Pre-Christmas Christmas Post

I wrote my Christmas letter today. I had the great idea to copy and paste it onto my blog. But blogger won't let me paste. So now I'm frustrated and don't want to typre it all over again. It's been almost 3 months since I posted last. I suck, I know. A friend of mine told me she's memorized my last post she's read it so many times. So this post is dedicated to Cecelia, so she can have something new to memorize :)

The last three months haven't been to eventful. I joined a quilter's Guild. That has been a blast. We have meetings once a month and last week had a brunch where we didn't talk much because we were laughing too hard. I'm the youngest by at least 15 years. women there have been quilting longer than I have been alive. I love it. and now I'm being showered with patterns and fabric and know-how like you'd never believe.

Libby still loves school. she's still not wild about "Uncle Wiggley", but I've noticed her attention span has increased as has her reading comprehension, and I think Uncle Wiggley is respnsible for that, so I make her suffer through. I got her a new workbook for Christmas so she can do as many worksheets as she wants during Christmas break. She's finally mastered rhyming if she can see the word. We've moved on to rhyming without her being able to see the word. She's a very visual learner, I've noticed, but she's doing well with it. At the moment I'm researching the different math programs offered by Sonlight and am trying to figure out which would be best for Libby. We've decided to introduce Spanish next year as well, but haven't decided if we should start with Muzzy or Rosetta Stone. I'm leaning towards Muzzy for now, and moving on to Rosetta stone when she's a bit older. Libby participated in a horse show in October. she had a blast. We have been wprking on her posture this fall, as well as the way she holds the reins. We're also trying to get her speak loudly and clearly enough for Stormy to actually obey her. she loves to make him go in circles. I'm impressed with her steering, but her stopping needs some work! Stormy will sometimes take off at a trot, and instead of saying "whoa!" she'll say "whee! run, Stormy, run!" That doesn't help the situation!

Jaina is an absolute hoot. She says the funniest things. We just crack up all day. She has developed an unexplainable fear of dogs bigger than a cat. Thankfully, most of the dogs she sees on our street are small. She likes to get books about little dogs from the library and she'll look at them and say "I love little dogs. I don't love big dogs." Jaina decided about a week ago that she was pretty much done with diapers. I even take her to the store and the park in underwear. No accidents in public and very few at home. It took a while to convince her to #2 in the toilet, but we're making progress. When she's really tired she'll ask for a diaper, almost like she's just too worn out to be on alert.

Malachi is a walking disaster. In the last month he's cracked his forhead open twice, and bit clean through his bottom lip. We do a lot of patching up in this house. He's generally pretty happy, and likes to wrestle and be thrown around. But when he's tired he likes to snuggle, which is new to John and I. The girls were never big on snuggling. Malachi plays hard, and falls asleep in his high chair a lot. He loves to make music, shaking and banging anything that can be shook or banged on. He also likes to color on the walls, which makes be twitchy, because I don't have any touch-up paint. My landlord said he'll just paint over it all when we move, but I can't stand having ametuer wall art. I spent hours a fews weeks ago cleaning the walls with powdered comet and a toothbrush, but Malachi made short work of my clean walls. I'm going to lose it one of these days, I just know it! Good thing he's so cute.

John's been travelling to Pittsburgh, PA lately. 3 weeks in Novemeber he was there. He missed all the snow, thankfully. But he's due to go back in January, which is sure to be ugly!

That's all for now.