girls and kitties

Meri's kitten, Padme, has found a cozy napping spot - the doll crib. It is really cute and the girls get such a kick out of finding her in the little crib sleeping.

March 6th our other 2 kitties, Luke and Leia turned 5 years old. Meri was very set on having a birthday party for them and making a cake so we went ahead with the festivities. Luke and Leia really didn't want to be in this picture so Mom and Dad had to hold on to them and Brayton took the picture so Shawn's head didn't quite make it into the picture, but anyhow, here's our kitty party. Since the party, Meri says she is going to write Santa a letter asking him when all the other pets birthdays are so we can celebrate each one!

Below are a couple pictures of the girls and I making peanut butter cookies together the other day. They love to bake and so do I. They especially love doing the criss crosses and licking the beater. The morning time is a fun time for us since it's just the girls and I. I'm really going to be sad when Meri starts 1st grade in the fall. Life so interesting how you just want to hang onto the moments and yet you want to see what is yet to come, and it always does come.

a bit about Orion

Orion started these agates and petrified wood in his rock tumbler on his birthday. A month later this is how they turned out. He was thrilled and all of us were excited to see how they turned out. Very smooth and shiny.
Orion has also become the "Cat's Cradle" King. Last Thanksgiving Aunt Shannon sat down with him and worked on learning all the fun string stuff you can do. - cat's cradle, cup and saucer, witch's broom, etc. He just loves it. Thank you Shannon for indulging him. He has really caught onto it and can do all the tricks in his little book now. The hardest one in my opinion is "Jacob's Ladder". Below is a picture of him with a finished Jacob's Ladder. He can work it in a matter of seconds.

You may also notice his giant bruise from one of his many rough housing antics.

You may also notice that he has all 4 of his front teeth missing. The first one fell out last October. The next one fell out after a sledding accident in February- it was hanging by a thread and he was bawling and screaming all afternoon afterward (the tooth still hanging on)- wouldn't let anyone near him and he wouldn't eat anything for fear of food touching his tooth. Finally at dinner time, a very hungry Orion still screaming was tackled to the floor by his mother (of course very gently:)) I held his arms and legs down and it wasn't hard to get to his tooth for all the screaming he was doing. I touched the tooth and it fell right out! Okay, so tooth number 3: again with the rough housing - Meri's knee knocked it out (it was already kind of loose). The last tooth was knocked out last week in Walmart. Upon walking into Walmart (all 7 of us- if that's not enought of a spectacle) Orion ran up to Shawn and must have hit Shawn's elbow because I turned around to Orion screaming and blood coming out of his mouth. So amidst all the Walmart customers staring I walked him to the bathroom to get him cleaned up. Oh, the joys! So now he is the great toothless wonder.

You may also notice - again with no shirt.

Orion is our very emotional, very full of life child. Actually they all are, but as the middle child in our family he makes it very sure and certain that he is not overlooked. He's always throwing us curve balls. We love our Ri Guy!

One more award

Meri earned a "Leading Reader" award a couple weeks ago. She was really surprised since they don't usually hand out reading awards to Kindergartners. For what ever reason, she has really caught on to reading and loves it. And what could be considered even more of an achievement, was the fact that she didn't run for the hills when Tommy Tiger shook her hand and gave her the award -in the past she has gone into super duper freak-out mode when she sees giant costumes wandering around. Below is a cute picture I took of her last Sunday wearing her "new" dress. We get lots of hand me downs from some of our new friends and the girls think it's like Christmas when we get a bag of clothes from them. So Meri was really happy with this new dress. And we use the flower from Auntie Shannon lots of times to top off outfits!

Box Top Winner X 2!

Our little Meri has been crazy about collecting box tops. She always spies them first here at home and gets dibs on them for her class. The kids' school collects all the box tops each month and then at the end of the month they draw 5 box tops out of a big jar (the kids are supposed to put their name on the back). Those 5 kids win a little tiger. A few months in to school Meri was so disappointed that she still hadn't won. But thanks to all of you who have sent her box tops - she has been a winner 2 months in a row! She loves her 2 little tigers that hang on her back pack. Thanks to all of you who sent her box tops!

Award winning students!

The science fair was last night and Brayton's robot project won him 1st place for 4th grade! He was very excited and proud. He built a robot with Shawn that sorts M&Ms by color. He compared the robot as a worker to himself as a worker. He found that he was a slower worker, but made less mistakes. The robot was faster, but made more mistakes.

Orion recently won awards at school for excellence in spelling and writing. Ethan won awards for excellence in Math and getting perfect attendance for the whole 1st semester. We are proud of the boys! They've really been working hard at school.

We had lots of fun with food on Valentines Day! Of course we ate bunches of candy! We made pink pancakes for breakfast and heart shaped pizzas for dinner and had lots of fun making it all. And the kids were thrilled to have strawberry flavored pop with dinner. It was a really fun day. The only sad thing was that Brayton decided not to make out valentines for his class because he felt like it was "little kid" stuff. He brought some cookies to share with this class instead. I was a teensy sad because to me it was a sign that he is growing up. I guess they can't stay small forever! And it sure is fun to watch them growing up!

Happy Valentines Day! We had a valentines day full of love. Flowers from Shawn - red roses, my favorite!



All week before Valentines Day Meri kept saying how she couldn't wait for it to come. She said it was her favorite holiday, even more than Christmas. I asked her why she was so excited - it had to be all the candy, right? Not so, she was so excited to deliver all her valentines to her classmates. For her, writing all the names of her kindergarten friends and signing them all was complete delight. (With the boys it was always such a chore!) The day finally came and she got to make her deliveries. Her she is passing them out at school. (She's the one reaching down delivering a valentine.)







Before heading over to Meri's class party Jessi and I celebrated Valentines with Angel. We thought she might like to try to red pepper. Our other guinea pig, Squeakers didn't like it, but Angel chomped it up! Jess thought it was funny to put bits of the pepper on her head! She kept saying, "mom, she has a cape!"

February 8, 2008 Brayton turned 10 years old!!














P.S. Yes, Orion is a big fan of not wearing his shirt.

Brayton turned 10 last week! What a decade it has been! It's hard to believe how much he is growing up. He has been talking about building a robot for a long time. He is always been a big science man. He got a robot for his birthday that he can build and program to make into different shapes and do different things. He has decided to use it in the science fair this month. His hypothesis is: Will a robot make a better worker, or a human? The robot will be sorting M&Ms for it's job. We will see what happens! Brayton enjoyed having his friends Jarod and Daniel sleep over for his birthday and they played with the robot a lot and definitely played their share of video games that night too.
P.S. Slick-slack, Brayton's lizard shed her skin for the first time a couple weeks ago. All the kids were very interested and excited about this event. And even more interested that she actually eats her old skin when she's done shedding! Below is a picture of her shedding.

Tea Party time! The girls love to do tea parties, especially with their pets. Here is Jess having a tea party with her guinea pig, Angel. Below is Meri having a tea party with Padme, her kitty. Lately Meri has been calling herself "momma" for Padme. She'll say things like "come to momma" to her. Well, the last few days she will pick up Padme and bring her over to me and say "you wanna see gramma?" Yes, she is refering to me as gramma!!! Good one Meri.

The Pine Wood Derby! This was Ethan's first and Brayton's 2nd derby. Brayton car is "The Squid", and Ethan's is "Boba Fett Bobsled". They both were great competitors in the races and Ethan's won 2nd for -best in show. It was an exciting night!

Here's Orion with his birthday gifts. Below is a picture of what the rocks looked like when we started them on his birthday. They are agates and petrified wood. We are now doing the final polish that should be done in a few days. We'll post a picture of the finish rocks soon! He loves doing all the steps with the polisher and looking at how his rocks are coming along.

On January 20, 2008 Orion turned 7 years old! To celebrate his birthday we went bowling as a family. We got to do the "Cosmic" bowl with the fun black lights and disco ball. Orion was the only one of us to bowl a strike which I even managed to get on video! He was a very happy boy. He was very specific that he wanted a United States cake so we did our best with that! He is our geology boy. He LOVES rocks.
He got his wish and received a rock tumbler, some rocks, and a couple of cool rock books from Grandpa Teare for his birthday.