First Half of January, at Home

Tiny is the cutest talker. At 18 or 19 months, she started saying all the words. It was incredible how quickly she started using phrases and how rapidly her vocabulary expanded after she first started talking. She started asking, "Why?" all the time really early on. "I don't know" has been a long-time favorite. Her inflections are the best.

Susan Oddou had surgery on her foot and was laid up for a couple months because of complications. I tried to help with her kids a few times. One day I took Luc and Amelie with us to the gym and then the park. It  was so hard getting the kids from the car through the parking lot and up to the park and then back again afterward. Seriously. Herding cats. But with some of the cats thinking it's so funny to run and hide every second. Also feeding kids is the worst. I don't understand how mothers of giant families do it. Anyway, I survived, and Tiny liked the swing:

The great thing about Jim is he loves to dance with the girls and me. Tiny loves her daddy and gives him world-class snuggles. I can never get good pics because of the dancing. 

Not infrequently, Tiny says, "I want to dance," except the "I want to" part is all one syllable when she says it. She loves dancing. Sometimes her dancing is just jumping, like during this pre-bed dance party: 

Stake conference was on January 7. Tiny was uncontrollable, especially in the second hour. With about 20 minutes to go, things became dire. We were pretty well hemmed into the middle of our row, so taking her out seemed hard and disruptive. She began saying, "Dress!" over and over, demanding that we help her take it off. Jim, desperate to quiet her down and just get through the last little bit of the meeting, took it off. So when Mel and Derrick Karner turned around at the end to congratulate us on how quiet our kids were, they were surprised to see this:

I told Melanie, "Hey, we're dying back here!" 

It was nice for me that Jim got to experience what it's like to try to contain and silence these three little people during church. I'm counting down until September, when he will most likely be released as bishop and able to sit with me again during sacrament meeting. I need to prepare myself for the possibility that he won't be released right at five years or that he'll be called as a high councilor or something. 

That last weekend of Christmas break, Ever put in a bunch of time on Jiji math because she wanted to get to 50% (on the second-grade level) before returning to school. She did it.

That girl is some sort of math genius. Not only is she amazing at addition and subtraction, but she's familiar with multiplication, fractions, and time. The other day we were driving, and she looked at the clock and told me the number of minutes we had until we were supposed to be somewhere. It was something like 12:53, and we had to be there at 1:45 or something like that. Whatever it was, she told me, "We have X minutes," and it took me a few moments to do the calculation myself and realize she was right. She also regularly uses words that I don't think other six-year-olds use, like when I ask her which of two things she likes better and she answers, "I like them both equally." I wish I could think of other examples right now. All I know is that I'm continually impressed by her. 

For our January dates, Jim took Ever out, and I took Wren. Jim and Ever went to Chuck E. Cheese's. It was Ever's first time, and she loved it. Wren just wanted ice cream and book reading at Barnes & Noble again (same as her previous date).

The girls spent some time on the trampoline getting impressive static hairdos. There is nothing better than when siblings play together and love each other.

I had to keep this pic because it shows Tiny doing what she does, which is run in circles around the perimeter:

Tiny's static hair as she went by me: