Andrew's family picture

I asked Andrew to draw a picture to put in our new year's letter. Here it is. Notice the hearts and arrows. Apparently they point at who loves whom the most. Andrew loves daddy the most and everything else follows from there ....

A simple project was a big success

The other night after making marshmallow dreidels with Andrew I had some leftover melted chocolate in two colors. Not wanting to let it go to waste, I made homemade "gelt" (coins) by drawing each of the letters in Alison & Andrew's names out (backwards) on a piece of foil in one color of melted chocolate, and then covering that with a circle to form a coin in another color.

I didn't think much of it ... it was a really simple thing, took me 5 minutes to do. So I didn't even take a picture.

Tonight I gave them to the kids. And got high praise from Andrew:

"My gelt is the goodest chocolate I ever ate. It's so good!!"

:-)

Andrew read a book tonight!

Andrew is very pleased tonight because he read a whole book. Admittedly it only had 4 words in it (two names:"Mat" & "Sam", plus the words "on" and "Sat") but there's a plot and several pages and he read the whole thing! I'm pretty pleased too :-). It's a series of 12 little books: http://www.bobbooks.com/bob_books_set_1.php

Alison's first computer program

Ali used "scratch" (scratch.mit.edu)  to write her first program. It's an animation called "wait up." She did it all by herself, and I wasn't allowed to peek until she was done. You can watch it here: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/suny36/1391022

When Andrew Grows Up

Andrew recently said that he wanted to be a fireman when he grows up. I asked whether he still wanted to be a guitar player and he said, yes, that too, and we discussed how he could play guitar in the firehouse when they weren't out on calls (I had to reassure him that yes, I was certain you could bring a guitar to a fire station).

Fast forward a week or two. Yesterday Andrew told me that when he was grown up he might go out on his own, for example if he wanted to visit a dog that he wanted to pet or something. But then he would come back home .... "unless I'm doing a show or there's a fire"

Alison's latest essay

Ali had to write a "journal entry." I'm not sure what the guidelines were, but here it is ...

An old quote from Ali -- May 13th

Forgot to put this in, but it's so Ali ...

Ali and I went for a walk to the other side of the lake and she climbed on a jungle gym (climbing frame) she hadn't played on before. She said, "This jungle gym is really made for me. It's so fun -- there's so many different ways to go on it. Every time you go on it you can go a different way!"