Wick!

Rea and Sara worked hard this week weeding daffodils and playing "The Secret Garden." We've been getting lots of rain and it's warm, so things are sprouting wonderfully. We might have a good garden this year if Rea keeps up her enthusiasm. Alison is starting to look at seed catalogs again; last year she said she was jaded and done trying to garden, but that's probably not actually true.

Mike got to present a game at BGDG on Tuesday because they didn't have enough games there for the amount of people who came. He did "One Perfect Moment," a new game he's developing for an 18 card game contest. He didn't get much feedback, but a few comments were helpful.

Montessori time is still going very well. Sara and Timmy are playing a store game with Mommy, where they find random things, make prices out of our place value cards, and count out the correct number of thousand cubes, hundred squares, ten lines, and unit points to pay for it. They're learning a lot. Rea heard the Fourth Great Lesson: the Coming of Writing. We talked about the history of the alphabet and she wrote some secret messages in cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and the phoenician alphabet. This kicks off our study of grammar and spelling. She continued following up with the other Great Lessons, learning about evaporation and bugs. She's asked to start botany next week.

Gideon has also had a great week for progress. For the first time, he's been happy for minutes at a time on his tummy. He can hold his head up and look around, and if there are cool things in front of him, he stays there for about a minute before rolling onto his back. We are very excited for him.

Gideon also said his first "words"" "another" and "zerbert." He uses both interchangeably, but they are very distinct sounds ("another" is mostly happy screams, while "zerbert" is buzzing his lips). It's so much fun to reach these milestones!

On Friday we had a Brazilian rain forest party. There was a playgroup at the Church on Monday and Rea and Sara played with a couple of younger girls that we didn't know as well. They had such a wonderful time that we decided to invite their families to our Carnival party for the week. The girls decorated the playroom with green streamers and pink and purple flowers to be a Brazilian rain forest, and we printed jungle animal coloring pages for all the kids to color and cut out and tape up. They played "Rescue Princesses," which is a series of books that Rea enjoys (the princesses learn ninja moves and use them to rescue animals in trouble) and Sara is always happy to play (princesses - need I say more?). They also dug for treasure in the backyard and let each guest take home a shell. We tried to make Brazilian brigadeiros, which were delicious but very messy. It was fun.

For our date Friday night, Mike and Alison played 7 Wonders. It was a fun game, although not one of our all-time favorites. The three big kids stayed in the other room and watched the movie the entire time we played, which was awesome. But they called us a couple of times because the VCR was scrambling the picture a bit; we may have to replace it soon.

On Saturday, Timmy asked Daddy to play Robots vs Aliens many times. He liked it a lot. We also went to the DI to buy new Sunday clothes for Timmy; he is growing so fast! Rea asked us to set up the tent inside the house like we do for General Conference. As we were putting it away, Timmy broke the elastic in one of the poles. We were very unhappy, but Rea and Mike were able to fix it. Yay!

On Sunday in our Family Meeting, we discussed the grumpy lack of obedience and lack of kindness we've been noticing. We decided on two things to try to help: more sleep and more wrestles. We'll have regular wrestle time and nap time every day,and darken the room so the kids will sleep better. We'll see next week how well this worked.

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