Cute stuff

I just wanted to jot a couple cute things down that have happened this week

Mark and Elizabeth:

Yesterday her and Mark were playing pretend. They told me that a howler monkey was in trouble, stuck in a tree and needed to be saved. Elizabeth said 'what should we use? hmmmm, I know, a ladder! How about we build a ladder.' Then when that got old she came up with a new idea ' How about we turn into giraffes. Giraffes are tall and then we can reach the howler monkey!' So smart. Her new favorite car game since I don't let them watch TV as much anymore is I Spy. It is pretty fun and they are surprisingly good at it! They are learning about all the signs on the roads and know many of them already!

Mark is maturing a bit more and is now ready to play a lot more with Elizabeth. It is the cutest thing to hear them being race car drivers and announcers, animal, car, truck and train savers and birds in the nest!! They will just walk into the room and say 'hi, what are you doing?' or if one of them falls they will always ask' are you ok?' I love hearing them communicate!!! Especially when it's the nice kind of communicating:)

Annie:

 She got up at 5:30 am (very early for her) just to talk!! She is going through a major developmental surge with her speech. I tried to go in there to rock her back to sleep but she literally talked the entire time! She was saying random things like' thank you, where are you, there you go, love you, baby', I quickly forgave her for being up so early (I couldn't be too mad, since Little Mark was already up and in my bed:). Yesterday we all baked cookies together. I let her have turns pouring the ingredients into the bowl. This morning she went to the baking drawer, pulled out a measuring cup, went into the pantry and tried to get into the flour to bake!!!! How cute is that?! Oh and she can reach into drawers now, and climb onto the dining chairs and of course then onto the table! She was running after the twins the other day and she was almost keeping up with them!! She is getting really fast. 

Our week

We have had some highs and lows so far this week! Tuesday was a particularly bad day for Little Mark. He was grumpy ALL day and none of my 'strategies' were working. No discipline technique, no amount of hugs was going to get him out of his grump. He was just going to be like that. And then, the next morning and since he has been FINE!! So we went on to have a little fun.

Elizabeth has been obsessed with building nests. She will gather blankets, stuffed animals and pillows from all around the house and ask people to come warm up in her nest! Today she had a total of 3 nests in the house. It is really adorable and she will pretend to be different animals too. So, I thought it was time to go to the library to get some books about birds, nests and eggs. We also ordered a window bird feeder and went to the pet store to pick up some feed. Hopefully some birds will find our food because I put it right on our window where the kids can climb on the couch and watch! Hopefully you will soon be seeing pictures of this.

One afternoon while the twins were still asleep, I got Annie set up to paint by herself! She was so excited!! Painting with 3 kids 3 and under is too stressful for me, especially since this little girl usually enjoys painting herself more than the paper! I left her fully clothed and that helped her focus on the paper. She did a fantastic job and kept things pretty clean. In fact, once she figured out that I was going to wipe off any that got on her she insisted that I do it every time the tiniest amount got on her! So here she is doing her first painting all by herself:

The next day I decided to try this out with Mark and Elizabeth. I have practically given up on quiet time so instead we are going to do things that are easier to do when Annie is sleeping. We got some new planet solar system wall stickers and they LOVED putting them up on the play room wall and trying to memorize and it was fun to teach them and see it being soaked up. Then we moved onto painting. It was pretty easy with just the 2 of them, especially since Elizabeth is a clean freak! 

Mark's approach to painting was similar to his approaches with other coloring things (crayons and markers). He lines them up, scribbles or in this case dabbed the color on and then moved on to the next one. I don't know if you can tell on the top of his picture you can see the dabbing, but he was actually keeping all his colors together!!! I was impressed. He named his painting the cow, because it has spots on it:)

Elizabeth was different. She had a whole paper to paint but chose to stay in one spot. She loaded color on top of color but created circles inside of that spot:) She named her painting the turtle (clever, can you see the turtle?) It was a lot of fun for all of us!

 For some crazy reason I decided that I would try to make my own bows. I normally order them from my sister but I thought it would be easier for me to do them....I might be wrong! It was much harder than I thought!! We'll see if I make any more after these 2 sets!

 One day while playing outside Mark fell asleep in the swing....and I totally left him there for a good 20 minutes (in the hopes he would be happy when I woke him to take him to dance class, this was sadly not the case!):