A BREAK IN THE WEATHER

Last Friday, we had a break in the weather and took the chance to visit a playground with the kids. As you can see, they were ready to run! This particular playground may be the nicest one in our area. It's down by the Mon River, so it has a nice view too.

There was a duck searching for food and entirely ignoring us, nearby.

From the top of the big kids' playground, this is the view of the little kids' playground.

That's the Star City Bridge in the background.

Climbing up through a tire tunnel.

Train stop.

The playground has all kinds of passageways and tunnels. They love to chase each other around and play tag.

Taking a breather from running from dad.

Looking for dad, ready to run again.

This is what we would call a silly Sammy face. He usually does it when he's being a penguin.

Ben loves the poles.

Wandering around, trying to keep up.

Running from dad too.

Caught him!

A view from the top...in the other direction.

The river. :-)

There's Cecily.

Getting good at slides.

Hi mom.

Three can fit on these swings!

They tried it out standing too.

A turn for the littler ones.

I love this one.

The adults did some playing too.

Peek.

By the time we left, it was dark.

A BENJAMIN POST

I happen to have some pictures of Ben and a couple of things I can share about him, so I thought I'd do a post of just him. First, he has a new outfit. It makes me smile. I went to a children's resale store last week and bought several new pairs of pants for the boys because we're hitting that part of the winter where half of their pants have the knees worn through. One of the nice pairs in Ben's size happened to be overalls. I checked with him because he hasn't had any of those for a while. He said that sounded good. Another thing I ended up getting for him was a sweater from Hanna Andersson. It cost me $1.99, which is worth sharing since it was such a great deal. To the point, he woke up the next day and put on the sweater with the overalls and was so pleased with himself. I kept telling him how nice it looked and he was more and more pleased. I took a few photos of him in it. I probably needn't have done that because he obliged me by attempting to wear it for the next several days. I think it was the third day when I told him he needed to make a new choice. But here he is, in the "outfit."

Here he is with his pogo stick.

Practicing pulling the string of his brother's bow.

Today, Ben built some things from K'nex all by himself. He doesn't do a lot of building, so that was good for him. He emerged from his room with 3 creations.

This is a house that he did from a picture.

On the left is a "car" that he designed himself.

On the right is a helicopter that he made from a picture.

NEW WINDOWS

These are the men who have invaded my house this week. :-) New windows are worth the inconvenience. They were actually very nice and seemed to do a very good job.

DRY ERASE ART

As we were having our windows replaced this week, we changed around our school schedule to accomodate the workmen. I brought this dry erase board upstairs to improvise and in between lessons and activities, Sam would come and do drawings on it. They were pretty fun, so I took some pictures to share. As you can see, this one is of Peter.And Calvin got his portrait drawn too.

THE CRIB

Someone asked me, in the comments on the post about Amelia's room, if Cecily shared her room. I thought I'd add one more picture to show where the crib is. The girls will share this room, but Cecily is sleeping in the cradle in my room for these early months. It won't be long and she'll be sleeping in this crib next to Amelia. It really is fun to have a girl's room, finally.

SOME PICTURES OF CECILY

I'll start with my favorite. This is Cecily's baptism outfit. Peter and I bought it at an antique store before Amelia was born and she wore it for her baptism as well. Does her hair look red? It seems to stand out in these pictures.




She almost always has these two fingers in her mouth. She just generally gnaws on her fist too, but the fingers are her favorite.

suck, suck, suck

very tasty fingers, very good pasttime

Looking at the Hanna Andersson card that came with her Christmas present from Grammy.

You'll notice that when the head comes up, the feet come up. They're attached with a string.

More fingers.