The Mother Letter Project

I just learned about this husband's blog tonight--thanks again, Liberty. He is creating a gift for his wife's Christmas present--a compilation of letters written by women, entitled "Dear Mother," in which he asks the writer to share their story, concerns, thoughts, etc. regarding motherhood. He will put every letter he receives in a book for his wife's present, and if he receives your letter by Christmas he will send you a copy also. This is such an amazing idea. I need to get busy on my letter!

Making Pies

Yesterday we made pies--pecan, pumpkin, and apple. The girls played with leftover pie dough at the counter, and I happened to get some great pics of Melina's many smiles (and of course, there's our Isabelle, all smiles as usual!).

Happy Thanksgiving!

It is a little after 1:30 in the afternoon, and in a couple of hours we will be at my Mom and Dad's for Thanksgiving dinner. Mom is doing a ham and other sides while we're doing a turkey in the crockpot for the first time along with crockpot mashed potatoes and green beans and ham hock (Grandma Clark always made this dish and it just wouldn't be a special dinner without it).

After a couple of days of on and off rain, we have sunshine and a beautiful day so Jeff took the girls for a walk around the block in the wagon, and I can now hear their happy, laughing voices as they play outside in the front yard.

We have so much to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day, each other, other family and friends, our health, our home and food to eat, and the list goes on and on. Thank you, God for our many, many blessings.

The girls did handprint turkeys last week that we sent to Grandma and Grandpa Morgan and my mom and dad too. And of course, I have one as well, so that meant making this craft 3 times, but the girls enjoyed painting their hands, even Melina. It was a fun activity on a beautiful fall afternoon last week.

Little House on the Prairie

I grew up reading all of the Little House series multiple times as well as watching the TV show--still do as a matter of fact. I've always dreamt of having my children grow up doing the same thing. For a couple of years Isabelle has already enjoyed watching Little House, and at about the beginning of this year I started to read aloud the first book of the series, "Little House in the Big Woods." However, she was going through a "scared of wolves" phase, so when we got to the part about "wolves eating little girls," she didn't want to read anymore. Well, about a month or so ago, we picked up the book again and this time she absolutely devoured it, insisting on me and Jeff to read her a few chapters a night. We moved so fast through it that we finished it in no time and just finished "Little House on the Prairie" last night. We just started "On the Banks of Plum Creek" tonight and read the first five chapters already. She loves these stories so much that she begs for just one chapter more. I am so excited that she is loving these books as much as I do.

Melina is 16 months old!

Here is our happy 16-month-old baby who adores her sister, gives lots of kisses to her baby dolls, has an unnatural obsession with all kinds of shoes, passionately LOVES cheese and mandarin oranges, rushes to be outside any time of day, loves to play with balls (even has her own sign for ball), eagerly tries to always pet and love the cat (much to Taylor's dismay, however), and is still not the world's greatest sleeper. We love you, baby girl!!

Melina's "glasses"

Unfortunately, we had to recently replace the frames of Isabelle's glasses because Melina is very quick to grab them off her face. First time she broke an arm off the glasses, we got it fixed, but when it happened the second time, the eye doctor couldn't fix it. She points to her glasses and says "eyes." She does this with anyone who wears glasses, including sunglasses.

Well, Melina takes her teething necklace and pulls it up over her eyes and says "eyes." Her own glasses. She is quite proud of herself whenever she does this. Here she is with Uncle Pat, showing off her "eyes."

Isabelle's First Knitting

Isabelle finished her first "swatch" of knitting using the knit stitch. She is very proud of herself!!

Happy Halloween!!

A cool, rainy, fall-like day! What a change from our 90-degree weather!

We carved our pumpkin, ate some pizza with the Truesdales, and did some trick or treating.

Election Day

Isabelle has been very interested in this election, asking lots of questions, and learning new words like Republican and Democrat, and McCain and Obama (even asking the question "Mom, is God a Republican or a Democrat?"). And this morning in Mass, she turned to me and whispered in my ear,"Mom, I just saw Sarah Palin!"

Anyway, I ran across this explanation of the electoral college on this homeschooling mom's blog
and decided to try and explain it to Isabelle. To try and reinforce what she learned, we used 2 labeled cups, as you can see by the pictures, along with an United States map of electoral votes, and a bowl full of M&M's (we used red and green, pretending the green are blue) to represent the electoral votes each candidate would receive. We had the TV on as soon as the election coverage started, and Isabelle would run from the TV to the table, counting M&M's and putting them in the appropriate cup, and coloring in her state map. To her dismay, however, (and ours too of course), we were seeing much more green M&M's than red, so around 7 that evening (about the time the media called the election), Isabelle poured each candidate's "electoral votes" back into the bowl and threw up her hands in disappointment.

So yes, we're disappointed in the outcome, but we pray daily for President-Elect Obama and his family and staff, and we're thankful for a great learning opportunity!

Random pictures from last week

What's going on in this picture???

Isabelle is knitting!

Remember this post?

Isabelle and I went to a knitting group a couple of weeks ago and we learned how to "cast on."

Isabelle was so excited that night--she came home and called her Grandma Morgan who knits, and practiced some more. It took a lot of effort to get her to sleep that night!

And here we are a couple of days ago. She didn't want to wait until the next knitting group to learn how to do the next step after casting on, the knit stitch, so here I am trying to teach her (this is all new for me--the Internet is such a wonderful resource--full of videos that teach knitting).

Day Trip

Over the summer, we found a brochure about the Silver City Ghost Town in Bodfish, which neither one of us have ever heard of. We checked it out yesterday on a beautiful fall Saturday. We first stopped for some lunch:

Then we took the self-guided tour of the town with another "Issy" (the cat) as our guide. The owner explained how the cat got its name: people would always say "is he yours?"--hence, the name stuck! Melina loved this cat. She chased it around the town, saying "meow" over and over. She loves Taylor our cat too, and does the same thing to her at home. I had to save poor Issy (the cat) and put Melina in the front carrier after awhile.

The town:
Isabelle was so proud of herself--she could read this sign!! While driving through Kernville later on that day, she commented how she couldn't wait to read so that she could read all of the signs. This is really her first excitement towards reading. I am so excited for her!




We were a little disappointed--no ghosts!!