What?

This is what I found last night when I realized Williams light was still on a good hour after his bedtime. Apparently, the light was so bright, he needed something to shield his eyes. I'll admit the unexpected eyes staring back at me were a most unsettling discovery...

Amelia

Amelia has been what my grandma would say is "full of the dickens". Which is North Dakotan grandma speak to say she is been in rare form and full of memorable quips. Watch for a number of these to show up here over the next few days.
***
Amelia was in the kitchen working away at a project involving scissors, glue and about 5.9 billion scraps of paper. And she's singing.

"Oats and beans and garlic grow, oh oats and beans and garlic grow. You and I and everyone know how oats and beans and garlic grow."

Sent from my iPhone

Hide and seek

Gemma loves to hide. Her favorite part is to hear you calling her name and then peeking out to see your face. Can you find her hiding spot in the pictures below?

Amelia writes

Amelia loves to trace letters while William does homework. It allows her to be a "big kid" AND she loves the colorful markers to uses to trace. So proud of you Amelia!

Amelia v.4.5

Amelia is 4 and a half today! We are so proud of our big girl. She is...well... A lot of things. She is stubborn, inquisitive, silly, creative, too smart for her own good, has personality to spare and most importantly, ours.

Amelia is SO motivated by school work and learning. She can often be found breathing hard down William's neck as we do school work. She just cannot wait to go to kindergarten. She is ready! She is reading, doing simple addition and subtraction problems and writing well. She can also do the monkey bars solo as of this month, so we can check that one off the list (do we have video John?).

Amelia started her ballet classes again and enjoys this activity so much. We are proud of how hard she is working in this class.

With William in school all day, Amelia and I have finally had time to work on her letter writing and other skills while Gemma sleeps. This little girl is so smart (I'm her mama, in supposed to brag! Plus, it is true.). There really isn't anything she can't do. Her biggest problem is that everything comes so easily she gets frustrated quickly when she doesn't understand something. We're working on it.

She is also working hard on her big sister role. She gets to spend a lot more time playing with Gemma now that her first playmate (William) is in school. It has been very fun to see Amelia emerge as the older sister with Gemma. Fun and terrifying at the same time because Amelia believes she can do everything she sees me/John/William do with Gemma. For example, she thinks she can lift Gemma down off of a table without help or even lift her out of the crib. Terrifying.

The take home message is this: we love this little girl to the moon and back. Good days, bad days and all the in betweens Amelia Ann, we love you!

Gemma's Secret Place

Gemma seems to not like the vacuum, yet she can't seem to stay away. So usually we end up carrying her while vacuuming. When I was vacuuming her room, she spotted some toys that needed to be rescued. I put her down the turned away for a bit to pick up some other stuff. When I turned back, Gemma was gone. I figured she must have gone into her secret place.

William Versus the Bonnethead Shark

The Bonnethead shark is the smallest of the hammerhead shark species.