Family News

It started yesterday, and is nearly done today: the house transformation.
And we had a cool Christmas, too.
I stayed up late moving some furniture and finishing a little “Melody” dollhouse doll (each family member had a doll in their stocking) to go with the dollhouse we gave the girls this year.
Both girls loved their little parka [...]

Again, from Jen’s idea.
~ ~ 1 ~ ~
Jay’s talking about wanting a pellet-burning stove.  I’m asking where it will go.
I’m asking for a double bed with drawers.  It will take up less room (in our little room) than the queen-sized bed (we never use all that space anyway), and let us get rid of at [...]

-6.2 degrees F on the thermometer when I got back.
And when I got back I realized I’d been wearing my expensive birthday-present earings on a cold walk in the soft snow.
It got my heart beating imagining having to look for one of them out in the dark.
Challenges “Needle in the haystack” with “Earring in the [...]

I have this game I bought a couple years ago to use for the storytelling class I was developing at the time.
Looking for something new to do with the girls (I’m experimenting with letting Melody skip naps) I pulled it out and tried on the fly to see if I could adapt it to their [...]

Chocolate lab, already semi-trained, 3-years-old and loves to cuddle.
The girls adore her and we’re teaching Elisha that “long-suffering” does *not* equal asking for more suffering.
I am so thankful to have found her.
The short story: We’ve been looking at the shelter a couple times a week the last few months.  We’ve looked at a number of [...]

But we’re on the way better.
On top of the general yuckiness we all feel, Melody seems to be in that rough transitional stage between keeping naps and leaving them behind.
This morning Melody desolved over something and wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.  I found her bubbling in her room and scooped her up, pretending she [...]

I have a passel of pictures to upload once pictures are working again, but for now I wanted to say our approach to Kindergarten has morphed a few times now.
I’m glad I haven’t been saying each thing as we were doing it, but to recap, we began with the intent of hammering out the “3 [...]

School started today all across the district, so yesterday I told Natasha she’d be starting too.
This seemed to bother her quite a bit, and she said she wasn’t ready and didn’t really want to start Kindergarten.  She was so (quietly) intense about it, I was ready to say, You’re only 5, we can wait, before [...]

I don’t want anyone to worry about my children’s education.
That said, I’m not very good at expressing myself when I attempt to dispel concerns.
Last Sunday a retired teacher noted the rapidly approaching school year and said, “I bet you’re really busy planning now!”
Did I say, “I began researching in January, stopped buying materials in March [...]

The whole, long story of thought and process.
Skipping the $500/month it would have cost us for two kids the first year.