grace cathedral

this is one of douglas's favorite spots in the city: grace cathedral and the labyrinth outside of it. he could not join us since he went down to los angeles to be with his grandfather, but mahala promised to tell him all about the choir we saw and about how good they both were at following the labyrinth.

noble just watched...

the kids had their first santa experience of the year this past sunday. but, hmmmm...who's missing from this photo? poor noble was too scared of jolly ol' nick to join in the photo! mahala was beside herself-we don't usually get photos with santa so this was really special for her. she told santa that she wants a book about sea otters (wow that's easy!) and that next year when we are in a place that allows pets, that she wants a pet lizard.

new technique to make them laugh

"reading"

one of noble's favorite books "brown bear brown bear what do you see?" is very repetative and here noble is "reading" it to aunty seena on skype. it goes "purple cat purple cat what do you see? i see a white dog looking at me" and so on.

desperate

we are vowing to take our kids to the snow this year. look at how desperate they are...it's 70 degrees but they just want to wear their snow attire.

hooked on phonics

mahala's writing skills have really been improving and she loves writing which is nice to see. she has been sounding out words and writing them out phonetically-and you will see great examples of that here! she has labeled each sticker and did this as a surprise for us. "toucan" is "tocan", "seal" is "seyl" and "happy face" is "hapefas". she was really proud that she could do this-and of course, it surprised us that she could get this far.

10.0 from all of the judges

we just discovered "kids choice" time at a gym nearby, kids get to play on all of the gymnastics apparatus for an hour on saturday mornings. now guess who wants to take lessons?