Enero, Febrero, Marzo

Yep, Cathleya's learning spanish. Jr. K has a spanish teacher come in every Friday and music teacher every Tuesday. That's more than I ever had pre jr high. She took about a month to get used to no naps at school. The afternoon teachers said she'd get droopy eyed around 4pm. They started calling her Sleeping Beauty. But she's better now. She does occasionally pass out after getting home from school while waiting for dinner. She's even slept through til morning a few times. Lucky. But she's learning so much and she's not even in kindergarten yet. She's doing addition and subtraction, site reading, not to mention spanish and music.

Jeremy is starting to communicate so much more than before. He'll bump his toe or something, lift up his foot and say "Hurt. Owee. Kiss. Kiss." Waiting for you to kiss his owee. Such a cutie. Dangerous!! He's also learning site words at daycare. She only has 3 kids right now but she'll play a site words dvd and they all watch. He recognizes little words like on, it, are, and bigger words like play & look. He can recite his numbers up to the teens, although he always skips 6. And he can recognize all of the letters. He still pronounces the words with baby talk, but the concepts are there. Jeremy is always amazing me. I'm lucky to have such smart kids. Although he still calls Mushu, Elmo now and then.

Being the youngest, Jeremy always wants to play with his older cousins. And being the youngest, he's always shunned and they don't want to play with him. But I think once he starts talking more they'll include him more often. They do let him join in once and a while. But once he starts grabbing their crayons or throwing them around, drawing on their paper instead of his, they decide to play something else and leave him where he is. Oh, to be young.

We drove down to LA in the new (used) Odyssey to meet the new cousin, Malia, and for Grandma’s belated birthday. The kids loved the dvd player. We were holding out as long as we could for a portable dvd player for the car. But now that Cathleya’s older, it helped a lot. But then she starts complaining that he neck hurts or she leans over sideways funny in her seat (just like on the couch). We used the booster seat function rather than the 5 point harness so she’s more comfy. But that means more freedom to not sit properly in her chair. That’s probably not the best thing to do in the car. But I remember the station wagon days growing up where you lay across the whole bench seat to take a nap with the center lap belt loosely fitted around your waist to claim that you’re still in your seat belt. How times have changed.

We are anxiously waiting for the city to approve our last iteration of our expansion plans for the house. Hopefully we'll get to break ground in April or May. We're so jaded now that its never going to happen that we haven't started packing things up and preparing for strangers to trample all over our house tearing down walls and putting them back up again. But we're a lot closer than we were before so we better get off our posterior and get packing. We'll be able to live in the house while the construction is going on so that helps. It will just be dusty for a while. But it will be worth it.