Maddie Growed!!!!

Yesterday, Maddie looked at the scale in the bathroom and said

"I wonder how big I growed! Hmmm....60 cents."

She is such a funny thing. We love her even more than 60 cents, more like a ton!

Here is a video of her during playgroup today. She has some of the cutest little friends to play with.

My Fortune

Hannah and Johnny handed this "fortune" to me before their bedtime tonight. Great...now I'm terrified to go to bed!

The new and improved alphabetically correct keyboard

Invented by Johnny!

Grandma, and a furry visitor

While John was away, I took a trip to Bancroft, picked my mom up and brought her home with me. It was great having some company. Together, we were able to attend a session in the Salt Lake temple with my nephew, Tristan (and family) before he entered the MTC. He will be serving a mission in Thailand.

We also brought Lizzy along for the ride. She belongs to my brother's family, and my mom is taking care of her for a while. My kids fell in love with Lizzy immediately, and were constantly wanting to take her on walks. It was great spending time with my mom, even though she wasn't feeling well for a good portion of the time. Her grandchildren adore her, and were sad to take her home again.

Ich liebe meinen mann ;)

John has been on quite a few business trips in the past 7 years, so I am pretty accustomed to holding down the fort while he is away. That being said, I still miss him, and would much rather have him at home than half-way around the world. Since he was gone during Valentines day we just couldn't resist being a little sappy in our notes back and forth. It was a lot of fun and pretty dorky as well--just our style :)

Well....actually, I am not sure if Morse code would be considered sappy unless you knew the story: years before John met me, he jokingly told a friend that the girl he married had to be able to tell him "I love you" in Morse code. As a complete coincidence, not knowing the joke, the first time I told John I loved him, I tapped it into his Ham Radio:
.. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-

Here is John's sappy love note in binary code:

"I love you Cheryl "--> 0100100100100000011011000110111101110110011001010010000001111001011011110111010100100000010000110110100001100101011100100111100101101100


And here is the sappiest love note of all, in German. I laughed hard over this one because apparently he wanted to call me "honey pie" (no cringing allowed, it's Valentines day!) but Google translated it back to "honey fruit cake":

Ich liebe meinen Honigobstkuchen. Glücklicher Valentines Tag mein schöner Liebling Cheryl

(translation: I love my honey fruit cake. Happy Valentines Day my lovely favorite Cheryl)

I am so glad that I got a great laugh for Valentines Day!)

Here is a completely unromantic picture of my "Honey Fruit Cake" under a "Fahrtgasse" sign.

I just had to include these pictures. Jet lag can be brutal, nothing can put you into an after dinner coma like a 22 hour trip home.

He came out of the coma for a few seconds when he realized I was taking a picture, then immediately fell asleep again. Yes he is smiling for the camera, but sound asleep.

After a few minutes of sleeping upright, he collapsed on the floor by the table and slept for an hour or two more. I was going to get a picture of that too, but I got sidetracked, and I am sure you get the idea.

But I have yellow hair!

The other day Maddie noticed my shiny toenail polish, and asked "why are my toes just plain pink?" What can you do? I had no choice but to paint her toenails and fingernails.

I don't know where she got her ability to discern fashion and style. I have to make a special conscious effort to notice what other people are wearing or doing with their hair so that I am not left decades behind, and I still struggle. Not my Maddie. I am hoping that her attention to detail turns out to be a good thing. Yesterday Hannah's friend came over to play, and Maddie wanted to play with them. I told Maddie that Hannah was going to play with her friend by herself this time. Maddie quickly became very sad and sobbed "But I have YELLOW hair! I want brown hair like Hannah and Macy!" I think that she thought that she was being left out because of her hair color.

Spiderman!

Johnny has had spiderman clothing included as part of his wardrobe for the past four years. It seems weird to say "wardrobe" to describe a six year old's jumbled piles of clothes stuffed into random drawers, but for lack of a better word...

Anyway, to get to the point, Johnny didn't even know who spiderman really was until Wednesday of last week.
He picked this comic book up at his school bookfair and quickly became hooked. Strangely enough, it was the Incredible Hulk that Johnny liked the best, even though he wasn't the main superhero in the book. He liked how he talked; "I SMASH YOU NOW!"

On another note, we were talking tonight about babies, and how Lucy is going to be the last baby at our house. That is until Hannah and Johnny grow up and come to visit us with their babies. I then asked if they would come to visit us a lot when they grow up. Johnny said "I'll just put my baby's pictures on my blog so that you can see them." I had to laugh, then I told him that he had better come and visit us too.

The incredible, amazing, and hilarious Hannah

Tonight, as I took Lucy into her room to put her into bed, I was startled to see a really BIG baby already there. Hannah loves to play tricks on me, so I played along and set Lucy down right next to her. Lucy thought it was hilarious.
Hannah has been amazing me lately with some of the things that she does in her free time, and I just have to share. The other day she brought these pictures of Pegasus horses home, she drew them at school during free time. Being the sceptical mom that I am sometimes, I had to ask her if she traced them. She said "no, I just looked at the picture, memorized it, and then drew it by myself." It reminded me of the time she asked me to draw a "My Little Pony" when she was in first grade. I did my best, and when I was done she gave me a funny look and asked "is that the best you can do?" Then she showed me how to draw one. She hasn't asked me to draw anything for her since.




Yep, I may be a little bit biased, but we are sure proud of that girl. She's pretty amazing.
A month or two ago, John bought the book "Where the Sidewalk Ends" to read to the kids. He has tried to recite the poem written on the neck of the giraffe a few times for them, but it didn't have the same effect as reading on the printed page. Hannah read the book and took it one step further. For the next week she was busy writing her own poems, here are two of my favorites:

Kooky Kate
Was used as bait
But the fisherman never used her.
He took her to the county fair
But no one would even bear
For the judges to prize her there.
Instead, they prized a giant pear.
One judge was from Australia
He was very odd indeed.
Oh, that judge, he just knew
What Kate the bait would need.
“Good day, mate!”
He shouted as he shouted it with glee.
“You are very kooky cool.
And that's the thing I see!”
Then Kate felt very special
As she shouted out “Yippee!”
“I am very special.
That's the only thing I see!”

By Hannah Loveless

Minnie May
Slept in hay
To make herself itch.
She went to the zoo
Where she met Sally Sue
Who didn't hate her a titch.
They fed the ducks
and they petted the goat
and they looked at the gators
who swam in a moat.
They stared at the tigers
(Who stared at them back)
And in the next cage
Was a googly gack.
Oh, the fun they had
And the creatures they fed
But the best fun of all
Was having a friend

By Hannah Loveless

I think I've learned the trick!

Last summer I decided to start "paying" our kids for doing good things. I use the Dad Dollars that I came across in the Family Fun Magazine. It has been amazing to see how Hannah and Johnny have grown, and I think it is just because they are realizing that I notice when they are doing good. Plus they have a little more incentive to try hard things, we all need that once in a while. Well, I realized that I needed a little more organization because they kept having to ask what they could do to earn Dad Dollars. I found something that is working for them, it's not completely my idea...it's somebody else's idea, modified to fit us.



Anyway, this is how it works; for every heart (goal), that they accomplish and move up to their initial, they get a Dad Dollar to put in their bank. The stop watches on the side of the board are for their school mornings, when we have a hard time moving quickly. I put a number on the school morning tasks and they have to finish that task in that number of minutes to be able to move their heart up. It has been a fun game for them, and a nice break for me--I hate nagging.

Maddie still gets blank hearts so that I can decide when I want to let her move a heart up or not.