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!