Nursery

Every Sunday morning I take care of the two year olds for the first hour of church. My Joshy is in my class and yesterday his good buddy, Gavin moved into our class. This is what the boys did the whole hour.



The girls were racing cars and playing with tools.

The pic is low quality because it was taken with a phone and emailed a couple of times. In case you can't tell, they are having a tea party. Before the party though, they each spent time in the play kitchen, "cooking."

Li'l Math Wiz

The other day while we were visiting Daddy at work, one of the kindergarten teachers brought a sheet of math problems for Jake to try out. He is really good at math but he has never seen a math problem laid out like this. He figured out the answers in seconds but then had a really hard time writing the numbers. I fixed a couple so he could try writing them again but everything else is his work. He got 100% and then wrote his name. So smart.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Darrin has been trying to shame me into taking the kids outside to play for a couple of weeks now. I despise playing outside in the snow and I will find any means possible to avoid it. But the guilt trip was working (along with the cabin fever) and finally it was such a beautiful day that I couldn't put it off any longer.



And so we played. We went sledding on the three foot embankment at the back of our yard. We hung out in the snow fort. Somehow, Jordy found a stick, even with her mittens on. We went in the front yard and wandered down the street to the huge snow pile in the middle of the circle. We played for two hours. The kids were exhausted and quiet for the rest of the afternoon.

She never lets me down.



Joshy was sad because he couldn't get himself up the snow hill. Too little.




Sliding down on bellies.



Pretty blue sky and little white airplane.




It was a good day.

Crafter's Smackdown

For the past several weeks, my girls and I have been secretly gearing up for the annual Crafter's Smackdown challenge held at the local Jewish Temple. We are not jewish but we are crafty and we were assured that craftiness was the only prerequesite. Although, after getting a look at some of the other teams, I'm not sure even THAT was required.



We spent weeks thinking of our team name and creating our crafty costumes. We called ourselves...The Glitteratti. It wasn't long though, before we were being referred to as "barbies." Do I detect a little resentment? I don't know why everyone was hating on us, we were out in the first round of competition. But we could talk some serious smack. In fact, once eliminated in round one, we let the smacktalk fly mercilessly...especially at the judges...



Yes, you heard me. We were eliminated in the FIRST ROUND. We missed by one point. Apparently our bribes weren't sufficient. The other teams had cash sticking out of their crafts for the judges. We stayed around and helped out another team, the God Squad. They ended up getting 2nd place.


One of the judges was Anchorage School District Superintendent, Carol Comeau. When we were trying to suck up to her you could hear us yell, "We love public school!" repeatedly. But when she shut us down, the truth came out. Excluding myself, all the other members of Team Glitteratti are in fact products of Anchorage Christian School, the school that my husband currently teaches at. Which is why I get to be included.

It was the most fun and the most I have laughed in a REALLY long time. Even being losers wasn't enough to get us down. We are excited for next year already.

Happy Love Day!

We normally don't celebrate Valentine's Day. Instead, we choose to love each other every day.

Yeah.



So I decided that I was going to be awesome and make a lovely Valentine's Day breakfast for my family, complete with heart shaped chocolate chip pancakes and pink strawberry milk. My pancakes did not turn out heart shaped and I completely forgot the strawberry milk until everyone was pretty much done eating.





The kids then spent the afternoon with Grandma doing their usual mysterious Saturday fun stuff. Darrin spent the afternoon at the shooting range with his basketball boys and I spent the day scrapbooking down at the LSS (local scrapbook store) with my girl, Tracy.

I came home to flowers, two homemade pizzas and a clean kitchen. Darrin said he spent three hours making these. He did good.

Bloggedy Blog Blog

I know, I know. I already got the lecture and I'm sorry. I just haven't felt very bloggedy lately. Maybe it's the never ending winter. Or maybe my kids got boring. Either way, I just haven't had much to report. Guess what. I still don't. So here's a picture to keep you happy until something neat happens, like a volcano erupting. Then I'll take a picture of ash. Which will probably look a lot like a picture of snow.


(Notice Jordan's straws placed safely nearby?)

Rory Update

Okay, I mentioned in a previous post how the boys were sleeping in the RV last night because it finally warmed up enough for "man time". Well, hubby showed up this morning with a huge bundle of sleeping bag/blanket/child and tucked him into bed with me because it had cooled down a bit outside. To negative 1. While we do have heat in the RV, it really is not match for a serious temperature dip.

I hear the cookies were yummy though. Neither of them made it through the movie.

Viva La Mexico!

It's official!

To celebrate our 10 year anniversary, Darrin and I are spending a week in Cabo with our friends, Reuben and Heather. We've been going back and forth for MONTHS about whether or not we were going on this trip but we finally bit the bullet, committed to going and started planning. Originally we were going to Cancun but some wonderful things fell into place for us and we managed to get a slammin' deal on a week in Cabo courtesy of our friends, the Hoffmans.


See our pretty resort?

So we are going in April!

It's a complicated process getting all our travel arrangements figured out. We have to fly through Seattle so we can drop the rugrats off to my parents and then pick them up on the way back through. I opted to stay a couple of weeks in Seattle on the way back because I won't get to spend this summer there. So, while Darrin has to fly back home to work (poo) the kids and I are staying for a bit and both my brothers who live on the east coast are flying in for a bit as well. This will be the first time that all my brothers and their families and I will have been together since my wedding ten years ago. The only one missing will be Darrin. Sad.

Rorying it UP!

Rory is our RV. We named him Rory because the man who sold us the RV was named Rory. We enjoyed the name and so it stuck.

Darrin and Jake have been planning to spend Friday night in Rory for a while now. It's only been about 1 degree all week long so we were afraid we were going to have to postpone the adventure. But today dawned a nice crisp 20 degrees!

So the boys are Rorying it up tonight. They are out there right now watching Star Wars on the laptop, baking cookies and drinking Yahoos.


All ready to go with his pillow, sleeping bag and Star Wars movie.


Heading out for a fun filled night of man stuff.

Making Crafts.

Another boring day stuck at home with no car. Today the kids made their annual handprint on canvas art and then made some crafty valentines.




Also, our hot water tank is leaking out the top. Weird.