Playing Trouble with Daddy & Mommy, then enjoying a wrestling/snuggling match with Daddy while Mommy makes homemade cinnamon-raisin bread...
Having a catnip feast, then beating up her alpaca-fiber toy from Grandma...
Ahhh, Saturday at home...how we love thee!
I have long wanted a fishing net to go in our nautical-themed bathroom, and when we were on our anniversary trip this past summer, we found one and bought it. It's been sitting in the closet waiting for the day that I have time to paint the bathroom first...but last week I visited a friend's house and she had a net strung up with shells in it and I decided that enough is enough! I can't wait until everything is perfect, because "perfect" just isn't going to happen often at this stage of my life! So I promptly put up my net, put in some of the shells that we found on "our" beach in Clearwater, and it's lovely. Now every time I walk past the bathroom, it makes me smile! 
Me collecting shells on "our" beach ~
Charlie, Lauren, & David as Civil War characters
Charlie & Abigail sending a telegram
All of the kids
And a rare sight indeed -- a picture of Greta & me!
I loved this sign from the 1920s...its quirky drama struck me as very humorous!
Lately Baker has had moments of actually acting like a real dog...he has become fascinated with the birds and squirrels and loves to be outside stalking, pointing, and chasing. If you look closely in this picture, you can see the squirrel on the side of the tree; Baker held this point, perfectly still, for at least twenty minutes the other day. He even held the point when it started raining (which is an amazing feat because he is petrified of rain and has been known to refuse for hours to go out and do his business just because it was raining!).
(For those of you unfamiliar with the Brittany breed, they are hunting dogs, who "point" at game with their nose to alert their master, and trained dogs also learn to flush out the game on command...)
We discovered that the sleepovers of 3/4/5 year old girls are not all that different than teenage girl sleepovers, except that they don't stay up as late, and (thankfully) boys hold no interest at this age! It was a riot to watch the girls squeal, giggle, exclaim over each other's pajamas, get matching braids, and act totally girlie as we got ready for bed.
Here's the whole crew at dinnertime having an "indoor picnic" and watching a video...
And today, this is the outfit he was wearing when he showed up for school...and apparently he felt quite manly in it...
Abigail has a fascination with words of any sort...hence the fact that she has been reading (as in, really reading) for a year or so now. She also has a pretty extensive sign language vocabulary, and has recently added to her interests the art of making up her own words. Some recent additions are "badip" (pronounced BAD-ipp), which means to march up the stairs like a soldier, and "dashable", which means something that makes your tummy growl. These aren't one-time-use words; she includes them as part of her regular vocabulary.
She also recently complained that "Mommy, I want to see [whatever it was]!!!" When I reminded her that she had already had a turn, she thought for a minute and then matter-of-factly replied, "Oh yeah. Well, Mommy, 'I want to' actually means 'I already did'."
This past weekend she drew a picture for Bruce and wrote on it "Sid Dei", which, she explained, is properly pronounced "Side Day". She also explained that it looks like "sid" but is pronounced "side" because "Sid Dei" is Spanish for "To Daddy."
Recently she was saying a word that I just couldn't figure out, so I asked her to spell it. With a very put-out tone (due to my denseness), she said "Mommy, V-O-L-U-M-E, that's what I said." Well. Okay then.
Yesterday evening for about half an hour she decided that we could only talk in sign language, without speech. She went from the heretofore randomly-used single-word signs to stringing all of the signs into complete sentences, and even fingerspelling a few words for which she didn't know the signs.
Perhaps we'll be starting Latin sooner than we had originally planned...
My response was "Oh, cool!!!", after which Bruce informed me that I was in the mere 1% of the population who would respond that way, and then he happily left for work and left me to happily deal with the insects! I ended up collecting as many as I could in a container and we spent over an hour studying them, doing research on the Internet to learn all we could about our new guests, and figuring out if raising them was a viable option (we're giving it a try).
I learned a ton of fascinating things about them. (I know everybody's not as interested as I am, so I won't go into it all, but just in case, there are a couple of informative sites here and here.) I did learn that the egg sac of a praying mantis is called an ootheca (pronounced oh-uh-THEH-kuh). The eggs are laid outside in the autumn, and then once temperatures reach 70 degrees, they will hatch in 2-8 weeks. (Let's see...we bought our tree on Dec. 5th, and so tomorrow would have been seven weeks since we brought the ootheca in to 70ish temperatures. Bingo.)
I never would have guessed that at any point in my life I would both purchase and attempt to propogate fruit flies, but guess what mantis nymphs eat? Yup. Fruit flies. Fortunately, PetSmart sells flightless fruit flies. That way the ones that escape while I try to feed them to our young mantises merely crawl around until I catch them, instead of flying away to form a second insect infestation in my house! So far the (apparently not-so-very-bright) mantises haven't figured out that they're supposed to eat the flies. Whenever one of the flies crawls near, the mantises all scatter frantically to escape it. Hopefully instinct will kick in soon! Mantises also tend strongly toward cannibalism, so that should get interesting, too.
I could keep rambling, but I'll try to restrain myself. This has just been so very fascinating for both me and the kids! David likes them; he recalled what we learned earlier this year about insects and is anxious for them to start eating so that he can see their chewing mouths in action; he's been using his magnifying glass to try to see their compound eyes and jointed legs. Abigail thinks they're "sweet" and calls them "pretty mantises"instead of "praying mantises".
Even Molly was fascinated...
Gaggle of grandchildren!
First annual grandkids' Christmas concert
When I mentioned a while back to my friend Greta that I wanted a supplemental grammar book, she recommended the book First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise. After looking through the book, I decided that it was exactly what I was looking for, and so we got a copy over Christmas break and started it this week. I'm very excited about it! (I won't go into details about the book itself since most of you won't really care anyway -- but for those of you in a homeschooling situation, it's worth a look!)
Below is a picture of the kids with their pictures illustrating the poem "The Caterpillar" (C. Rosetti).
Their pictures started out as a simple caterpillar on a "leaf or stalk" but then their imaginations took over and the pictures got rather creative. That tends to be the way of it with my kids. Now mind you, sometimes I give them very particular instructions that they have to follow closely; that is, after all, a skill that they need to learn. But for the most part at this stage, as long as they include the main gist of the assignment, I leave them alone and let their imaginations soar. It's so much fun to watch what they come up with!
On that note, below is a picture of David's spelling paper this week. The last instruction of the paper was to draw a clown ("clown" is one of his spelling words). As you can see from the picture, it started with a clown...and then morphed into a clown with a power saw, a cannon, and four special tools that "drill into the ground and then spin around to shovel the dirt out and then spin around again to drill some more" -- the stuff in that brain of his is quite fascinating!!!
Now the kids will practice their piano, then enjoy some playtime, and I will do some housework and start another organization project. This is the month that inspires me to clean out and get organized, so I'll squeeze as much of that worthy task in as I can before the month runs out of its inspirational steam!
