January Goodness

A few photos from the rest of January.

LOTS more "jump pictures".  As in...hundreds of them.  They are pretty fun though...lots of jumping and trying to come up with neat mid-air shots like these...

Brooklyn trying her cross-legged yoga pose.

Sam, pretending he's underwater and a sea snake is swimming by.

Brooklyn and her teeth crack me up.  She gives me regular updates on them--which are wiggly, which molars are coming and how much they have come in, which adult teeth are in and are driving her crazy because they catch on her bottom teeth.
And when this girl decides a wiggly one is needing to come out, she focuses all of her energy there until it does come out.  This was a good solid hour of wiggling, looking in the mirror, twisting...and I try REALLY hard not to find it horrifying.  Don't get me wrong, I'm quite proud of her, but it gives me the heebie-jeebies!!

POP!  Another baby tooth down.

I found a puppy in my closet!!

This was at our rental house--our master-bedroom-turned-additional-play-space because our front room just wasn't enough to hold a big tv, Wii, NES, SNES, 3 laptops and a desktop computer.
Oh, and like our top-of-the-line furniture?  Who needs a hike-a-bed couch when you can just have a REAL bed FOR a couch!  Ha.

Sam is my game boy.  Video games, computer games, board games, card games...so he and I were playing Uno and Brooklyn said "Whoever wins 2 out of 3 games will be crowned the Uno King."
Sam is being crowned. :)

When you ask Brooklyn about when she was in school, she will tell you that she wasn't a big fan EXCEPT for the day that they made marshmellow chocolate-covered spiders.  That memory is obviously a fantastic one for her because she brings it up every.single.time. we talk about school.

We've replicated it a few times, and she is so excited every time.  She walks me through all of the steps and does a demonstration for me.

While I'm not a big fan of marshmallows, chocolate syrup, or pretzels...I had to admit, it was pretty tasty when you put them all together!
...although I wasn't brave enough to try Brooklyn's, which sported an armor made of Skittles...

I have good memories of my brother Chris and I playing Barbies together (sometimes it was more destructive than other times, ha), so it makes me smile when Sam and Brooklyn play with them together.
I adore listening to their conversations and watching their imaginations hard at work.  Sam gets totally into it and it's just so sweet to watch them interact.

So we go from my sweet Barbie-playing-boy to my scooter-jumping-boy.
We have a few older boys in our homeschool group who are always doing crazy physical things--jumps and flips on their scooters/bikes/whatever, back flips, climbing super high trees...they're pretty amazing boys, really.  Both in a physical sense and in a personal sense--so kind and smart and aware.  And it's obvious where they get it--they have quite amazing parents that *I* look up to.
Anyway, my kids love to watch their antics and area always eager to try and follow their lead.  I'm grateful my kids have such great kids to look up to.

"Let's do a fist-bump!"  "YEAH!"

Gah, I love these two.

I'm amazed at how much this race track gets played with.  It's a toy that we all enjoy constructing, experimenting with (what happens when you put a marble in the shoot, why does one car go further than the other, can we make a ramp that will get the car to jump over the cat, etc.).

Well, that about sums up January.  Woot!  One month down, time to bust out February!