Babbi

Well I haven't gotten a picture yet, but I wanted to jot down that just in time for Easter Ashley has learned her first sign. I do some baby signs with my babies, but the funny thing is they have all seemed to learn the sign and the word at the same time. But it's still a fun way to communicate with them. So Ashley's first sign she learned was "rabbit". She started doing it yesterday. She picked up a stuffed bunny, put it down, and then put her thumb and forefinger up together and hopped it up and down and said, "Babbi". She's done it several times since, but I haven't had my camera handy. But I'll try to get a picture of it this week if I can and add it to this post, because it's really cute to see. :)

Helping With Laundry

Yesterday I brought a load of laundry into the living room to fold, dumped it on the floor, and then left to do something. When I came back a couple of minutes later the girls were playing in it and had buried Ashley amongst the clothes, which she thought was great. Well, after that I began folding the clothes and Ashley pulled herself up on the basket where I was putting the folded clothes and began to try and pull the clothes out. I held her hand and said "No." Then she cried. Then we repeated this process several times. Finally she sat down and watched what I was doing. Then she picked up a little pink washcloth and put it IN the basket. Then she looked up at me as if to say, "Was that right, Mommy?" Of course I smiled real big and gushed over what a good girl she was for helping Mommy and she smiled real big and wrapped her little arms around my neck to give me one of her special hugs and patted my back. After I had put the laundry away I came back to find her sitting near the puppet basket, which had been dumped earlier that day and she was picking up puppets and putting them in the basket. I gushed again over her helping Mommy and then ran to get my camera, but by the time I took the picture, she had lost interest and was playing with a pop up bear box.

Piano Lessons

Alexis at the keyboard

Alexis getting ready to practice

Ashley likes to help

Emily says, "No, no honey." :)

We've been wanting to give Alexis piano lessons for some time now. She took a piano course at the community center almost 2 years ago and performed in a little recital and I've taught her a few little songs and some things here at home, but I really wanted her to have lessons from someone who really knows how to play. :) So we finally decided to start lessons and heard about this wonderful lady who lives about 25 minutes away in Pickerington, who was willing to come to our home! Yeah! So I got to thinking about Emily, who's only 4, but I thought might really enjoy and benefit from lessons as long as they were kept short and playful. So I asked her about it and even though she has never taught that young, she was willing to try it and knew of a great program meant for little ones her age. So she comes over and teaches Alexis for 30 minutes and then Emily for 15 minutes. The girls simply LOVE it and get so excited when they know she's coming. She's excellent with them. We've incorporated their practice into our homeschool time each day and they do great with it. She even does a recital with all her students at the end of May, so the girls are looking forward to that.

Library Storytime

I thought I'd share where we spend our Tuesday mornings. Every Tuesday we wake up and do a an hour or so of learning until about 10:00. Then we pack up and get into the car and drive to our local library for storytime. Every week they do a different theme. This week was farm animals. They read different stories about farm animals, sang songs, and played games. Afterwards they made a craft. It was a cute little baby chick hatching out of an egg. The girls look forward to going every week and Ashley really likes it too. Especially the singing parts. We always check out way too many books each week. By way too many I don't mean more than we can read, because we can easily read them all. I just mean we get so many it's a pain to haul them all into the house and back out again the following week to return. :)

The funny way we use playpens

I've always been against using playpens for the most part. My philosophy is that baby should be free to explore and to stay close to Mama. We never even once used playpens for the first two girls, even though we owned one, so we sold ours in Florida before we moved up. Well, when Ashley became mobile I started thinking, what if some emergency situation came up and I needed to keep her safe for a few minutes? (We also don't own a crib.) So I called my Mom, who had one, and she happily let me borrow it just in case I ever needed it. When we began moving everything around to move our homeschool room downstairs, there was stuff everywhere and Ashley was having loads of fun getting into everything she shouldn't be. So I had the thought, "Why not set up the playpen and see what happens?" Well, she loved it! She happily played in it for about 45 minutes while we continued to move everything around. We used it on her a few more times, but now the novelty has worn off so we don't put her in it anymore. But we found another use. One day Emily wanted to do tangrams during homeschool time in the homeschool room. (We have some designated baby safe areas in other rooms, but not in there. So we had the brilliant idea to put her in the playpen to keep the chokable pieces from our little human vacuum. Emily still meets the weight requirements and we found it to be a wonderful place for her to use that day. And Emily thought it was just hysterical and laughed and laughed about it. :)

Big Girl Food

Ashley is still for most part completely breastfed, but at 6 months we started introducing a few pureed fruits and veges and some brown rice baby cereal, but mostly she's been quite content being breastfed. Now, however she no longer wants pureed foods except for a few choice things. She wants big girl food she sees her sisters eating. And she loves to smear it all over herself, as she enjoys her meals. This is a picture of her enjoying tiny pasta mixed with various tiny pieces of vegetables. She loves this stuff.

Happy St. Patricks Day!

We had a fun St. Patrick's Day with the girls this year. We went to a St. Patrick's Day storytime at the library that morning. All the kids wore green and they had fun stories and songs that centered around different green animals. They made a cute green frog for the craft. Then that evening we had a little St. Patrick's Day family party. We all wore green, of course, and we had a sort of St. Patricks Day dinner. We had Irish stew, potatoes, and green pudding. Afterwards we played some fun St. Patricks Day games together. First we played shamrock hunt. We hid shamrocks all over the house along with a lucky pot of gold. The girls ran around finding all the shamrocks and Alexis found the lucky pot of gold. Then we danced an Irish jig. We put on Irish dancing music and danced really fast. After that we played, "Leprechan, Leprechan, who has your shamrock?" which is played like "Button button, who has the button?" Daddy of course got creative and hid the shamrock behind pictures on the wall to fool them. Finally we read a story all about the origins and traditions of St. Patricks Day. I think the best part was watching the baby laugh as she watched everyone dancing real fast. She thought we were pretty funny, and I must say we were. ;)

From the Beginning....

The other day Don and I noticed we hadn't seen Alexis for a little while so I started looking around the house. We finally found her upstairs, laying on a bed reading her scriptures. So I ran and got my camera and snapped this picture before she realized I was there. She's actually been reading her scriptures almost everyday since we got them for her. We haven't told her to read them. She just does it on her own. She's still in Genesis, of course, but she asked me when Jesus is going to be in the stories and I told her not until the New Testament and showed her where it was. She sighed real big and said, "Oh, that's going to be a long time". So I told her she could just go there now and read about Jesus, but she said, "No, Mommy. I want to read the whole scriptures all the way from the beginning." We'll see how it goes. ;)