Surprise!!!!

Not only am I posting, but I am posting pictures! I know, you all probably thought my camera had been destroyed by now. These are a few of our adventures from the past few days.

Well it appears that B has learned a new trick. She not only mastered the art of crawling in the blink of an eye, but apparently it wasn't challenging enough for her so she has moved on to bigger and better things - pulling herself up to stand. I have a feeling this one might be an escape artist.Yet apparently, she doesn't like company? This picture cracks me up because it's a bit of a roll reversal. B is always smiling and never really mad or anything, and Soph is always getting mad and protesting. Silly girls.

Soph and I busted out her tinker toys, she built a microphone and started singing with a guitar she made. Then she saw the bin and realized the girl had a pretty rockin' "guitar" - so I foolishly volunteered to make it for her. Hot DAMN that thing was complicated! There is no way little kids made half the things in those pictures! It's all a lie!

Yeah so DH couldn't resist joining in the jam - an every day rock star for sure. This is why I love the guy folks... he really is like a great big 7 year old. And who can resist a face like that?

Today we did some patterns- always fun

This would be Soph being me and DH - she stole my glasses, and his boots, and voila!

This would be us - I don't think I've ever ever posted a family photo before - this one is the best we could do, and believe you me, it's 1 of like 20. How sad is that?

B got a VTech car thingy for Christmas. I'm not sure who likes it more, B or Soph. Soph is taking B for a ride, as you can tell she's in the back seat :)

While cleaning and preparing B's room for moving, I stuck her in her crib so she wouldn't be crawling all over me - well I returned with a box and this is what I find - Soph "reading" to B in her crib - apparently she was lonely.

Yeah and that's about it for now. Hopefully, perhaps I'll have more to share. I'm fairly confident that I took more pictures than that, if I can remember where I saved them I'll post them later. Oh, and have I mentioned my children really really don't like clothes? Perhaps California and our family are just meant to be - we're not "winter" people.

Slow week and Pumpkins

Well... It seems that not much of anything got accomplished since my last post. I'm sure that more gets accomplished than I recall by the time I get around to posting. It I don't have a picture of it, I don't seem to remember it - gosh I'm getting old. We do lots and lots of puzzles. It would be silly to take pictures of all of the puzzles we do. This one is an alphabet puzzle with pictures of words that start with that letter beneath where the letter goes. It is working quite well with Sophia learning letter sounds. Sometimes she surprises me. Like when we were looking at a catalog today(her new thing is she likes to look at catalogs and dog ear what she wants....even if it's a curtain catalog) - there was this doll that I'm 99% sure she's never seen before, and I sure had never seen it but there was a dialog bubble that said "Uh-Oh, I made stinky" - and Sophia looked at it and she said "mommy I want that doll. She says Uh-Oh".... what? Perhaps it was coincidence. We dress up all the time... usually I don't find dress up picture worthy - unless she is wearing belle, Cinderella, little mermaid, sleeping beauty AND snow white all at the same time. I don't even know how that's physically possible - I wouldn't think they'd fit. My child defies all odds. The definite highlight (and only thing I really remember well) of the entire week was Friday when my bestest friend Maxine, her fiance and the kiddos and I went pumpkin picking at the ONLY farm around here that actually had pumpkins for picking! Oh it was a blast. She picked out her very own pumpkin. It was little and a bit lopsided, but it's the one she wanted so I wasn't about to tell her it wasn't good or anything like that. 'Cause it was perfect and adorable. We also "planted" seeds in her window greenhouse so we can see how plants grow. They suggested Lima beans - we went with morning glory seeds we harvested from our morning glories growing on our front steps. We hung them in her bedroom window so they can get lots of sunlight and she can see the daily progress. Hopefully it will go well. We also went to the newly opened Lakeshore Learning store. If heaven was a place on earth... it would be Lakeshore. It's a CA based store so I grew up with it- imagine my excitement when I found out there were opening one 10 minutes from our house. They're an teeny bit pricey, but some of their things are very reasonable... and they offer homeschoolers the same discount as teachers (15%) . I got lots of good stuff from them. Like Write and wipe numbers and letter books and a real cool teaching clock... oh it was fun. They have a website too at www.lakeshorelearning.com . Great stuff. Well that's abouts it.

Weekly Review

I know this is so long overdue that it's not so much a "week in review" because I meant to post it like 3 days ago. My bad. Well - here is as much as I remember. It seems that unless I have pictures my memory is shot. Gosh having children ages a girl! We acquired a Bumbo seat for Brenna. I had heard such good things about them, and although she can roll over until she's blue in the face and almost crawl, she doesn't like staring at every one's feet. She loves sitting in it now. Sophia is diggin' it too because now they can have tea parties together. Last weekend (not this past weekend... but the one before that - yes this is that overdue) Sophia and I decided to make bubbles at night for the next day. The dish soap was blue, and Sophia wanted purple. So, she added lots and lots of red food coloring. A very dark purple resulted. We also played with her counting/sorting bugs. Here she was doing them while I made breakfast. Later we did them together. Every now and then I would make a mistake - she thought it was hilarious. I realized I never quite give Soph enough credit. Whenever we've done computer games on my laptop I also assumed that she didn't know how to use the mouse since it's different than a normal mouse (that and my mother can't even figure out my laptop mouse when she visits;)) Well I was very wrong, Sophia is a pro at the laptop. She really likes playing Disney Preschool Time online - here she is doing just that. There were a couple mornings last week that were quite cool and not humid and nasty (like it is right now). She's usually not hungry when she first wakes up, and on this day we were lucky enough for Brenna to be napping, so we went out in PJs and all to swing on our new swing set that we got from Freecycle. After I gave her a couple pushes she took over and didn't even need me anymore - I took pictures instead. Puzzles are on of our favorite things as well. We also got these from freecycle from a very nice lady who, after giving us a felt board was so kind as to tell me she was cleaning out duplicates and she would put them out for us to take what we wanted. So nice! The bag was filled with awesome treasures that both Sophia and I appreciated greatly. So many nice people out there!A bit ago Soph picked out a cat costume for Brenna. She decided she should be a witch so while at the dollar store she used a dollar of her allowance to buy a witch costume. Then after getting Halloweena from the library she thought she should read Brenna the story while wearing her witch costume. Brenna seemed to be having a good time. I didn't get to hear the story however. I got to put away laundry (lucky me). I just thought this was too cute. Talk about a flexible - I hope they were tasty. Brenna really is such a good baby. She just hangs out and follows along. She's probably going to be laid back and easy going like her daddy. Sophia is probably going to be off the walks and always busy like me. No wonder we butt heads - we're a bit too much alike.Well that's all I remember. We also went to gymnastics, went grocery shopping, went to the library - same ol' same ol'. Since so many people do book reviews, and I appreciate them so much - I figure I should be so kind as to review the books we read - we read enough of them! I'll only do the good ones though :) Hopefully life will be less hectic and I'll be able to post a bit more soon.