Hi Ms. Lorrie!!!

RUS's teacher, Ms. Lorrie, is on maternity leave and we all miss her a lot. So we thought we'd record a video to say hi and let her know a little bit about what's been happening at day care.

Transcript: (done)

S: okay, go!

RUS: Hi, Ms Lorrie!

S: Can you tell Ms Lorrie what you’re doing? What are you doing?

RUS: I’m sitting in my seat.

S: Oh, what are you gonna do?

RUS: Uh ah ah I’m eat.

S: You’re gonna eat?

RUS: Yeah.

S: Did you have a good day?

RUS: Turn it O!

S: Did you have a good day at school?

RUS: Turn it OBER! Mommy!

S: I will, but can you tell Miss Lorrie what you did at school today?

RUS: I- I pway wit D!

S: You played with D? What else did you do?

RUS: I pway wit E. an an an and turn ober!

S: Okay.

Monday Morning

On Monday the kids didn't have day care but J and I both had work. I arranged with my father-in-law to have him keep an eye on the kids while I worked for a 3-4 hour stretch, but I had the kids to myself in the morning after J left.

The older RUS gets, the better they play together. Of course there is still the requisite fighting, but here are two things they did together that morning.

First, R put RUS to bed and read him a night night story, at 8 a.m.! He loved this. She is reading him Princess Baby.

Then, a little later RUS wanted to read more stories, so he asked R to read him this book about dinosaurs. This is one of those cases where I really wished J was around to tell me what she was actually "reading" to him. But they occupied themselves for easily 10-15 minutes looking at this book. It's wonderful when they are so sweet to one another. Please, please let this stage last forever.

I hope this isn't obnoxious yet

Y'all, I just have to say I am so unbelievably impressed with R's attempts to sound out words and write. She resists reading and trying to read, but she loves, boy does she love to write. My mom sent both kids some really fun workbooks (I know that sounds like an oxymoron but both kids have been having a ball, so there!) and R spent some time yesterday working on one of them. She would trace each letter a few times and then trace the word.

By the time she got to K, she totally got the idea and instead of going straight to tracing, she came up with two "k" animals and wrote them down herself-- "KAGAROW" and "KWiLA".

SERIOUSLY! I am SO IMPRESSED! 

Bow Holder

Whenever R says she wants something, often our first reaction is to see if we can make it or something like it ourselves. R has really picked up on this, and will often try to make things herself on her own initiative. She knows where to find her scissors and how to open the secretary in our living room that has tape and other craft things in it.

One day we walked into her bedroom and found that she had made herself two new bow holders for all of her bows--they don't quite all fit on her bow holder that my mom's good friend JH made for her and that she loves to display from her vanity drawer handles (see bottom pic below). So she made her own!

 

Writing

R's new thing is writing. She loves writing and lately has been sounding out words and writing out sentences. Here is one of her latest. I want to emphasize that she did this with zero help or input from anyone else: she is sounding out and writing down the letters she wants to write.

Her class has been talking a lot about healthy bodies and related to that theme, doctors and nurses and other health care professionals. Today at school they worked on making eye charts, and this is what she drew on the back of her eye chart.

If you look closely, the sentence she said she wrote was, "There are so many eyes you can't even count them." The sentence starts with TAR and ends on the next line with AOT TM. Click on the picture to make it bigger and easier to see the letters.

Happy Valentine's Day!

After dinner today we had a little Valentine's Day party. J gave me some potted roses he picked up for me. I love them. I just hope I can keep them alive. Here are the kids opening their bags (I shamelessly re-used the bags Grammie and Grampie used to give the kids their Valentine's gifts last weekend!)

R got one of the new Lego sets for girls. She (and J! and I!) LOVE the whole series.

RUS got some dinosaur figurines.

And this is the valentine's box R decorated for her class valentine's party. It is FILLED TO THE HILT with cards and goodies!

One of the (many) reasons posting was pretty sparse in January

J and his dad put down some wood laminate flooring in our basement to cover up the old cracked, holey, duct-taped linoleum.

BEFORE:

 AFTER:

The project is still ongoing since we also put down all-new moulding (which is on now but wasn't at the time I took these before/after pictures). J also painted all the walls--some were still dark wood panelling (you can see it in the back wall in the bottom picture) while others were a dingy scuffed white. It is so much brighter with everything painted.

We're excited to be able to put all the furniture back in place and really start using the space!!!

New Pictures of Prekay!

In R's pre-kindergarten class at day care they have a little dog named Prekay who comes home with one child every weekend and they write about what they do with them and share the weekend events when they go back to school on Monday. We have to write a page in the Prekay book, but we've also been documenting what we've done with Prekay and I thought it'd be fun to have R write a blog post for us about Prekay. Here she goes!

*****

Prekay is my school's dog and I got a turn today and I'm going to have fun with him. I'm having fun with him. How are you doing? What do you like about Prekay?

Prekay is soft and tiny bit of hard in it. I like Prekay because he is my best friend. I love you Prekay. Prekay you know what I love you so much.

I take care of Prekay very well.

Prekay likes making Valentines. He thinks it's good exercise. He even likes he thinks making Valentines is really fun.

Good bye I am going to go to bed. The End. That's the end of the story. I love you Prekay. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

 That picture is I am opening the Valentine from Grandma.

I am doing Valentine's. I am coloring with Prekay.

 I am smiling with Prekay with a dress on.

 I have a normal face on with Prekay and RUSy has a normal face.

 I am smiling with Prekay and RUSy is smiling too.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

Happy 34th Birthday, J!

J turned 34 this month. We had two celebrations, one with J's parents on Friday and another with my parents when they came in town for the weekend. Here we are getting ready to have J blow out the candles on the awesome chocolate peanut butter cake J's dad made for him.

And here we are with my parents enjoying cupcakes my parents brought from the West Side Market as well as cupcakes J and R picked out at SAS (a local fancy cupcake place we really like).

Unfortunately SAS is "refining" their vegan cupcake recipe so they're not selling vegan cupcakes for the time being, so J is blowing out a candle on a non-vegan cupcake that, obviously, he couldn't eat. Boo. He still enjoyed opening presents--I got him a Harry Potter lego set and a vegan crockpot cookbook and he got a new belt from his parents and some really nice clothes from my parents.

"Wat DAT!?"

Not the best video, but for months now we have been saying we need to get a video of RUS saying his favorite thing in the whole world, "WAT DAT??" He said it at dinner one evening so I grabbed the camera and tried to get him to say it again. He does, but not exactly the way he normally says it. But, close enough. I've been remiss about recording videos of him talking and it's one of my goals since everyone says his talk is so cute. Especially since it took him so long to really get going with it.

January Nap

Taking down the Christmas tree

We took down the tree on New Year's Day. It was quite the traumatic experience. R didn't want to say goodbye to Christmas. :(

The tree looks so empty!

And just for fun, one of my favorite vintage ornaments saved from when J was a little kid. We obviously fold it back up every year when we put it away. I remember these being big when I was little although I don't have any left from back then.

Happy New Year's Eve!!

Grammie and Grampie came over and celebrated New Year's Eve with us. We had our usual appetizers for dinner. After dinner Grammie and I opened a bottle of wine we received at our Christmas Open House and Grampie brought over some beer and we all sat around and colored pictures from R's new big coloring book she got for Christmas.

Disney On Ice

Grammie got R and I tickets to go to Disney on Ice with her up at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. It was really good. I love figure skating, and I loved seeing the costumes and the skaters were very very good. They did more fancy things than I expected them to, including some scenes where Rapunzel and Flynn Rider swing in the air from her "hair" hanging from the rafters.

R got all decked out of course (although we made her switch out her 'glass slippers' for actual shoes before leaving). It was too dark to try and get any good pictures so I just took this one of Grammie and R in our seats.

Brandywine River Museum

A few days after Christmas J and I took the kids to the Brandywine River Museum to see their annual Christmas model train layout as well as the dollhouse display that is, also, I believe up every Christmas. 

The museum has a gorgeous big picture window looking out over the river. 

One of my favorite things was seeing the various Christmas trees they had decorated using only natural elements.

 Close up of one of the woodland critters decorating a tree.

Unfortunately all my pictures of the train layout are terrible-- it's actually somewhat hard to take clear shots in a dark room of a moving train! 

I loved the dollhouses. Ann Wyeth McCoy, the daughter of the painter Andrew Wyeth, apparently loved dolls and got some every year; when she married her husband built her a child-size (as in, big enough for a child to walk inside) doll house that she spent years furnishing and decorating. Her family eventually donated the dollhouse to the museum and they split up the rooms and displayed it. Absolutely amazing. The detail was incredible.

Christmas Morning 2011

Christmas morning was so much fun this year!! The kids were so excited! 

Santa always fills our stockings and leaves two presents already set up and ready to play with. Here are the kids walking in and seeing the filled stockings on the couch.

R found the clementine at the bottom of her stocking

And here's RUS playing with his new Polar Express remote control train set--it was a HUGE hit!!!

R got some really fun castle blocks. Look at this amazing castle Santa put together for us!

This game was a big hit with both kids. They ask if we can play it daily. I will have to get RUS saying it on video one of these days. He says, "Cat in the Hat I can do THAT?"

 This Thomas blanket from Santa is all kinds of awesome. Look at that SMILE!

Whenever we asked R what her favorite Christmas gift was, she always pointed to her Belle doll. She also got the accompanying Beast doll which has a big beast head and a jacket that you can remove to turn him into the prince. Very clever!

Santa also made a new matching outfit for R and Mary Rose!

Hooray for new pajamas!! Those books RUS is holding aren't new, but they remain big hits (thank you Grandma & Grandpa, who gave those to us several years ago!)

 RUS also got a new puzzle maze and R got some much-needed new leggings.

Here's J opening a present--if I ever figure out how to get videos off of our actual video camera and onto a computer we have some REALLY FUN christmas videos to share, including one of J actually being surprised by a present, and of the kids' reactions when they saw the presents for the first time.

And here's partial Christmas breakfast: cranberry-orange bread and applesauce bread and J made his amazing cinnamon rolls again. YUM.