The kids were so excited to get their picture taken with a real fireman, much less the Fire Marshall, himself! Ha! It was a blast.

Tammy came over for a little while to hang out and play games that afternoon, so that was fun too. It just happened to be James' and my 7th Anniversary, but we're waiting to really celebrate until we have a good opportunity! As for that night, I cooked fried chicken for dinner (James didn't even show up for dinner that night.... ahem!!!), made his favorite dessert (brownies) and wrote a poem for him. He had brought me a dozen roses and chocolates a couple of days earlier. One of these days we'll leave the munchkins with Tammy and at least go out for a nice, quiet dinner.

Yesterday I took Katie and Joe to an art class for little kids downtown. I found out about it through the home schoolers and thought we'd give it a try. It seems silly to take such young kids to such a thing (surely I could teach them anything at this level, right?!), but they had a blast and did sooooooo good! (Sam and I stayed to watch.) The lady had them practrice drawing different lines and shapes, then declared that they would now be able to draw anything since everything out there is made up of these types of shapes. The kids were thrilled and proceeded to copy the teacher's version of a horse, constructed of the shapes they'd just gone over. Katie did great and her horse looked almost just like the teacher's... except the legs. I asked her about it later and she said that the teacher's horse had pointy legs but she didn't want to give her own horse pointy legs because she didn't want it to fall over! Ha! What an "artistic" way of looking at it! We'll try this class a few times and see if it's something we want to stick with or not. Kate and Joe both LOVED it yesterday.

Today is library day and we'll be leaving shortly. Although we don't really need to get any more books at this point. James has brought home a whole bunch of new books from Mardel the past few nights--stuff that had gone on sale and (coupled with his discount) he was only paying pennies for. Cool!

Kid stories, kid stories... Mom said I need some on here. I'm thinking. Let's see... Oh, Katie has been amazing me again. We missed our devotions the other morning and when I walked into the living room later that day she was sitting on the couch with my devotion book (a read-the-Bible-in-a-year book that tells you which portion to read for the day) and her own Bible in her lap. She had found the correct page to go with that day's date and had found the right place in her Bible and was reading our daily devotion all by herself! That was amazing enough, I thought. But then I remembered where we were in our reading... Exodus! She was reading about all of the dimensions of the tabernacle and how many cubits the curtains were supposed to be and how many sockets were to be in them, etc. !!! Crazy kid. Makes a Mama mighty proud, though. :-)

Then there's Joe. He's a beginning reader now and doing pretty well. He writes things frequently and I can always tell what he's trying to say because he sounds things out perfectly. But that often means that there are no vowels involved, because he just doesn't hear them when he says the word. The other day he made a sign that said, "NO GRLZ ULOWD" or something similar. He taped it to the door and then said, "Hey, Mom, does that say 'no girls allowed'?" "Not exactly," I said. As he was walking casually out of the room he said, "Well, that's what it says to me!" Ha! I guess that's all that matters!

And then, of course, there's Sam. He's just been doing the usual. Yesterday I found him in the kitchen banging a hollow plastic toy on the floor trying to knock something out of it. "Come out of there you Ramen noodles!," he was saying, "I know you're in there!!!" Thinking back to our lunch an hour earlier, I knew he wasn't kidding. ~sigh~

Guess that's it from here. Gotta get the monkeys looking good enough to take to the library! Have a great one!!!

~Bec~