Monday

Thoughts on this COLD Monday morning:

Charlie and I are planning a Harry Potter birthday party. He's really excited about it (although probably not as excited as I am) but he keeps getting nervous that his friends will think it's babyish. Since when is Harry Potter considered babyish?!? I'm hoping to make it so awesome, that his friends will all want to go read the books. Sadly, they've seen the movies and aren't all that keen to read them. This is why I had mixed feelings about them making movies in the first place. Oh well, I'm going to make the party amazing anyway. If the two people who actually check my blog have any great ideas, let me know. Today, i'm going to work on a piñata with Umbridge's face on it. (I think I'm hilarious.)

Mike is applying for a promotion, which means sticking around here for a while. I never really wanted to stay here. I'd love to go somewhere less cold. I'm not talking sunny and warm all the time, just someplace where it isn't like 10 degrees for most of the winter. Maybe somewhere where it rains all the time. Although I keep joking with Mike about wanting to go back to Alaska. And even though it's a joke, I think I really would love to go back. Mike on the other hand, wouldn't want to be that far away from his family.

I think we're going to change Squish's nickname to The Hulk. He can be sweet and nice and mild mannered, setting up a birthday party for Elsa on our kitchen table, but then something changes. For example, I won't let him use the butter to make a 10-layer cake out of slices of bread. All of the sudden he's screaming, pinching, biting, throwing things... We all have to run for our lives. He spends a lot of time in time-out. But after he's all calmed down, he's sweet and nice again. I think sending him to preschool next year will be really good for him.

I conned someone into taking over the school fun run for me! I took all my stuff over to her last week and breathed a huge sigh of relief. And I think I overwhelmed her completely. But she'll be amazing at it. Much better than I was. She actually CARES about running.

Let's see, I haven't mentioned Peter or Caroline yet...

Peter is Peter. Nothing new or interesting going on with him. He's getting to be a much better reader finally. The after school program must be working. He's always been amazing in the other subject areas, (especially math, it must be in our genes) but reading never really clicked until recently. It's been fun to get him into some more interesting books. I am so sick of the paper readers that they send home for him to practice with. He came home with a stack of sticky notes from his teacher. Evidently she writes them and puts them up when someone is doing something good and she let him bring a bunch home. They say things like, "Peter pushed the chairs in at computer lab," "Peter gave Hannah a drawing," "Peter was nice to his team," and "Peter helped the teacher lots of times!" I'm so proud of what a great kid he is. And so grateful for a teacher this year who cares so much. The past couple of years have been a little rougher on him.

Caroline is taking after Squish in so many ways. She looks like him, and acts like him, and copies everything he does. It scares me to death actually. She's getting quite the little vocabulary. Shoes, socks, boots, mom, dad, help, up, eat, bath, happy. She loves to play the piano and she loves to push chairs around to get whatever she wants. And she LOVES books. Her current favorite is Mr. Brown Can Moo and she does all the animal sounds with me.

We took all the kids sledding, and they loved it of course. But we discovered that Caroline is a little dare devil. Squish too, which is funny because before Disneyland he hated riding anything that moved. But I can tell I'm going to have to watch out for those two.

Usually January feels kind of slow and I just want to get through it, but this year it's been kind of busy. And as I just now realize that it is February 1st, I realize that January flew by this year. It's a good thing... I think.