Luke - Art Show/New Career

Luke had an art show/fundraiser at school this past week.  Since Paige and daddy were at Paige's skating lesson, Luke, Ali and I went to check out his works of art.

So many pieces of artwork, made the halls so colorful.  Luke knew exactly which was his -

 Now that most of the snow is gone and the weather is FINALLY warming up a bit we have been enjoying some outside time.  The kids love having a real driveway and sidewalks to ride their scooters and bikes.  Paige and I made a road with chalk one day.  We put in a stop sign in the road.  When Luke came home from school he was excited to join in but wasn't diggin' the fact that he has to stop at a stop sign so he fixed that by making a shortcut with no stop sign.  Very clever Luke!

BREAKING NEWS!  After years of wanting to be a fire ranger when he grows up, Luke has switched career paths.  He informed us this week that he is going to become an author because in his words "I like to make books better than I like animals" Sounds like solid reasoning to me! He does love to make books.  He cranks out 4 or 5 a week mostly about animals but he does all the drawings and captions himself. I hate to throw them away but we could never keep them all, too many!

Ali - 4 Months

Paige and I took Ali to her 4 month apt today.  And it was a good thing she had lots of support because she got 4 shots and an oral vaccine.  YIKES! 

Our big lady is leveling out. Her stats are below:
Weight 14.12lbs - 64%
Height 25 - 75%
Head 16 1/8 - 63%

Duel band-aids :(


Ali's newest favorite thing to do is blow raspberries.  She loves this, I will post a video as it is quite funny.  No rolling yet but you can tell she wants to, just a bit hard getting that big belly in motion.  Still a good little pumpkin.  She is very agreeable and goes with the flow of what is going on in our crazy house.  She is a perfect third child!

It is pretty embarrassing when you go to a play date and one of the moms has an 8 month old that is the same size as Ali.  I spend half my free time running around to different stores exchanging her clothes for bigger sizes...but we love our big girl!!!

Here are the highlights from the month -

Peek Week -

Paige takes a little creative movement/ballet class on Saturday mornings.  This week was "peek week" so we got to go into the studio and see what the little ballerinas have been working on.  It was very cute.  Paige thinks this is the real deal like she is going to be cast in the Nutcracker.  She bounces around the house practicing her moves.

New Car -

Daddy got a new car this weekend.  Since our old Subaru was so good to us (we got 145k miles out of her w/only routine maintenance), we decided to repeat with the same car, newer model.  She's a zippy little thing but anything seems zippy after driving the Volvo for a while.  

Don

Ali is affectionately referred to by Jay and I as Don, as in Don Zimmer the former Yankee's Manager.  Early on, Jay suggested that she might look a bit like him so after googling him and once we both stopped laughing, we decided that sadly it was true.  It stuck and now I would say 50% of the time we lovingly refer to her as Don.

Sorry Ali, if you are reading this when you are all grown up and I'm in the nursing home, don't visit me any less!! Just know your mom and dad has a good sense of humor.

Girl Power -

We were at dinner the other night talking about something, I actually forget the topic, and Luke was asking questions something about the MAN that took care of something for us.  I said, “How do you know it was a man that would do that?”  He looked alarmingly at me and said, “well a women can’t do all the things because a women can’t be president”  That’s when I launched into my feminist speech to which Luke said, “well I know there are things that women can’t do that guys can do.”  He thought a minute and said, “I know! Wrestle polar bears!!! Women can’t wrestle polar bears, right mommy!”  To which I said, “You are right in that a women would never wrestle a polar bear but not because they CAN’T but because they are smart enough not to.  Men on the other hand….well, you’ve seen some of the things they wrestle on those animal shows.  Enough said”  Luke said, “Oh yeah. Why did god make all the girls smarter than the boys?  Like all the girls in my class are smart and get their spelling tests right and read really REALLY good!  The boys in my class aren’t as good at that stuff.  And for Class Dojo*, the girls NEVER get negative points and the boys do.”  “See Luke” I said, “now you are catching on.  Don’t count girls out, we are smart cookies!”

*Class Dojo is a behavior type system that our teacher uses.  The kids get positive and negative points throughout the day for good/bad behaviors and have a running weekly percentage.  It is pretty cool. So Jay and I can follow along with how Luke is doing on the website or better yet we downloaded the app to our phones and can click a couple times a day to see how he is doing.  Each night we can have a talk about the positives and negatives.

 

Luke is not a huge fan of homework. It is much like pulling teeth to get him to sit down and do his homework at night.  The other night, while sitting down to do his homework, Luke said, “Who invented homework because I really wish they didn’t do that.  I wish they would have invented something different than homework, something cooler.  I REALLY wish they thought of something else to invent.”

Just Paige....

As we get settled in our new town and seeing Luke no longer is in catholic school, we started going to Saturday night mass with the kids.  Luke is used to mass (which he told Paige is a fancy word for church) from going at school for three years but little Paige has little exposure to going to mass.  This became abundantly clear when mass began, the music started and the priest walked down the aisle and Paige got an excited look on her face and whispered to me “mommy, the king is here!”

 

Paige was having a playdate with a little friend, Lauren, from her new preschool.  The girls were upstairs pretending they were going to the beach.  When it was time to go, Lauren’s mom and I went upstairs.  The girls were in full on bikinis with beach towels…the whole thing.  As Lauren’s mom was trying to collect her things and find Lauren’s missing underwear she said “oh, Lauren you shouldn’t have taken your underwear off."  Paige looked at her and said, “That’s OK if Lauren sees my vagina because we are friends.”

I’m pretty sure we won’t be getting a call back to have another playdate with Lauren anytime soon.

Our little model :)

 

 

What have we been up to?!?

This winter has been tough with all the snow but we have been doing our best to keep busy . Here is some of what we've been up to.....

 

Sleepovers with new friends.  Luke with his new neighbor friend Ben.  Paige was at Ben's sister's house for a sleepover so it worked out nice.  Here they are, acting like they have headaches -

 Daddy took No. 1 and No. 2 to a minor league hockey game and to see Chase play in the big rink.  Lots of fun -

 We then left Daddy and Ali at home and headed to a trampoline place with the five families & lunch after.  That place was a zoo but kids had fun and were able to work off some winter energy -

 We headed to the cape to have dinner with Grampy but not before we pit stopped at the indoor pool, so fun!

 Paige has been talking a science experiment class at her preschool on Monday afternoons.  She comes home with a project each week.  She loves showing us at night.  Here is her lava lamp she made one week -

 Lots of just hangin out -

 Mommy and Paige made monster cookies one day.  Surprise for Luke when he came home from school -

John boy -

I’m embarrassed to not have done this sooner but better late than never I suppose.  Introducing the newest member of our family, John.  John joined us in late January.  Apparently Daddy promised Luke a fish after we moved (luckily it wasn’t something bigger).  John was a novelty for about 2.3 minutes.  Then everyone was onto the next thing.  Now, I hate to say it, John is little more than another item on mommy’s “to do” list.  Feed John – check!  Change John’s water – check!  John lives in Luke’s room.  Hopefully John doesn’t have longevity in his genes as mommy is already over John too…sorry John!