Tanner with swords and guns--ignore my obnoxious giggling

Tanner lately...

My baby is in nursery. This is such a cute age. And hard. He's getting very opinionated about things, and SOOO curious about everything. He's also in the copying stage, so he's always copying whatever we're doing. He'll put lotion on his face while he watches me get ready in the morning, he helps the kids with their jobs. He copies everything, really.


Here he's helping Erilyn dust the bookshelves.


Here he's reading with the big kids.

Here he's lamenting the fact that the big kids get to play outside in the snow and Mom won't let him out. Notice the stool.

Here he's cuddling with Erilyn while they watch Baby Songs. (This one was really cute; until I came around the corner with the camera, Tanner had his head on Erilyn's shoulder, and her head was resting on his. So cute!)

And here he's so proud of himself for climbing up onto the table with the other kids while they stare zombie like at the TV.  They really don't watch that much TV, but it's a good time to catch them when they're still, I guess. Anyway--toddlers are cute.

Science experiment

This is precisely why I love homeschooling. It's hard, it takes a lot of extra time and energy on my part, but you should have seen Erilyn's face when we did this science experiment!

We were talking about properties of water.

When I told her we were going to do a science experiment, you could literally see her thinking, "Say what? How long till it's over and I can go play kitties again?" But she tried to be a good sport about it.

First, you do the trick of putting some cardboard on top of a really full jar of water and then flipping it over. Ta dah! The water doesn't spill out!

Her eyes literally go twice as big as normal. She immediately said, "Do it again, Mom!" Ahh....the joys of seeing your child get excited about learning.

So we did that a few more times, and they each tried it.




Then, you put hot HOT water in one jar, color it red, and then cold COLD water in the other jar, and color it something different. Do the fancy trick with the cardboard, and then put the cold jar of water on top of the hot jar of water. Carefully pull the piece of cardboard out, and watch what happens to the water. (The colors mix. Predictable. And not that interesting. Unless you like mixed colors.)



But THEN! You do it again, with the hot jar on top and the cold jar on the bottom. Pull out the cardboard, and the colors don't mix!!! Again, Erilyn was amazed. Anthon was too, but I knew he would be. This is right up his alley. We had to do it about 4 thousand more times. We learned that hot likes to be on top and won't mix if it's already on top. But if it starts out on the bottom, it races to be on top as fast as it can. Same with air.

You can't really tell from the pictures, but they loved it. So fun.

Reading buddies

For homeschool, I'm making Anthon practice reading out loud. He reads too fast in his head, and he just skips over words. Reading out loud helps him slow down, practice being animated, and forces him to pronounce words. Plus, it's great sibling time. And Erilyn loves it. (Anthon does too, but he has to pretend not to. See "Cool Brother Code sec. 2 item 24")

Here's what we're loving lately. So fun.

Cooking with Tanner

Tanner loves to cook. He's already discovered, of course, that he can carry around his stool anywhere and immediately be able to see and do things he's never seen or done before. He has two stools, one big and one small. Actually, niether stool is really his, but you try to tell him that. The small one is handy for around the house stuff. Turning on and off the TV, for example. Or, even better, the Wii or Xbox while the kids are playing a game. Or for finding books on those hard to reach shelves. It's light, and easy to carry. But for jobs where height is really important, he uses his kitchen stool. It puts him at precisely the right height for "helping" with every day cooking chores. He's becoming an accomplished stirrer, a competent scooper, an excellent licker, and the best ever mess maker.

He loves it thought. LOVES it. Anytime I even go into the kitchen, or open a cupboard, he comes running--running--from wherever he is in the house, finds his stool (and if I've locked it up in the pantry to prevent this very thing from happening, he goes to the table and gets a chair. Stinker.), pushes it up to the counter and looks at me like, "Okay, Mom! What are we cookin' today? And where's my spoon?"

I can't resist.

It's lucky I have a broom.

And then this happened...

I'm sure you are all aware of the super storm that has dumped a boat load of snow across the American Midwest.  Apparently, that includes Texas, though I'd call us the Southwest.  Anywho, we got dumped on.  And iced.  But first, iced.

First we had some hot weather, you might recall, and then we had a good ol' Texan rainstorm.  Then it froze, and Texas shut down.  We were all iced in.  Seriously.  I could never grasp this concept of an ice storm until I moved here. We had 2-3 inches of ice covering everything.  People couldn't even open their garage doors, let alone drive their cars anywhere.  I was glad we are well stocked in the food department, because if we weren't, we would have been SOL, as my dad likes to say.  Kirk didn't even have to go to work!  I still didn't see him, though.  He was studying.

The kids spent that day skating on our back patio.  Fun times.

Then it snowed.  And none of this little fairy dust stuff.  It snowed big, fat, white chunks for a full night and day!  We had nearly 8 inches of snow on our trampoline.  So the kids spent that day doing snow angels, having snow throwing contests, eating snow and icicles, and getting soaked and frozen since we don't really have the proper outerwear for this kind of weather.  (We live in TEXAS for heaven's sake!)  The kids toughed it out, though.

Notice the 6 or more inches on the trampoline and fence, and it's still coming down!  Love those fat, fluffy flakes.

I thought about trying to go sledding, but when I took into consideration our abysmal outerwear situation, and the fact that there are no hills nearby and impassible roads, as well as the fact that they don't even sell snow boots here, let alone sleds, we decided to stay home and play in our own backyard.  It's a shame, though, really.  Sledding is one of the few great joys of winter.

Kirk teased Anthon about the fact that he had more school last week than all his friends did, since school was canceled for the whole week!  Crazy.  It was kind of a bummer, though, thinking about all of Anthon's friends who were home during the day, but we couldn't play with them because we were snowed/iced in.

It's all mostly melted now, though it's supposed to snow/sleet on us again in the next few days.  We have errands to do tomorrow, though, so I'm hoping it'll hold off until Tuesday at least. 

Happy Winter!