Weekly Wrap-Up: January 9

We've had an eventful week.

We started our nutrition study this week. We're using Vintage Remedies for Girls, so this week, we read the first chapter, learned about "real foods" (vs. prepared foods and such). Then we took a field trip to the grocery store (somehow calling it a field trip made them much more excited about going grocery shopping LOL), and looked at labels and things, as well as purchasing the ingredients we needed to make Pasta Primavera (the recipe they chose from the choices listed for Chapter 1).  Then of course, we made the Pasta Primavera for supper. Despite including vegetables like zucchini that they CLAIM they don't like, hee hee.

So that was a hit!

On a less great note, A managed to get her finger smashed in the electronic sliding door of our minivan. She & L were fighting over who got which seat and I was still in the house gathering up Little Bit and all the "stuff" that we seem to drag with us everywhere. So I'm not completely sure of what happened. The door is SUPPOSED to have sensors that automatically reverse to avoid such things. I think she was holding onto the door jam, so it was JUST her finger in the door & it was too small for the door to "register" until it had pinched her pretty good. I'm pretty sure it did NOT completely latch, or it would have broken her finger. She came back inside and we put ice on it & gave her homeopathic arnica (I SWEAR by this for bumps & bruises!!!!) and her finger never even swelled up or turned black and blue. It DID bother her for a day or two, and still feels bruised if she pushes on the finger nail, but it could have been MUCH worse.

Thursday night was our first "date night" under our new schedule of dates. Our friend, Starla, came over to watch the girls while Rodney & I went out ALL BY OURSELVES!! When we got home, Starla was sitting in the same chair she'd been in when we left, with all 3 girls on her lap. She said she'd been sitting there the whole time, hee hee. Said Little Bit didn't even seem to notice we were gone, so that was good (I wasn't sure if it would be problem because she doesn't know Starla very well, but guess it wasn't an issue).

And as you might have guessed would be a part of our week, from the picture at the top, we woke up Friday morning to SNOW!!! I think I had mentioned it briefly to the girls but they hadn't really picked up on it. Little Bit noticed it first. She woke up, chattering, as usual, then suddenly glanced out the window and her eyes got big and she said "nooooo" (not to be confused with "no" (no) or "no" (nose), the 3 are all distinctive but I can't figure out how to differentiate them in writing). A few minutes later I heard the big girls wake up & realize it had snowed LOL.

Once we'd done boring things like eating breakfast and doing chores, of course the big girls wanted to go out in the snow. And when they started talking about going outside Little Bit got excited too. So I decided to take her out for a little while. I hunted down her snowpants and boots and we got her all bundled up and I took her out. She was SOO funny, she's abit of a neat freak (poor child, lives in OUR house, how WILL she survive?) and found it very disturbing that the snow sticks to her boots, hee hee. And then she touched the snow and was equally disturbed that it sticks to her GLOVES. So all in all, the Little Bit snow experience wasn't a huge success. It was getting close to naptime and I *think* the toddler sleds are still in the shed (though it occurs to me as I type this that they might be in the basement), and Rodney has the key to the shed (I hope, because I haven't seen it since he had it last . . .) so we didn't try sledding, that will have to wait for another day . . .

I think I mentioned last week that we've been talking about rearranging the girls' room so that they can sleep on the floor instead of the loft, and eventually Little Bit can join them. Yesterday, we finally did some rearranging. I was just going to do the "first phase" and move the toy shelf against the wall so that there was a larger expanse of floor space under the loft, and then let them continue just sleeping on folded blankets until we got new (smaller, more futon-like) mattresses to use on the floor (and then move the regular mattresses that were on the loft out of there completely). But Rodney was home, and willing to help move the mattresses, so we went ahead & moved them down onto the floor. Probably a good thing, they took up more space than I would have thought. Unless the futon mattresses I was planning to get are narrower, I don't think we can fit 3 across in the space I was planning to use. So now we're thinking about treating it more like one king-size bed, and just have the 3 of them all sleep on it, we shall see . . . for now they're thrilled to have their beds down.

Once we finished with that, the big girls set to work up on the loft, which suddenly seems to have SO MUCH room with the mattresses gone. They decided to make one side "American Girls" and the other side "Schleich Town".  They haven't set up the Schleich stuff yet, but have at least a good start on the American Girls. I was too lazy to climb back up onto the loft to get a good shot of it, so you'll have to settle for A's dolls that are set up in the back corner. The pink princess boxes came with disposable diapers in them, when I saw them at Walmart right before a bunch of our travelling (when I knew we'd be using disposables for Little Bit anyway), I grabbed 2 of them, thinking they'd work well for the big girls to use to store things in. With the rearranging, the girls decided they would make good "sofas" for the American Girls.  Not especially in keeping with the "era" of the dolls  (Colonial, 1800s New Mexico, and Depression era) BUT it works . . .

And finally, some cute Little Bit notes:

The picture is terribly blurry (she just moves TOO FAST for my phone camera LOL), but I had to capture her "fashion sense". She was running around nakey (as is her norm), and suddenly decided she wanted to "get dressed" when I didn't immediately go find her some clothes, she went upstairs and got the lavender sweater out of her drawer and brought it down for me to help her put on. Then she found her (too big) periwinkle fleece pants (I've been putting them on her if we go outside here at home. Her boots keep the extra length from being an issue and them being fleece means they're warm AND water-resistant in case she pees, though that's not really an issue any more) and put them on. And finally found a lavender straw hat that's been in the girls' dress-up stuff forever, but at some point moved down to Little Bit's toy drawer. And there you have, our little fashionista!

She pronounces "sock" with an f sound instead of an s . . . I do a double take every time she says it, but she IS saying sock, I promise!

On morning this week, she woke up and sat up, and I didn't open my eyes right away, so she patted my arm, and when I did open my eyes, she put her hand up by her cheek and did a little wave and said "hi" with the cutest little grin. THEN she asked to nurse LOL.

She loves songs with motions, we sing songs like "This Little Light of Mine" and, one of her favorites . . . "The lightning flashes and the thunder goes BOOM!!" in the car. She also likes "With Jesus in the Family" and is quite opinionated on who we sing about when, hee hee. I wish we sang more of the fun cradle roll songs in Sabbath school here, I think she'd really enjoy them.

When I ordered this year's My Bible First lessons for the big girls, I decided to order the MBF Cradle Roll lessons for Little Bit too. The big girls use MBF in Sabbath School but for some reason (perhaps my biggest complaint against MBF, LOL) they don't make a quarterly for Kindergarten & Primary, just the weekly papers. So, if we're gone a week and don't remember to get the paper in advance, we don't have the paper. After the first couple months that we were here I decided it was worth the money to just order our own set of the lessons (they're only like $9/quarter) and then we'd have them all. Now that I have my handy-dandy binding machine, I bind each quarter's papers into their own "quarterly" and it works wonderfully!  ANYWAY . . . our church doesn't use MBF for Cradle Roll, but I haven't been overly impressed with the lessons they DO use, and we don't always get them, and generally don't get them until at least a week or two into the month and there are no pictures and it's not chronological . . . so . . . I decided rather than trying to struggle along with those lessons now that Little Bit's old enough to have a lesson, to just get the Cradle Roll MBF and use that here at home. It's not ideal, since it doesn't get reinforced at church, but I think it's still a better option for us.

So, starting with this new year (we were a few days late, I was late getting the order in and it took longer to get here than usual because of the holidays), we're reading Little Bit's lesson each night at bedtime too. She's SOO cute! I need to get a video of her saying her "memory verse". She still doesn't talk much, but will try to repeat most anything if you ask her to. So we go one word at a time and she "says it" after me. But in most cases not so that anyone would remember it. BUT last week, her memory verse was Gen 1:1 and then partway through the lesson, it has you read that verse again. So we'd said her mv at the beginning, and then I was reading her lesson. When I read the verse, she said "Genesis" (not clearly, but the same way she said it when repeating her mv)., so she's getting it . . . one thing I like about MBF is that the cradle roll is a 1 year cycle, so at this age where she changes SO QUICKLY, it will be reinforced each year as they are developmentally ready to understand so much more (also helped in my decision to buy it, since I only have to buy 4 quarterlies and they'll last us until she moves into Kindergarten LOL).

And that was our week.