L'Artiste Keira - Since we're living in the land of cheap arts-n-crafts, I can spend five bucks at Michaels on some tempera paint and foam board for an entire afternoon of painting fun. The kitchen island is the perfect place, and Keira is more mess-averse than me (if that's even possible), so it's always easy clean-up.

She's getting great with her letters. She did the K-E, and I did the I-R-A. Now ask me where I'm going to hang this masterpiece? Thinking there are some very white walls in her closet that need some sprucing up.


Mid-week Monotony -

Not much to report this morning. 10am and I'm trying to motivate. Keira is home sick today with a runny nose, so she's parked in front of the Disney channel. Bill and I are headed up to Lifestyle Family Fitness in an hour to get a membership and get our big butts moving a bit more. They just opened a brand new facility, literally 3min. from the house. Best thing is that they have a free kids' club, so we can drop the monkeys and workout. I'm very excited, Bill and I are both getting bored running/power-walking around our development. We get a few sessions with a personal trainer as part of the membership, so we can figure out the machines and get a program started. I'm also trying out a new program called Isagenix, which basically entails a weekly cleanse of the toxins, as well as pummeling your body with huge amounts of healthy stuff. Will keep you posted on that one...as most of you know, healthy options are not generally my favorite :) If only they could package fiber and vegetables in the form of cigarettes or gin&tonics. Actually, I'm doing okay on the smoking front, since anyone who smokes in this country is looked upon with utter disdain. Red wine and/or cocktails, now that's another story...

Have some photos from the week to share. Sorry they're not more exciting, there's just not alot happening at the moment.

We spent at least two hours on Tuesday playing restaurant, where she brings the plastic food and I have to figure out how to 'eat it' to her satisfaction. Tricky business, and there'a always another course right around the corner. She still doesn't have a kitchen, so that may be a good present for Ho-Ho to bring.

Daddy and Keira making 'mousy' pancakes on Sunday morning...

Before....

After....


Scholastic Book Fair - anyone who knows me knows that I'm totally addicted to Scholastic books (I'd happily give up shoes for books, certainly now that we're in a warm climate), so needless to say this was a dangerous endeavor, but I volunteered to help at the book fair anyway and left without too much damage. Not sure if I rambled about it in a previous posting, but both the boys have a year-long event at school called 'Battle of the Books'. They each have lists of 15-18 books to read, and then the students will compete (sortof like a game show, with buzzers, etc.) to get on their school's Battle Team. The teams then compete against other schools in the district, then eventually the winners around the state, to be the Battle of the Books Champions. While I'm being realistic that my guys probably won't 'go for the gold', I'm buying all the books anyway and we're going to try and get through as many as we can.

Riley was so ticked off at me, standing in the library taking pictures of him at the book fair. Could I be any less cool?

I'm now the snack lady at the middle school's sporting events. We had our first home basketball game last night, so Keira and I went to Sam's club to load up on snacks, ordered some Domino's pizza, and put together an ad hoc concession stand for the little spazoids. I completely forgot what middle-schoolers are like, and they definitely don't need to be give large amounts of sugar :) Keira had fun selling the snacks and putting the money in the box.

Here's the school's mascot (they are the Liberty Eagles)

I asked Keira to take a picture of the basketball team warming up, and here's what I got...

The youngest guitar hero in the house...

I always finish with a bang, don't I? Here's a squirrel outside my kitchen window. You can't see it, but it's pouring down rain and the wind is blowing like crazy. This guy is pretty clever, he perched on the other side of the wind and rain, and stayed there for a good 10 minutes until the storm passed. This is not really newsworthy, however I'm excited to finally have a kitchen window where I can watch the world (and the squirrels) go by.

TTFN. Will try to post again over the weekend. xo. K.