the kids from going crazy a bit more of a challenge. We have yet to be able to do a Snow Day, because temps have been just barely in the double digits at their highest. But I never said that I didn't like a challenge! :) So here are some things we have done to keep busy! Saturday we went to Chuck E Cheese to play some games. I had a few bucks leftover on a Mastercard gift card from Christmas and we thought that we would take a quick trip to burn off some energy. It was a bit busy, but still tons of fun! Alan and Anna played that snow mobile game probably a million times! Maybe my little snow puppies were hinting at something? ;) We had a great time though! Sunday brought even more snow! We wanted to go sledding with Grandpa and Uncle Kal but the weather got wild and blizzard-y so we couldn'