Happenings

In February Daniel and I went to California to celebrate his grandma's 100th birthday.  I loved this print they had made.  We were grateful to see family, grateful his cousin Brie let us stay at her house, grateful for Daniel's brother Mic for helping us get there, and very grateful for good friends who took good care of our kids while we were gone. 

A picture of his grandma when she was younger.

She's still so beautiful!

Daniel and his siblings



Eliza loves playing with Ian.  I love it because Andrew is good friends with his brother Luca and Ethan is good friends with his sister Layla, so its so cute that these two are becoming friends.

The other two :)

A trip to the butterfly house





American ninja warriors for Andrew's cub scout banquet- they loved it! Now Ethan will be doing the same thing for his birthday party coming up.

She is lucky to have an older brother that adores her. 

He was past due for a hair cut.



She was sitting there plunking keys and singing :)

He loves playing with his ninjago legos.

My kids always want to help me with preschool so I let Hannah and Andrew each take a morning to stay home from school and help me. Hannah is helping with the number bag.

I love how much they love kids and how well they do with them. 



Andrew's recorder concert.  He was so excited for it! He has really enjoyed learning to play the recorder.

A beautiful evening walking around the lake.  (Daniel ran, we walked)









I love this picture of Andrew trying to teach Hannah to skip rocks.



These two playing well together again.  Hopefully she is past the stage of trying to smother/attack him.

She looked so grown up...

I had to take a picture of her holding my hand because the days of having a little kid to hold my hand are going too fast.

I love all the blossoming trees!

 

It was so warm this day that we just couldn't be inside for long. We were playing red light, green light here.

We had some fun with instruments



I love her rainbow :) This was on a Thursday...

Andrew and Daniel love playing games, specifically monopoly deal right now.

Fun run! The kids were so excited and did so well. We're so grateful for all the support they had.

...this is on Friday.  The Friday that was the day after the Thursday that was super warm.  It was freezing! The next day it snowed.  Not much, but still.  Thursday was in the upper 70s. It's crazy.  I should be grateful...it hasn't felt like winter since early February...but the flowers had bloomed and it was hard transitioning back.

 

Hannah running

Ethan in the blue sweatshirt

Andrew had a friend over and it happened to be on his half birthday so the friend was the lucky recipient of our half birthday cake giving tradition.

A field trip to the fire station with preschool

so cute

This is Ethan leading us through his classroom for his student led parent/teacher conference.  He was super cute.  He has an awesome teacher who I am so grateful for.  They all do, and that is a big reason they are all doing so well at school.  Ethan's teacher choked up a little telling us how hard of a worker he is and that he has a heart of gold. We heard similar things from Hannah and Andrew's teachers.   

My cute activity day girls building a temple out of legos. Didn't they do a great job?

We were following the rainbow in preschool to find the gold (the rainbow was rainbow yarn on the ground). Along the way we found different paper shamrocks that had tasks for us to do.  Here we had stopped to see if we could find any pictures in the clouds.

Happy St Patrick's day.  She is picking the marshmallows out of lucky charms in case you're wondering.

I'm grateful for a great family. My kids go back in forth between amazing me and driving me crazy.  Occasionally they have me wondering how I messed up so much in teaching them...it was after one night when that was the case that I made this family values sheet to try and put things back on track.  We are on stage one- we briefly talked about each value and at dinner we talk about the values we saw that day and they get a jellybean for everything they share.  It doesn't have to be about themselves or even anyone in our family...it could be something they saw at school, from a stranger, or even from a book.  The point is to notice, remember, and use the vocabulary and then we'll add to it. The next stage will be to spend more time on each one.  Maybe focus on one for a month each and try to apply it before adding the next one. We'll see how it goes. So far I like it.