Here's your update, mom, currently minus photos since my card reader is apparently on strike.
Winter came back. It's cold (relatively speaking) and rainy this week. There seems to be a virus or bug of some sort floating around town. Brandon missed school on Monday and Tuesday with a fever; Rick and I managed to escape with 24 hour versions. So far it has passed Jacob by. He, by the way, was up giggling until 11pm last night, up giggling at 6 am this morning, and asking to start his bedtime routine when he came off the bus at 3:30 this afternoon. Sorry bud, 5 hours to go.
Before the rain came, I managed to get one or two photos of the kids playing in the leaves. We can never take those pictures until January; it takes that long to accumulate enough leaves to make it worthwhile. Rick and Brandon went camping last weekend, but since they came home early because of Brandon's fever, there are no pictures to share.
Jacob is really talking a lot right now, repeating what we say, and has even started throwing his hands across his chest and saying "Te Amo!" Not sure where he learned to say I love you in Spanish, but he figures it's got to be cute enough to get him out of trouble, because that's when he says it. He's also started saying "Mom", which earns him a few get out of jail passes, as well. The teacher figures he's also starting to try and read. She will give him a list of words and then verbally spell out the word and have him mark it off on his list; so far he's getting them right. He's also matching up pictures with written words and "helping" his classmates do their work. He's still doing really well on the potty track, using the bathroom at least twice a day, and has also started using it at school. Lots of exciting progress going on at our house.
Brandon is working on his project for the science fair. He decided to test which is the best light source for growing grass seed. I think he's more excited to use my electronic die cutting system to create his story board than doing the actaul work. They took a practice test for the TAKS writing test this week, so hopefully we'll get to find out how he did. I started having him write in a journal I created. I took a composition book and wrote out a fun question at the top (if you had a 100 second shopping spree at the toystore, what would you buy; if you created a yu-gi-oh card, what would it do...etc.) and told him to just spend a half an hour writing without worrying about grades, hoping that it will help him not see writing as such a horrible thing. He still complains, but at least he's getting some writing practice. On a more fun note (for him, anyway) he picked a Harry Potter theme for his birthday party. Except we'll be camping with the cubscouts the weekend of his birthday, so I'm not sure how we're going to schedule it.
After not scrapbooking since September, I took part of last week to play catch up with my pictures and get back in the swing of things before starting on some Disney scrapbooks that one of Rick's coworkers hired me to make. Thirty seven layouts later, I'm caught up to the end of 2007. I had planned to have a garage sale at the end of this month (we can only have them the last weekend of the odd months) but Rick will be out of town, so it got moved to March, which is now a camping weekend, so it looks like I've gotten a reprieve until May. Not sure if that's a good thing or not, since that gives me 4 months to change my mind!
In other news, Rick is AWOL this holiday weekend. It's the company retreat and they headed to Steamboat Springs, Colorado for some skiing. Now, 2 years ago when the company did a retreat to Lake Tahoe, you could have knocked me over with a feather when he told me he skiied. We'd been together 13 years at that point, and I had no idea. He ended up not skiing because he felt guilty leaving me to entertain the kids (we paid extra to take the kids). This year, we just came back from playing in the snow and I didn't feel the need to go through the hassle and the expense to go play in the snow for 2 days, so he's a (relatively) wild and free man this weekend. He's been told that his room will be the designated poker room, so hopefully he doesn't come back broken (or broke!) Actually, I just hope has fun, as hard as he worked last year.
There you go, mom, one really long post of rambling.
