Back to work today. Luckily it was a slow-ish day but still plenty of action.

After giving the kids nearly three weeks of close contact inside our house, we are trying hard to find our polite, nice children. Towards that end, yesterday, Jess and the kids made a Reward Chart where the kids have to earn niceness points to get Family Movie Night on Friday. Each kid has to get at least ten or none of the kids get the movie. And yes, they lose points if they're not nice. It's a lot like house points in Harry Potter but there are no owls, wands or evil wizards. If the kids don't go to bed I can sometimes be confused for an evil wizard but that's different ...

The kids are excited to go back to school tomorrow so that's a really nice change. Even Truman said he was looking forward to it.

I gave up coffee for the month of January. I've done this several times in the past but it's probably been 2-3 years since the last time. I drink a lot of coffee each day so I think it's not a bad idea to cycle myself of periodically. When I go off coffee, I go onto tea. In a big way. And when I drink tea, so do Jess and the kids. We were nearly out of tea today so Jess made a tea run and bought a huge stash.

Henry and Truman reading books before bed tonight:

Truman looking cute in his Truman State sweatshirt:

The water company is working on the water pipes outside our house. They've been at it for nearly a month. Today they blocked Jess's car in the driveway so she couldn't get out. Classic.