My little ponies..

Conversation on the way home from the orthodontist yesterday:

Milla- 'I can't WAIT for the next MY LITTLE PONY episode! It's going to be AWESOME!!!'

Mama- 'Oh yeah?  How so?'

Milla- 'It's about BETRAYAL and the IPAD of EQUALITY and...COM-MU-NISM!'

Mama- (Waahhh?) 'This is not the My Little Ponies of the '80's......'


So you think I ought to actually sit down and watch a few episodes?

(Oh- and *spoiler alert*- Milla's braces are coming off April 1st! She's so excited)

February

I think I might as well just label all of my posts by month as I don't seem to get around to writing any more often than that.  Might even be time to switch to 'season'.  But I'm going to stick to 'month' right now, showing my unending optimism.  

So in January, we decided to begin our 'Christmas 2015' season with getting a snowbuddy: a program with Volunteers of America where you are paired with someone nearby that is in need of snow shoveling assistance.  It took a couple of weeks to get the background checks done, forms filled out, etc, but we were finally paired with Ms. Barone.  Since then we have been consistently enjoying 50-70 degree weather.  But the skies did open up on February 1st and gave us a good 6-8 inches so with our 1 snow shovel, 1 large broom and 1 flat bottomed regular diggin' shovel we had Ms. Barone's driveway and front walk cleared in no time.  The sun came out and shown 60 degrees the next day and melted off all that we may have missed.  Consistent with my aforementioned optimistic spirit, we purchased a second snow shovel the next week so that more of the family could participate next time.

For February, as well as continuing with our snowbuddy, we decided to focus on Family History and have a goal of 24-48 hours of indexing by March 15 (we are about a half month off).  Milla has been enjoying the challenge of learning to read cursive (you all know that cursive is kind of a thing of the past?  My kids have still been introduced to it in school, but Milla has said that her teachers usually ask that they just print -- or type ofcourse--as appropriate).  

As this is my 'February' post we mustn't leave out Valentine's Day!  We've made it more of a family affair as Brandon and I will have Anniversary fun on Monday.  Following a relaxing morning of taking it easy, we headed out to our nearby Cherry Creek Reservoir and spent an hour walking and exploring with Henry and the family.  They have a great off-leash area that is HUGE and, along with the meandering paths, is lined on one side with a river/stream.  It's nicely edged with rocks and sand (so you don't get muddy!).  A lot of dogs were jumping in.  We were a *little* concerned that Henry might follow suit and we'd have to go in after him, but luckily at almost 7 years old, he has wised up to the fact that a gimpy 1+ foot tall basset hound would probably drown in 18 inches of water.  Nice to be out on a gorgeous day.  Afterwards we stopped by the grocery store to pick up a couple of missing items from the 'heart' menu the kids had planned out and then went home to make dinner! 

Seans strawberry lemonade

 Catherine's fruit pizza (okay-you know Rin better than that, right? She did the sugar cookies with me, but everyone decorated their own 'pizza's' and hers was, true to form, covered in chocolate and marshmallows)

Sean and Catherines hearts shaped cantaloupe

and

Milla/Papa/Mama's spinach cheese and sausage basil raviolis

We watched one of our favorites, 'Return to Me', while eating dinner and then finished with evening off with an emotional round of HERO QUEST.  (thanks again, Lys!)

I suppose just as March's post will contain the last part of February, it is okay to include some of January here.  The next two pics are the only time I remembered to take out my camera in January.  It was quilt washing day and I had my white bed quilt soaking in my tub when Thomas came in and said, 'You know that big thing in your bathtub?  I really want to jump on it!'.  I thought, 'why not?  needs some agitation after all'.  So in he and Catherine went.  And out came the water.  We had about 5 towels out soaking up water by the end

they were getting pretty creative with ways to coordinate their movements so that geysers of water would shoot up into the air

by the end of quilt 2, Catherine was a little worn out and was showing me here how she could trap air in the quilt and make a little pillow for herself.