It's official ...

Timmy is transitioning stages. I say this because yesterday, when I was cleaning out my office and re-arranging it a bit, I found a bunch of pre-school, K, 1st grade workbooks. Reading stuff, math, matching games, etc. Anyway, I brought them down at lunch, and after lunch, Timmy sat for somewhere around 2 hours and just did stuff in the workbook. Of course, that's totally his personality. He can do things* for hours at a time and not get bored. However, this is certainly something he has never done before.

*Other things he has done like this before: cars, super heroes, soccer, computer games, movies.

The other thing he's totally into at this point is dinosaurs. He's got a couple of books about them that he likes to read, and he's starting to memorize some of their names. The other day I was reading him a dinosaur book and as we passed certain of the dinosaurs, he'd say, "I have that one" (referring to the 5 or 6 dinosaur action figures he has). So we'd have to check out the underside of the dinosaur action figure (where the names are imprinted) to verify if indeed that was the same dinosaur. More often than not, he was correct.

So there you have it ... the next stage of Timothy David DeVries.

In other family news, we all took a trip to Target last night to get some slippers for Timmy and gloves and boots for Emma. The trip was a success, and confirmed for me that Emma and Timmy are cut from the same cloth ... they both love shopping and trying on stuff ... cloth which does not come from either Cyndie or I!

Following our shopping trip we stopped at Emma's school for an upper elementary play that one of the neighbor girls was in. It was cute, and the friend, Olivia, stole the show.

Feels like Wednesday

For some reason, today totally felt like Wednesday when I got up. Perhaps that's just wishful thinking!

Not a whole lot to report on today. It's sunny and it looks like most of the snow we got will probably be melting today. Timmy and Emma are both at school this morning, so Cyndie worked some on some graphic design business she has. She's doing a logo and letterhead for a friend who is starting a business, and also doing some branding type stuff (logo, letterhead, poster, mailers) for a Covenant Harbor related ministry. The best news is that both jobs are paying jobs!

So that's about it around these parts!

A Few Pix ...

Here's a few random pictures from the last week for your viewing pleasure ...

Here's Emma and Grandma and Grandpa D at the Pilgrim Feast.
Emma and Tim all blanketed up while watching the movie at the library last week.

Timmy swimming during Emma's swim lesson ...

Here's Emma this morning building her snowman on the deck at 7 am.

Odds and Ends

A few random thoughts regarding the weekend:

• Emma (and Cyndie) had a great time at the girl scout Sup and Sing on Friday night. Emma can home with a patch and singing all the different songs that she learned. I think girl scouts (actually Emma's age group is Daisies) will be right down Emma's lane. She loves the acheivement that goes along with earning patches, so I think she'll really excel. Cyndie and another mom from Emma's class are trying to round up enough girls from Emma's class at Woods to start a troop. So we'll see.
• I split quite a bit of wood over the weekend ... and I was pretty sore! I think I'm getting old. Mostly my hands hurt and my lower back is pretty sore. I think I'll wait a couple of days before I attack the "to be split" pile again.
• More fall yard cleanup was accomplished on Saturday. I think we're pretty much ready for snow, which is good considering the whiteness which is blanketing us this morning!
• We're all excited for a short week of school and work this week. Auntie Jane arrives on Wednesday late. Her arrival will officially mark the start of the holiday season.
• We had a fun time on Friday and Saturday spending an hour or two each day over at the art show for our art class. It was fun to talk to different people about both the paintings, and life in general.
  

White Monday

As foretold by the weather.com forecast yesterday, we woke up this morning to about an inch of snow on the ground. When I went into Emma's room at about 6:50 and opened up her curtains to show her, she was VERY excited. She promptly went downstairs, got all her snow stuff on*, and went outside and made a snowman, complete with carrot for a nose, all by herself.

*I should take a moment here to compliment Emma. When I went into her room, she had already made her bed, cleaned up half her room, and was halfway through getting dressed. That's progress for her. We're really working hard on keeping their rooms clean. And by that I mean Emma and Timmy keeping their own rooms clean.

The snow looks to be pretty wet, and I think it will get warm enough over the next couple of days where it will melt fairly quickly. However, it was still fun to get. The first real snow of the year!

How much wood would a wood chuck chuck?

So Dad and I have spent much of the morning and afternoon (with a trip to the class art show and a bit of work thrown in in around that) cutting down dead trees around the yard. So far we've managed to get down almost all of the trees that need cutting, with the only damage to the little yellow slide on the Dragon's Lair (and a near miss of a tree on Dad's head, but we won't go there). Perhaps the better quote would have been something about a beaver, but a wood chuck will have to do.

Tonight Emma and Cyndie are heading out for a girl scout event (I think they put it on to try to recruit new girls) and so Timmy and I invited Grandma and Grandpa D over to help us eat the extra pork chops. *

*We may have also invited them because rumor has it that there was a freshly baked apple pie over at the senior DeVries house that needed eating.

Total Cuteness

So I had to take a break and share a cool/cute little scene that happened this morning. Emma is almost always the first one up in the morning* (of the two kids). Today she comes down stairs while Cyndie and I are working out and finds a basket of books. Anyway, I didn't really notice what she was doing until I came up from the basement and was starting to put together her lunch and breakfast, etc. There she was, sitting there reading to herself for like 20 minutes or so. Totally cute, and exciting that she's into the reading thing. I can easily see her becoming an avid reader. She loves the stories, plus she's developed a nice bond with the kids librarian at the LG library who is always suggesting fun new stories for her.

*Note to self and spouse. Perhaps we should think about making Emma's bedtime a little later to see if that equals out the rise times of the kids.