Daddy's Cell Phone Photo Dump

 Holiday on Halloween at school.  That's her teacher, Mrs. Carr behind her.

 Still Halloween...showing off the lost tooth from earlier in the day.

Still Halloween going trick-or-treating with the kids and some friends.

Birthday brunch for Daddy's birthday. 

Some shots of dance class.

Johnny at a friend's birthday party.

"Boys"

Christmas Eve with new homemade fleece blankies that Aunt Alexis made.

At the Hat 'N Boots Park.

I'm glad they did something with it.

I believe this was Green Lake.

This is a donkey Holiday drew for the 'Pin the tail on the donkey' game at Kids Co.

One of the kids activities at the Boat Show.

Just looks like fun to me.  Johnny was ready to strip down to his diaper and jump in.

Last week at a park by our house.  She's holding 'Baby Dragon' that she made at school.  She takes it in the car with her everywhere and sleeps with it every night along with a couple other beloved stuffies.

Johnny is an expert climber now.

What'd I tell ya.

Who knows what's on my cell phone right now.

Learning Progresses

So Holiday gets homework to do Monday through Thursdays typically (unless school is closed any of those days).  It's not hard stuff, just enough to get them in the habit of doing homework.  The biggest challenge is keeping Holiday focused when she'd rather play.  I bought a couple sets of reader books for her for practice and we go over them on nights where we have extra time.  I have to say there's been some marked improvement.  I don't know if it's my efforts or the school's but something is working.  That's exciting.  Last week I noticed that Johnny is starting to visually recognize numbers now. That's a pretty big deal too.  Johnny has a lot more purpose to his drawings than he used to. David and I were able to get out for a date night on Saturday and saw the final installment of The Hobbit.  The Prestons were able to babysit for us, the kids always love going there.  You'd think they'd pass out in the car from being that excited that long.  They kind of feed off each other's energy.  Holiday did fall asleep as I was singing to her at bedtime.  I was able to fit in a decent weeding session yesterday between rain storms and got a bunch of junk cleared out.  It's pretty much ready for more soil and bark in the front now.  The pink current is blooming and the rhubarb is just coming up.  It'll be time for pruning roses and perennials soon.  The grass needs to be mowed but since there's been so much rain our back yard is really waterlogged right now, some places even has standing water.  Can't really mow on that.  I can work on weeding and trimming bushes in the meantime.

Little Conversations

This is a paraphrase between Holiday and Johnny:

(Holiday with intensity):  "I have some bad news Johnny."
(Johnny with max drama):  "Oh, no."
(Holiday): "I got punched in the jaw today."
(Johnny with even more drama): "Oh, NO!"
(Holiday with more positive inflection):  "But I'm feeling better now."
(Johnny with relief): "Whew!"