Here are a few updates from the past few months...
Gabriella had been anxiously awaiting the possibility that it might snow in Dallas. She loves snow (so does her mama)! Unfortunately, we missed the Christmas Day snow, much to our chagrin. It's hard to tell a 5 year old about the truly small chance that it might actually snow in Texas when all of the winter books, pictures, coloring sheets she sees have beautiful white snow. But happily enough, one morning we looked out to see some beautiful white flakes floating down. Both girls went out to play in it - Gabriella always lasts the longest :) We do own some gloves for the cold, but not the best ones for snow. So when she did come in, it was to cries of, "My hands are FREEZING!!" because of her handing, sculpting, and throwing the wet snow in her thin gloves. We quickly warmed her up by the fire and all was well with the world.
Look at the happy smile on Gabby's face!
This is a picture of so many things that are a part of my everyday life. I wanted to document it.
1) Gabby is always trying to hug/carry/baby Melia. Sometimes Melia allows it. Sometimes she pushes Gabby down and yells no. She's quite forceful that way and we don't see her ever having a problem standing up for herself as she gets older! I can usually tell what kind of response to expect from her depending on her mood. Gabriella either has not developed that type of intuition or just chooses to ignore it, because it causes quite a few fights each day. On this particular day at this particular time, Melia was sweetly enjoying having Gabby be her "mommy." Well her back is arched a little so maybe not "enjoying" it, but at least not taking Gabby down for once.
2) Melia has her Ellie the Elephant blanket which she lovingly calls "Lellee." She is still at an age where it accompanies her most of the day along with her blankie too.
3) Our kids love little Cutie oranges... and Melia recently learned to peel one on her own. My first child to learn it! Oliver asked recently and I showed him how to use his nails to get it started so now he knows how too. Gabriella learned as well but was not as motivated as she enjoys having people do things for her instead of doing them herself. Much the opposite of her extremely independent 2 year-old sister. However, at this point we were obviously still working on getting Melia to put her orange peels into the trash can (evidence: the huge pile of miniature orange peels in the upper right corner of the picture).
4) Oliver is playing iPad and wearing a Lego Star Wars shirt. That boy loves video games... so much so that he is the only one we really have to limit on his screen time. The girls have usually moved on to something else by the time the allotted screen time is over. But this boy loves his video games, especially his Lego Wii games!
We were so proud of Oliver for being one of 2 kids in the whole first grade to participate in the Science Fair. He worked on Sunday evenings over a period of two months to perform his experiment, write a report and prepare the board. It was a lot of work, but he didn't complain too much and was proud of the result. He titled his project, "Insulating Our Heat." He tested different fabrics to see which one did the best job at insulating glasses of hot water to determine what fabric would be the best to wear on our bodies outside on a cold day. If you look closely at his board, you can see a picture of the different fabrics wrapped around drinking glasses. We poured hot water in the glasses, measured the starting temperature, waited 15 minutes, and then measured the ending temperature. The warmest glass... the one wrapped in wool! He wrote all of the pages displayed on the board (even the graph), the entire report (not pictured), and cut out the letters for the word "HEAT." You'll notice in the picture that the 'E' escaped us and was hiding unbeknownst to us behind the "Materials" page. Good job big boy! He won a 2nd place trophy for his efforts. He LOVES collecting trophies so that was real validation for his efforts :)
A picture of Oliver with the other first grade participant and the one Kindergarten participant:
Thanks to mild winters in Texas, we enjoyed some beautiful days outdoors:
And someone lost their two front teeth...
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