Big Basement Creativity

For Christmas, we expanded out train set. (For last Labor Day we got a basement) The boys have had fun with a big area to play in, and last Sunday they built a monster of a train track. I helped a bit with joining the circle, but most of this is their creativity. The pictures are from Harrison, who also loves to use the camera.


They put their action figures to watch over one portion of the track, just to keep it safe.

The impetus behind this burst of creativity was locking the computer cabinet.

At the end he turned the camera on his adoring audience.

It's only a matter of time...

Before this girl starts crawling:

She's been getting up on her knees a little more each day for about a week, but today she was really moving. She only goes backwards, but I don't think that's going to last too much longer. This is a whole new experience for me. Both Harrison and Noah spent a couple months happily sitting before they ventured into crawling. And I think they were capable of crawling before they were interested in it. Olivia still doesn't sit for any amount of time, and really wants to be moving. As soon as she figures it out, I think she'll be off. Now I just have to figure out what to do about the stairs, and the railing...

Snow Day

Martin Luther King day brought us our first real measurable snow of the season. Sam and the boys spent much of the day outside playing the snow. They shoveled, made snowmen, threw snowballs, made snow angels, and even sledded down the front and back yards. Noah really took to sledding, and probably could have kept going for hours longer.

The Magic Tree House

A month or so ago, I checked out "The Magic Tree House" on Audiobook. The first 9 books came in one case, and Harrison had listened to all of them in less than a week. Next time we went to the library, he got the rest that the library had, and has listened to all of them (38 to be exact) many, many times. For Christmas my mom got him paperbacks of the first 16. He carries them everywhere, and can read them pretty much independantly. Noah also likes to "read" them, and they will occupy themselves for long stretches of time just reading and looking at the books. I love that they are loving books.

Morning Surprise

Thursday morning we woke up to an unexpected (and not predicted) light dusting of snow. Before I could even get the boys to eat breakfast, they were putting on snow gear to go play, and build a snow man. They quickly found that the snow was extremely powdery, and would not ball at all, but that didn't stop the from having fun. They made snow "drifts" as they called them, by pushing all the snow into big piles, and they were quite proud of their work.

5 Months

Olivia is 5 months old now - and really showing a lot of personality. She is constantly grabbing and putting any and everything into her mouth. This includes, but is not limited to: toys, fingers, noses, shirts, blankets, buttons, ears, chins, cameras, binkies, necklaces, paper, watches, etc., etc., etc. She hasn't taken to a pacifier or her thumb or fingers, and much prefers gnawing and chewing to sucking. She shrieks and screams rather than fussing or crying. The other day at church Sam was holding her and talking to someone when she let out one of her loud shrieks. They thought that the fire alarm had gone off. Yes, she's that loud. She can roll from front to back, and back to front, and spins fairly well, allowing herself to move quite a bit. She's already pushing up onto her knees at times, and I'm afraid she may be crawling soon. She can sit up, but doesn't really like to, and almost immediately topples over so she can get where she wants to so she can grab what she wants and put in in her mouth. Her hair is coming in, and it floats above her head like a cloud. She slept through the night once (the night before Thanksgiving), but has made progress to only getting up once during the night on most nights. She loves watching her brothers, and smiles at them almost constantly. She does really well in the car now, easily falling asleep, and rarely fusses when she's awake. We love her, and she is a joy to have in our family!