no life = no posting

As you can tell, it's been a while since I last posted.

We've been in a late winter rut lately.

Not much to post about.

Our evenings have mostly been spent at home.

Playing Monopoly - the family championship version (it goes faster than the regular version). It has taken some adjusting so that Meredith is OK if she doesn't win. We play it enough, though, that she has learned that if she doesn't win this time, there will always be another time.

We've been reading a lot. We just finished the Little House on the Prairie book with Meredith and started On the Banks of Plum Creek. But then we realized that we didn't read Farmer Boy, which is #2 in the Little House series, so we went back and have started that book.

We also discovered the Magic Tree House series and Meredith is loving that series.

Jesse and I have gone to the library a lot lately. I take my computer and work on it and he plays with the toys.

Basically, we have no life and are just biding our time until we can be outside more!

March desktop background

I've been having fun lately playing around with Photoshop and Illustrator and I made this desktop background with the March calendar on it. Only I'm having problems knowing how to post the file here so that you could (if you wanted to) save the file to your computer and then use it for your own computer desktop background.

So for now, until I figure out how to post the jpg without it shrinking too much, you can leave a comment and I'll email you the file...if you're interested.

 

**Update: If you click on the picture above, a larger version will load in your browser window. If you right click that and choose Set as desktop background, I think it should work without much distortion.  Please let me know if you have problems, though.

Meredith's big day

So Meredith is in 1st grade. And of course she's been learning to read all year.

And she's been doing great at it.

About a month ago, Meredith's teacher started putting names up on the "Reading Wall" at Meredith's school. I don't know if it works the same for every class, but for 1st grade, you have a reading score that depends on how many books you read and how well you test on those books that you read.

So Meredith's goal has been to have her name put up on the reading wall. Every day she would come home from school and give us an update on how many more books she had to read before her name would be put up.

So it was huge news when she made her goal earlier this week and her name went up on the wall!

She came home and was so ecstatic, I couldn't keep her from running and dancing around the house.

Well. I guess I was able to stop her for a bit to take her picture!

We had told Meredith that when her name went up on the wall, we would take her out to supper wherever she chose. For any of you that know her well, you may know that her first choice is always the Orange Place...a.k.a El Ranchero. (The restaurant is painted bright orange...hence the name that she calls it.)

She surprised us this week when she requested IHOP for supper. (Yes, my kids are suckers for pancakes, especially if they have chocolate chips and a whip cream face painted on them!) Unfortunately this happened on Tuesday...which was National Pancake Day. Otherwise known as "National-don't-go-to-a-pancake-house-unless-you-want-to-wait-forever-for-your-food-because-everyone-else-wants-pancakes-Day."

In spite of the overcrowded restaurant, we still had a great supper (who doesn't like breakfast for supper?) and were able to fully celebrate the reading wall victory!

Pictures on the Refrigerator

So this morning Jesse colored a picture for me. I left it in the kitchen and went upstairs to change the laundry. He followed me up and asked if I had my picture. I told him that I left it in the kitchen because I'm going to hang it on the refrigerator. So he said he would hang it on the fridge for me.

Then he colored a picture for Meredith for the refrigerator.

And I was able to see how he "hung" it up on the fridge. He didn't. He put the pictures inside the fridge!

He was so proud that he did it all himself, the pictures are still chillin out in the fridge!

 

**Update: When Meredith got home from school, Jesse deemed the pictures cold enough so he took them out of the fridge...and now neither one is stuck on the fridge door.

 

Play Date

Who doesn't love a play date with good friends?