All three children love to sit at the table together and draw in the afternoons. I'm surprised by the amount of time Ruby spends sitting up there writing and drawing.
We are trying to pull ourselves up out of the February doldrums. Noses are still running, and Ruby has many more days of medicine, but the daylilies are coming up, and I saw four Eastern Bluebirds at the children's school last week.
John's drawing and letters are coming along. He has a completely difference process than Ella did, and I'm enjoying letting him approach them at his own pace.
She is so tired of sharing her room with her little brother. I thought it would take longer, and there is really nothing we can do about it.
Ruby calls the littlest doll inside the set of nesting dolls, "babushka baby".
This afternoon she played the harmonica to the jack in the box in an attempt to get him to pop out.
We are wallowing in some sickness around here. All I do is walk around behind John picking up tissues. Ella turned green after her bath tonight and sat in the bathroom with a glass of ice water.
We'll just have to work through it.
I went on a Valentine's day hike with this guy, the big one on the right. We climbed up two miles through deep albeit packed snow to see the frozen Cascade Falls. We left the children with friends and headed out into the blissfully quiet woods.
We've been feeding the birds outside the kitchen window, and Ruby set up the heart shaped stool so she'd have a place to sit when she comes to watch the birds. This afternoon we put lots of birdseed on the back deck as well and had many visits from the cardinals, nuthatches, titmice, and chickadees. This photo is my Valentine to all of you.
I love learning to make something new. I have to do it after the children go to bed, and I'm so afraid that I'm going to lose my place and not know how to get back.
Ella and I did a friendship bracelet booth for a school fundraiser this weekend. Here's Ella wearing the yarn. She made the signs for the booth and very patiently taught a lot of kids how to make them. She has been knitting quite well lately with this very same cotton. A presentation on the Peace Corps on the school's service day really caught her attention, and now she counts her Peace Corps work as part of her school calendar. The second graders are folding origami cranes to make mobiles to sell to make money for their service project.
