I took some Christmas card pictures for friends a couple weeks ago, but besides that I haven’t had my camera out the past couple of weeks. I’ll try to remedy that soon, but in the meantime I thought I’d at least share some iPhone photos of our past few weeks. We are all doing well. Max had a friend from school over for a play date last week. He was SO excited to have her come over. A few weeks ago we were driving home from school when he asked, “Mom, can Amelia come over for a play date?” I said sure, and he said, “Good, she’s coming over today.” At that point I hadn’t had any communication with Amelia’s parents though Max said she told him she knew where our house was. I love this age! I finally convinced him that she wouldn’t be coming over that day but we could set something up. They had a great time playing Play-Doh, dancing together, and drawing pictures on the chalk board.

Max is making great progress with reading and writing. Right now we are encouraging him to practice writing words by writing the sounds he hears rather than having us spell everything for him. This is a bit of a challenge for a kid who has a bit of a perfectionist streak. 😉 We keep reminding him that this is how everyone learns to write and that his teacher says it’s okay to not have all the letters exactly right when you are learning. I keep picking up more responsibilities in his classroom. It’s a co-op school so in addition to the volunteer commitment everyone takes a classroom job. Mine has been the newsletter, but another parent moved so I’ve picked up coordinating our class website and now representing us on the school-wide auction committee. I’m actually excited to get to know more about the school and meet other parents there, so I’m happy to pick up the extra responsibilities.

I’m happy to report that Anna no longer cries at preschool dropoff! She loves having her friend Penelope in her class. We are SO lucky that Angel picks both girls up every Tues/Thurs and brings them to her house, then Mom gets Max at school and then picks up Anna. The kids get out only about 10 minutes apart and their schools are more like 20 minutes apart, so thank goodness for good friends! Anna is starting to write her name, she can make the “A’s” and had the right idea for “N” but still working on execution, which is totally fine by us. She loves to draw people and I can’t get enough of them!  Both kids lately are into speaking in gibberish and pretending they are speaking Spanish. Shani if you’re reading this, maybe you can do some Skype language lessons? 🙂

Here are a few random snapshots from recent weeks, enjoy!

Halloween was a lot of fun this year. Anna really got the whole concept this time, though she may be muddling her holidays a bit–the day before, we were talking about trick-or-treating and she asked me, “Will Santa be there?” We clarified that Santa would not in fact be present and thankfully she was cool with that. Max has been steadfast for months that he wanted to be a bear this year. It was surprisingly hard to find a child-size bear costume. There are plenty of toddler-sized ones, but I had a really hard time finding a good one for him. Thankfully eBay came to my rescue and he was thrilled. We have a firm rule that once your costume is purchased you can’t change your mind. The only exception to this is costumes we already own. So Anna went back and forth on a few options that we had on hand, and finally settled on being a chicken. The costume is so cute and it was nice and warm, which was good as we were trick-or-treating on a cool, rainy evening.

It was so fun to see them eagerly walking around our neighborhood, knocking on doors and calling “Trick or treat!” and thanking neighbors for the candy they received. We brought it home to sort through and sample. Anna enjoyed sharing hers and directed us to each take one bite of a few things, “But don’t eat all of it, okay?”

Here they are!