Holiday's Barnyard Moosical

Last night we attended the Kindergarten's Barnyard Moosical at Adams for Holiday's class.  Each class was dressed as a different animal, Holiday's was goats so they all wore headbands with little goat horns and goat ears on them with goat beards taped to their little chins.  After we had dropped Holiday off at her class to get ready she chased us down the hall crying that she didn't want us to leave.  So we explained to her that we weren't leaving and just trying to find a place to sit in the cafeteria to see her show and David took her back to her class.  It was a packed house, we were able to find seats in the very back (and we were there early) but the event ended up being standing room only.  When her class filed in it looked like Holiday was okay.  Johnny was being held up so he could see and he belts out, "HI, HOLIDAY!!!" as the room was getting quieter in anticipation of the show starting.  I figure that only helped Holiday get the moral support she was needing.  But she finally saw us and smiled and waved.  She could see her Daddy holding up a camera so she held her pose for quite a while as the other kids were finding their spots on stage.  She didn't realize at first that he was taking a video and was not going to put the camera down.  Eventually she stopped doing the 'vogue'.  It was pretty cute.  Afterwards it was still light out so we let them play on the playground for a while.  They were having so much fun that naturally they didn't want to leave.  Thank goodness they fell asleep fast after being tucked in for the night.

Pictures and Potty News!

Johnny's bath time.

This was when we put up the tree this year.

Johnny likes boxes.

Holiday was pretty helpful with decorating the tree.

Snuggle time!

Her two bottom adult teeth are growing in.

All of us in Christmas pajamas from Grandma Linda.

I get out of the shower and find this elaborate set up by Daddy and Johnny.

Snack time in the 'tent'.

Silly Johnny.

Too cute.

Daddy's silly too.  Holiday just likes to pose for the camera.

This was after his haircut a few weeks ago.

He looks so grown up now.

As for new updates...Johnny went potty for the first time in the big toilet last night.  He's sat on it a bunch of times but nothing has happened.  Holiday has a wiggly upper front tooth.  Daddy mowed the lawn last Saturday.  February people...February.  Usually the first mow happens in April.  This winter has been crazy mild.  I'm hoping to replace the greenhouse when we can find one in stock.  Our front yard is looking pretty decent right now with all the weeding, new bark, mowing and rose trimming done.  Now all that has to happen to the back yard.  I think a lot of stuff needs to be cleaned off too.  Moss is growing EVERYWHERE!

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!"

Coming out of the sickness and other winter happenings

Well, there hasn't been too much to report lately.  We've had sickness off and on which is typical for us this time of year.  Johnny was pretty sick last weekend.  The fever was the worst part but I already was armed with children's Tylenol so I was covered.  Sunday morning he woke up at 4:30 am needing another dose.  He wanted to get up and cried hard when we didn't let him.  After a half hour of that and the medicine had kicked in, I was able to sing him back down to sleep.  I got everyone up at 8:00 am.  By then, Johnny was just a little sweat ball.  His pajamas were soaked in sweat and he was not happy to get stripped right then.  His little hands were even pruney, even more so than at bath time.  But because he was able to sweat his fever out, it broke and he improved quickly after that.  There's been lots of coughing from everybody (except me).  I did feel pressure on my chest for a couple days which did seem weird that I didn't cough.  But that might be because I hate coughing so much that I will myself not to do it.  Hate hearing people cough, hate coughing myself because it gives me headaches.  I guess we all have our qwirks.  David's done with the boat show, with the overtime in-person part at least.  We all went to the boat show Sunday evening.  The kids explored a couple boats and played in the kids section.  They built (mommy helped a lot) a couple boats, jumped on a huge trampoline and puttered around in a couple of paddle boats.  That took Johnny a few minutes to figure out.  Every time Holiday crashed into him they'd both laugh really hard.  It was all good though, those boats were built with crashing in mind.  I'm starting to evaluate my yard again.  I'll need to replace that greenhouse, the old one is disintegrating slowly.  We'll need to use some moss killer this year and will likely need to re-seed as a result of that.  Now that the dead leaves are finally gone I can move on to the weeds and bushes.  The candytuft and crocuses are starting the bloom and the roses are getting little buds on them.  I made applesauce a couple weeks ago and it turned out really well.  Next time I'll cut back a little more on the sugar and make sure I budget for 4 hours of time.  My recipe for 8 jars needed 18 apples and it takes a long time to peel, core and chop up that many.  It didn't take too long to cook it down.  Using the food processor to bring the cooked apples down to sauce did take some time too just not as long as the prep did.  David was talking about chutneys so maybe I'll look at those recipes next.

Getting back on track after the holidays

Well, we had a terrific Christmas.  The kids got a lot of stuff and plenty of activities to do.  The Tuesday before Christmas we went downtown and Johnny had his turn to see Santa.  It was funny.  When he was told it was his turn he broke out into a run onto Santa's lap.  It surprised everybody but, hey, keeps us on our toes, right?  The got to ride the carousel and check out the big Christmas tree and the Macy's Star and the Macy's trains.  On Christmas Eve we went to my brother Chris's house and got to see the extended family that lives in the area.  The cousins always like to play together.  The kids went to bed late that night but they slept in till 8 am (which is a record by the way).  Both got lots of cool stuff.  We took down the tree two days later partly because we put everything up early this year and we needed the room to get the new stuff settled.  We moved the play kitchen back into the living room and put all Holiday's 'Bunny House' stuff in her room so she can keep it together.  I still need to go through the toys and their bedrooms to purge out anything we don't need anymore.  I'm kind of in the middle of several projects.  One of which is deep cleaning the kitchen.  I just didn't realize how much it needed it until I was on a ladder inches away.  Thank God for Mr. Clean erasers. I'll be marching from room to room as needed till it's done.  I'm starting to set up again for another round of canning, this time applesauce.  I'm also planning my garden, what to plant from seed in the greenhouse, what I want to start as seedlings, when to replace the greenhouse, etc.  It changes every year.  Johnny had a cold but he's better.  Holly's been a little sniffly but it doesn't seem bad.  I've had a touch of something since last Wednesday but I think I'm on the downhill side of it now.  It's not bad except for the congestion.  I'm trying to establish a committed schedule for working out, it's all about balancing everything.  But we're all back in the swing of work/school/daycare again, getting back into a rhythm before the Boat Show starts (ack!).  Unfortunately we've had a loss for David's side of the family.  John Hack, dad to David's best friend Dan growing up, passed away over the Christmas break.  David drove back to his home town of Goldendale for the memorial service.  The journey went well enough for him, but funerals can be kind of tough to get through, especially when they play Taps (John was a Viet Nam war vet).  The kids and I stayed home and rode the bus for dance class.