V-Day Cards

Grandma and Grandpa sent the boys Valentine's Day cards and this is the first time that they really seem to be taking an interest in cards. They love holding them and carrying them around and having us read them out loud.

Thank You For Our Quilts!

We wanted to post a special thank you to Grandma's friend who took the time to make us these very nice quilts. And here is a picture of us with our quilts! I posted early photos where the quilts can be seen but the boys were sick. Here they are much happier and have a lot less snot on their faces. :)

Thank you Mrs. B!

Ethan wearing mom's slippers

New favorite activity - trying on mom and dad's shoes - even my flip flops are not safe! Here are pics of Ethan trying to walk in my slippers.

Reading our ABCs and 1,2,3s!

We have been pretty lazy about the video camera and documentation of some of the latest development milestones, so I am using this post to cover a topic that was been in the making for the past few months.

Last year we posted some video of Mason singing his ABCs and he has since continued to love signing it over and over and if you start singing and stop anywhere in the alphabet he will pick up and continue until the end. Back on January 3rd (the last day of Grandma and Grandpa's latest visit) Mason surprised them by reading the letters off of his wooden blocks.

Those same blocks have both letters and numbers on them and it didn't take long before he mastered identifying (and reading aloud) all 26 letters and numbers 1-9.

Ethan jumped on the letter and number bandwagon and now can consistently identify at least 2/3 of the alphabet and knows the rest of the letters, but sometimes gets confused between E/F, C/G, etc. He can now identify all of the numbers 1-9 on a fairly consistent basis (though the way that a one is written in different ways can throw him for a loop). Ethan is also saying his numbers from 1-10 but sometimes skips over the 7 and 8 - he gets excited to get to 9 and 10! (which is always said with great enthusiasm).

They can both read aloud letters when I write them on their magnadoodles and they have started reading them off of other objects - like the TV "S-O-N-Y" and my mug "N-O-R-T-H-E-A-S-T-E-R-N" and they like to spot letters in signs and posters.

Now we are working on the sounds that these letters make so we can turn all of this letter identification into some reading! I am encouraged that we could possibly have some early readers. My dad and cousin were early readers (by 3). I was not a very early reader and neither was Brett, but maybe those genes will just filter through us and go straight to the boys.

Here are 2 videos that we took to document this for the boys. I warn you though they are both about 3-4 minutes long and you might be bored after the first minute, but we are posting them anyway because we know the grandparents will be glued to the screen! :)

Ring Around The Rosie

The latest favorite song. Mason tries to sing the whole song and has a pretty good grasp of the words. Ethan's version is mostly "ashes, ashes, ashes" over and over again and then "down."

Snow - 2 years in a row!

We have had some crazy weather - it was 80 degrees on Sunday and today we have snow on the ground.




While that was going on we were inside, sick, snuggled under blankets watching Disney Pixar Cars (our very favorite - and first and only - full length movie, which is requested, though not always watched, on a daily basis)

Monkeys