Oh what do we do in the Winter time?

This is our house this morning. It is snowing like crazy and just piling up more and more.


Here is a picture of our back deck this morning.

I have Spring Fever really bad now. I'm so anxious for it to warm up so I can open the windows, take the kids outside, stop wearing 3 layers in the house, not have to wear a coat anymore, go for a walk to the park, get out the kid's bikes, and the list goes on and on and on and on. I've been feeling really stale and out of ideas, so I've been trying to spice things up a bit in the house.

I started teaching Athena and Samantha piano, FINALLY. They are taking to it quite well. Samantha is so excited about it that she just cannot stay off the piano. Several times a day she is in there practicing her songs. It makes me happy that she is so enthusiastic about it and I wonder if I should have started sooner. Today will be her 4th lesson.

I've also been trying to read more with Nathan and spend more time with him. I have been helping him a lot more with building his train set. We have to rebuild it every day - now that Alexandra can pull herself up to the train table she has learned that it's one of her favorite things to wreck the train set. I've also started teaching Nathan how to do puzzles. He is kind of getting the hang of it and takes great pride in seeing the pieces fit together. :)

As I mentioned previously, I've also been putting more time into indexing. I'm now approaching 7000 names. WOO HOO! Before I know it I'll be hitting the 10,000 mark. I like to index. It's fun to have something to do at the computer that really seems to have a purpose. I get sucked into it and can't stop until my kids are pulling at my sleeves and forcing me to get up. Finally I just have to save and exit the program so I'm not tempted to come back to the computer and do "just a few more names".

For Christmas we gave the girls each a magnet board to hang in their rooms. Each board only came with 5 magnets. Once they started hanging their special things on the board, I could see we were going to need more magnets. I decided to make a fun project out of it. We went to Robert's craft store and got supplies to decorate a whole bunch of magnets. Athena and Samantha LOVED this project and they really got into it. Here we are decorating the magnets.

This is Athena's patriotic magnet. She gave this one to Grandma Lynda.

These are just a couple of Samantha's creations. :)

And here is the whole slew of what we did. I had fun helping the girls put these together. Now they have just another little piece of themselves in their rooms.

On to the next story . . .

I am getting a little tired of Alexandra's crazy baby hair. It is just all over the place and doesn't lay down nicely right now. After much examining, I concluded that her hair was long enough for a ponytail. After going to great lengths of trying to get her to stay in one spot so I could just loop the ponytail holder several times so it would stay, this is what I ended up with:

Even though it is very small and you have to look super close to see it - I did achieve a ponytail! It took me about 5 minutes of combing, trying, re-combing, and re-trying. We took this picture of her and then I put her down to crawl. No longer than 5 minutes later, Nathan walked over and abruptly swiped it out of her hair. It was gone. So much for that.

Before I know it, it will be warm enough to go outside and play. Hopefully I can come up with enough fun stuff before then that will keep us all from killing each other off! :)