winter blahs

I realized that I haven't posted anything except Iris's birthday in February and that actually happened in January.
The middle of winter isnt that exciting around here I guess. We have been doing lots of school.
Serena is reading and loving it :) Math is fun and I am so glad that she likes it. We started Spanish and that is also neat. We took a Spanish/English dictionary we have and looked up things around the house and labeled them, that is a really good way to learn the names of things. I just had to start doing school with Iris because she was quite unruly if she had nothing to do while I was doing school with Serena, so I have been printing out alphabet books for her to color a different letter everyday and we are going to collect all 26 to read to her as she is learning the letter sounds. When I do math with Serena I give her one of the preschool math readiness sheets froma book that I had lying around and she likes that. We just finished a unit on money and that was fun because I could give her a handful of pennies to count and stack and then They both love to play store, so my house is not only labeled with spanish words many things also have price tags and everything is under $1, lol.
The picture above.....Xavier was turning the tv off and on and the volume up and down while anyone was trying to watch so I had the great idea to put the toy boxes in front of the TV to keep him from being able to reach the buttons worked great for a couple weeks. There he is sitting inside the toybox and soon he will scooch up and turn the tv on or off or the volume up or down.:) We have been having Serena take him far down the hallway everytime he does it hoping that this will serve as some kind of "natural consequence" that would disude him, He is unphased.But sometimes he gets distracted on the way back into the living room which gives us a break for a bit :) Spring is coming and hopefully that willmean more posts.

Iris is three

Iris's Big day was the 28th :) (of january)
The day was very exciting for her because we had a big snow and her older brother came and took her and Serena and Dad sledding. No pictures of that, Mom didn't go and no one wanted to be responsible for the camera in the snow; ) But she had a great time, but so great she came home and fell asleep before dinner and presents and cake! We had to send Kyle, Jordon and Ricky away without eating any cake.
When Iris did wake up She opened her presents,
she is wearing one of them in the picture to the left.


Here she is having her cake, in the middle of the night. You may notice that before Mommy was up and ready to sing happy birthday some girls helped themselves to a piece of the cake, or two.











Iris requested a strawberry cake, which I managed to deliver with no red dyes, woohoo!

Eagle days

The kids and I enjoyed a presentation at the nature center about eagles today. Serena took these great pictures of the bald eagle.
Her name is phoenix and today she was quite vocal, you see the picture of her with her beak
open she is calling loudly.






















Before the presentatio0n the kids got to hang out and play with the nature exhibits.
Xavier is holding a baby possum











Iris is loving a red fox.













Serena is holding a cardinal, one of several birds that she held. She is still so very interested in animals and how to care for them, she wants to be a zoologist who lives on a farm when she grows up :)

faces I love

random pictures of my littlest ones

Red belt

Serena has moved up to Ninja red.
next is black and then its on to the big kids class.

Owl prowl

Our local nature center had an owl prowl last weekend. we bundled up and went into the woods to see if we could find an owl, no luck but thats ok because the zoo brought owls for us to look at :)
We got to see a screech owl, a bard owl and a great horned owl, pictured.
Serena impressed the presenter with her question, "do owls have sticky feet?"
I didnt know what she was talking about
but the presenter did, " lots of raptors have tiny little nubs on the bottom of there talons that helps them to grip prey she explained, but owls do not have this feature probably because their prey is rarely wet, or wiggly after the initial grab."
We had a good time.

our x baby is one !!!

The girls assisted making this cake and they picked the flavor
, carrot :) yumo












He cant wait to dig in.













he agrees, YUMO













I think he looks so angelic in this picture, I barely see the frosting mess :)












Serena helps Xavier open his presents













Kyle and Jordon help Xavier get into his presents.