MAMA!

Hippie Baby!

Poppy way outgrew the biggest bathroom sink we have so it was time to graduate her to the big tub. Sigh. She did not like it at first, she might as well have been in the ocean. And suddenly out of the blue she wailed
MAAAMAAA!

Is there any sweeter word? She would have earned a piece of chocolate if that was part of her diet... say! I think I will eat some chocolate just for her! Some nice Green and Blacks Milk Chocolate with Almonds.... good baby!

Bathing a baby entails an audience, of course.

Little wild 'n crazy monkey Pip!

Bilbo

Eleanor and Poppy.... and she said "Mama" two more times! Several ounces of chocolate are in line... all as a reward for Poppy, of course. Thank goodness it is a Sunday in Lent :)

Cutting and Crawling

Galadriel continues to improve at a great pace. She is reading at her normal speed. At her weekly physical therapy session they continue to work on various coordination activities. She can skip, run, gallop, side step and change activities mid-way nearly perfectly now. This week was added on the crab crawl which she was not able to do very well. The droop in the left eyelid is open about 3/5ths of the way now. Great progress there! She works on many activities to increase the use of her right hand. Grasping objects like clothes pins... she'll be a pro by the time we are hanging out laundry in the spring! Since she is left handed she doesn't want to use the right hand as much. This past week the therapist had her working on writing with her right hand by tracing. I thought she did really well considering I'm right handed and can't write at all with my left. Her natural reaction to "pinching" or picking up by grasping is to swing her hand over the top. I found that very interesting being that it is not a comfortable position at all (I tried it!) but apparently it is easier than having to use her "pinchers". So we are working on that. Again not something that has much of an effect on her daily living activities since she is a leftie. So things are progressing very well. She is very excited because this week the therapist gave her a week off!


Once Bilbo looked like a caucasian, blond Michael Jackson as a boy, it was time for a hair cut.

Before....

After....

We simply had to keep the cut-off curls. When asked where his curls were Bilbo said "Inna bag".

Delectible or what?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELEANOR!

Eleanor turned 7!

Now this is cake decorating at its finest!!

Time for getting more wood. This time it was a family affair.

There and back again....

Feeding the fire.... which seems mighty hungry these days!

Pippin helping.

Look who's crawling! Or maybe we should call it swimming.

"Hey Mom! This pancake looks like a sunflower!"

Hmmm... I wonder how much this would bring on ebay!

St. Valentine's Day

Since I'm too tired and lazy to write up something nifty about St. Valentine's Day, I'll just pass you on to Fisheaters.

Poppy is getting around. At 5 months she was driving herself around.... backwards.

She gets into some rather awkward situations.

She has popped herself up on all 4's and taken some official crawling "steps". But it's a very ungraceful sight, she gets where she wants to go.

And she started herself on solid....... paper. She's a bit like a dust buster, she drives herself around to any tidbit she can find on the floor and stuffs it in her mouth. Sigh. This is why we have our throats blessed on St. Blaise Day.

The chickens are producing eggs. And with the new chickens laying away the old chickens decided they better keep up with the Jones'es.

The big one was a double yolker.

Need a little more food coloring in Sam's volcano.

Owwww-siiiiiiiiiide!

Bilbo is 2 and has taken to "I doooo weeeet" (I do it) Which means he removes his pants at regular intervals through the day and dresses himself to go outside. At least he has his hood up!

Today was a beautiful day out, warmed up to the 20's so perfect sledding weather.

"Mom, will you go sledding too? They say the more weight the farther the sled will go."

(that was suppose to be complimentary....) So up I climbed.

And down we went.

We went a loooooooong way. Guess all that baby weight is worth something afterall.... I never thought I'd be saying I won the heavy weight championship. *chuckle*
Awwwwwwwwwwwwww, sweet!

I'm seriously jealous.

No Topic

Poppy has gotten to be the grabbiest baby at meals. On this particular night she had made a particularly fine mess of Aragorn's plate. She doesn't eat solids yet so I guess she didn't know what to do with the green bean. When all else fails, suck yer thumb.

Don't ask. Blogspot just randomly decides to flip my images sideways. I've been a bit on a hiatus from picture taking but the children still manage to sneak in some shots. This was the latest woodpile. I got home from wherever I was to find Aragorn sitting on this huge log and said usually by that point of the day they had felled (fallen?) 10 trees but so far they had only done one. Obviously this was a very large tree judging from the wood pile. Hauling and splitting wood is the Saturday event. I'm glad I'm not one of the men in the house.

Poppy is everyone's picture subject.

So is Bilbo.

Back to Poppy

Back to Bilbo. Now, Bilbo has been to the "beauty salon" very often lately, much to my chagrin.

Sam is sort of a poster child for dyselxia. I learned all I needed to learn about Dyslexia from Ron Davis' Gift of Dyslexia and I was bound and determined to have Sam overcome dyslexia, rather than just come up with coping tactics. It's alot of work. He made great strides last year using the 13 volume set from Learn To Read. Since dyslexics are picture thinkers they have many "trigger words" that they can't picture, simple words like "and" & "the". So the goal is to create images in the mind of a dyslexic so they master every word. The Learn To Read series is in pop-up format with little push buttons to hear definitions. However, that got a little young for a 13 year old so we moved on to Ron Davis' system which uses a Dictionary and Clay. The child has the "trigger word" then looks it up in the dictionary, reads the definition, reads the sentence. Then he forms his own image in his mind and produces the image in a clay model, followed finally by spelling the word in clay. The most important thing is to let the child formulate his own imagine. Sam's are interesting.

The above word was "always", his picture is of a horse jumping over a rock. I asked him how that showed "always". Well, obviously! "The horse always jumps over the rock." Of course. I couldn't resist asking him why he didn't choose a pig. Here I refer you to The Adventures of Pig-Pig