Phone Dump

This kid cruises around backwards in here.

And he's been sitting up now! This photo is from when he was just getting the hang of it.

So I started working-joined the trend that's everywhere--and I'm teaching English online to little Chinese kids. They are the cutest, it's going well, and things are good. But I had to have head shots, and I couldn't find ANYTHING without kids or other people, so one random morning at 7am Sterling quickly snapped a couple before he ran out to his rotation.

And this is in our bedroom, my set-up for teaching. HA! This was my set-up for taking my get-to-know me video. NOW there are paper props laying EVERYWHERE (and I use my laptop to teach, it's faster) along with puppets and dry erase markers and everything else you could imagine to making teaching English fun. What is nice though, I didn't have to buy anything--I just forage through my kids' toy bins.

Monochromatic. There are two other boys in Will's class of ten, so the three of them are pretty tight. And Holden, his friend, LOVES sharks. One of the moms bought matching shirts for the other two boys, so when I saw this BLUE (his favorite color, obviously) shark shirt at the Children's Place for 4.99 and free shipping, I thought it would be a pretty big hit. And it definitely has been.

Asleep at church. That is my absolute, absolute favorite. He is at this PERFECT stage where he is heavy, but it feel so so so nice to have that heavy, warm little bug snuggled up beside you. Oh he's the best!

Tuesdays we usually go to Library Little Picasso's. My kids LOVE that they get to do an art project at the library!

Ruthie and Will got new shoes--there is a Nike outlet by us, and all their clearance items were an additional 30% off. AND both my kids had grown so much I had to go up two sizes. Oops. Ruth's last pair had laces though, and I never took the time to teach her (horrible mom guilt here) so I'm pretty excited to move on from those shoes for a bit.

I just have to say, this pudding turned out AMAZING.

Sideways picture, but at the beginning of December our friends the Hillam's (okay just Jeff) got an expansion for Settlers. Pirates and Fishing? Anyway--the rule book had you learn by adding only one new thing per game. So it took us a total of four games to get to the point where we could play with all the new things. SOOOO---it's been some LONG Catan game nights in the making, but I WON the final game!! WAHOO!!! And then we played Carcassone, because that is more on my level. We play games with Jeff and Diana quite a bit, and we try to invite new friends, but someone asked what we liked to play, so I'll document here. We usually play a few quick games to offset one longer game in a night. Wackee Six, Carcassone, Dominion, 7 Wonders, Dungeon, DixIt, Citadels, Code Names, Monopoly (the monolopy that is a card game?), Sushi Go, Blokus (if there's only four of us), and everyone else seems to like Small World, but it is probably my least favorite. Over Christmas we did invite some new friends from the ward and they brought a few new ones that I LOVED--so we'll have to investigate :). 

That reminds me--we got some GREAT kids games for Christmas. I can NOT say enough good things about Sleeping Queens. We literally LOVE it over here. We also got Loot and really enjoy it but Ruth is the only one who can solidly play by herself so that makes it tricky. Last year we got Enchanted Forest and that is still going strong. We also have been teaching the kids Milles Bournes and I love it. Ruth and Will are both pretty good at playing it. Molly's favorite is Sleeping Queens, but she is also in love with Peek-A-Doodle, which is kind of just a glorified Memory. It's fun though.