January 2011

It has been brought to my attention that the ol' blog has sat empty and quiet for an unacceptably lengthy bit of time.


I can assure you, we are all alive and well.


What have we been up to?  So far in this month of January...


 - We celebrated a birthday, with lots of family, chicken & dumplings, and, of course, cake!

I found the idea for the bear cake here.  Among the birthday cakes I've made, I give this one extremely high marks on the "easy" scale.

It was Dale's idea for Tyler to have a bear cake, since that is one of his favorite words.  Yes! He has words!
Bear (beah), uh-oh, and Mama.  And he's close on 'baby'.  I don't let the 'mama' thing go to my head, because evvvvverybody is 'mama': Mama, Daddy, Dale, Alan, Gramps, Mimi, Grandma.... you get the picture.  He 'talks' all the time with his own made-up baby words, and keeps us laughing with his baby silliness.  I know I'm not the first one to say it, but who needs tv when you have a 1 year old around??


-  We played in the snow!

Yeah, yeah, it's old news now, but it was already old news before the stuff even melted, ya know?  

Snow around here is pretty rare, especially a decent amount.  

But for it to still be on the ground 5 days after it fell?  That's almost unheard of in these parts!

- We went to Grandma's.  Since we missed our Christmas visit due to illness, we wedged in a long-weekend trip to Arkansas. 

While there we took a trip to the Historic Arkansas Museum. 

Museum exhibits: great.  Posted requests not to use your flash: no-so-great.  Other than being admonished twice (two very different exhibits) for using my flash, we had a great time!

On the way home, we stopped to see my sister and brother-in-law at their new house!  They fed us a yummy lunch, too! 

- We are busy learning.  After taking it lightly for the month of December, we spent the last two or three weeks wading back in to full-swing school.  Dale is learning 'borrowing'.  Did you know 'they' don't call it 'borrowing' anymore?  It is now "renaming" or "regrouping".  I like "borrowing" myself.  We have started the New Testament and are taking our time reading through Matthew and memorizing the Beatitudes.  We are finally finishing that weather lapbook we started I'm-not-telling-how-long-ago. 

Alan and I are still working our way through the alphabet.  The letter of the week this week is "O" for 'octopus' and 'ocean'.  I'm very pleased with how Alan is coming along in his pre-reading skills; he can recognize most beginning sounds, many ending sounds, and a few sight words. I often find myself wishing I planned more 'fun' preschool stuff for him, but have to remember not to overlook the things that seem so simple to me, yet so much fun to him.


Thanks for checking in, and stay warm, friends!