WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM CERI

I HAVE NOW PUT MY PICTUURE

ON THE BLOOG I HOPE YOU SEE IT
SOON. I PAINTED IT BY MYSELF. I COULDN'T FIND MY RAINBOW PICTURE SO I PUT THIS ON INSTEAD. I THINK IT LOOKS GORGEOUS. I HOPE YOU DO TOO.
LOVE SARAH X XX X X X XX XX

Little Women

This has taken more than a week, and many many tries to FINALLY get a couple of videos uploaded onto Blogger, or even one! So we haven't really been silent, just trying hard in the background. :o) .....


One of my very favourite books (one of Michael's too actually), and our very favourite film too is Little Women. I was watching these four girls dancing the other day, and thought of various parts from the film and book of how the March girls played and worked together. There have been several times when they have totally reminded me of those March girls, and this was one of them. None of the video clips we have actually captured it at all, which is a shame. They all seem to be taken just at the wrong moment, but hopefully you'll get the idea.





Peter gets very excited when we mention dancing, and likes to say 'dance', or more like 'danth' actually. He LOVES dancing in Mummy's arms, and often on his own or with his sisters too. I think he must have had enough by the end of that last one though - he suddenly wasn't really in the mood anymore!



It's really funny how, in age order, they have quite a few of the same characteristics as Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. There are loads of differences too of course - they're their own people and not a book character! It if fun to watch and observe the similarities at times though. I hope you enjoy a little bit of them too. :o)


Oh, and here is Sarah still madly in Mary Poppins mode. All four girls have not stopped singing those songs for the past few weeks since we watched the film for the first time. Then they went to a friend's house, and they had the sound track for it - so we had almost non stop Mary Poppins songs after that. The only thing that stops them is other music to sing or dance to. Rachel even started singing scales after she heard me playing some scales om the piano last week! That's our lovely Rachel. :o)

They also like to say "spit spot" when quickly getting ready to go, and every other fun phrase they can think of from the film. I think Rachel would quite like to BE Mary Poppins! :o) Oh, and sliding down, and up the banister became a favourite pasttime for a while (that last one with a little bit of help!)

Time to colour

I love Rebekah's pictures at the moment. It's a fun stage she's still going through. After breakfast this morning they all drew some lovely pictures. Rachel and Hannah went for horses as usual - their one true love. :o) Their horses are getting pretty good. I think they need some new pens though, or use some other material to draw with. They've gone up on their bedroom wall now. They do like horses, and Peter just loves to see so many of them around the place. He always chooses to make a clicking (clip-clop) noise for a horse, sometimes with the hand sign, bit mostly not. Here's Rachel's lovely horses,

















...and Hannah's.

















Sarah loves to draw rainbows in everything and did as ever. I think she likes the colours. Rebekah also drew a rainbow, and then drew this fun picture of somebody picking up rubbish. Can you see they're holding brooms, and you can see the one broom actually sweeping things (in green). I liked it.

Help!!

This adorable, cute, cuddly, and very cheeky little boy has been talking again.
One of his favourite words to say (he doesn't have many just yet) is Bob, as in Bob the Builder. He could say Bob before, but this week he very clearly at times is also trying to say "Bob the Builder", and then "Yes we can!" It's cute. Everywhere he goes he tells us about the cars he sees, as CAR and BOB are the two totally clear words he uses all the time, closely followed by BALL and THROW (and he doesn't just like to throw balls - Peter will tell you that everything works well, including food!) Yesterday he was funny though. I don't know where he'd got it from - possibly Rebekah as I think she's done this a few times this week. Anyway he loves to climb, the higher the better. So he naturally doesn't like to stand on the floor or sit on chairs too often. They are fun too, but not as fun. Standing on top of the dining table is his favourite place to be. Yesterday he wanted to sit / lie / climb on the arms of our sofas. They join together in the corner, and he kept on lying along an arm, or sprawling across two arms, calling "Help!" By the evening, his help was pretty clear. Of course he could get down on his own, and Mummy played the game and got him back down onto the chair too a few times, but he climbed back up again, pretended to be stuck, and shouted for help once more! Typical cheeky little Peter - this game was too much like fun! :o) Rebekah when she does it likes to dangle backwards off a chair so that she's about to fall, and call for help. Ideally she'd like a friendly ambulance or fire engine to come along and help her, which occasionally it does. :o)




This was the first time he's worn these grown up pyjamas, so I just had to take a photo or two. He acts and looks a little bigger every day it seems. When we were walking home from the bus stop last week, we crossed the road, and were walking past the bus stop on the other side when Peter suddenly started to giggle as he ran off the path, through the bus shelter and towards the road! Michael was walking right behind him, but had to run after him to get to him before he got to the road. He's not fast yet but he's getting there.

He loves to tell us things, either signing, with real words, or in his own little language. For his first birthday we gave him a board book with lots of pictures of animals and their hand signs (British Sign Language), so as we read the book as well as learning the names of the animals he has learned some of the hand signs, which is an easier for him to show us what animal he means at times. The last two weeks we started playing a simplified version of the game Noah in family home evening. For those of you who don't know that game, one person is Noah, and every other person chooses to be a different animal. You choose a noise and an action for your animal. Then Noah starts by doing his sign and then one of an animal. That animal then does their sign (and noise) followed by someone else's. The idea is to keep it going quite quickly and then it's easy to get muddled up and do the wrong sign or noise here or there. Also when a person makes a mistake they move to the end of the line (of chairs ideally) and become the animal that WAS on that chair. Everyone else moves up one seat to fill the gap and becomes the animal who WAS on that chair! You can see how confusing it can quickly become! We're nowhere near that stage though - sitting in circle and staying as the same animal is enough for our younger ones for now. Anyway, the sign that we use for Noah is the sign for a man in BSL (which makes sense) so this week we figured we'd start using it as a game to practise and extend our signing. We choose an animal and the BSL hand sign for it (and look it up if we don't know what it is) and then just use the sign for the game, no noise. It would be a fun game to use with deaf people if sat in a circle so you can see each other. We're doing it silently (sort of!), which makes us pay close attention like we need to anyway with signing. We also get enough practise of the signs during the game to remember them in the future. It's a beginning! :o) What was quite cute was that Peter recognised the signs he knows and so did them along with us - just about every sign that was being made. He was stood in the middle of the circle making the signs along with us. It's fun to know that the signs mean something to him - they're not just doing something fun with your hands.



As for the girls, they've been singing, dancing and playing their music as they always love to do. They seemed to really enjoy their ballet and tap dancing today. Rachel must have enjoyed it as she also spent a good hour before tea gracefully dancing away to some other music, while Hannah went through some CDs and wrote herself a list of the songs that she likes. Rachel can't ever really stop herself from singing anyway, (or whistling if she's not allowed to sing anymore!) After we watched Mary Poppins after our Family Home Evening this week though they all have been singing those songs - and Rachel especially. They hadn't seen it before, and nor had Michael. I was excited because I quite clearly remember it being the first film I ever saw at the cinema. Mum and I snuck out after David went to bed. We were at my Granma's house at the time, and she looked after David while we were gone. I remember going upstairs as if to go to bed, and then being able to come back down and creep out once he'd gone to sleep or was well on his way. Then I had the choice of Annie or Mary Poppins when we got there. It was fun, and nice that I remember it so clearly. I was excited about it all the way through!



These pictures are of a cold afternoon they spent at the park this week with Michael and a friend of theirs. They ended up buiding these two fairy houses next door to each other. They spent more time on the first one making it pretty, building a wall, and putting in comfy moss carpets. They clearly enjoyed themselves. They could play like that all day if there was nothing to do, with whatever materials happen to be lying around. Lego is their standard material, though it's fun what you can make from natural materials.




I've spent most of today in my scruffy clothes painting doors and ceilings on the landing. Some of it needed doing anyway, and the rest was to cover up Rebekah's beautiful drawings that she will insist on decorating the house with. I'm not nearly as creative as my girls though.

This evening Rachel and I sat and watched President Hinckley's funeral (our current prophet) on the internet before she went to bed. We all watched some of it, but I knew the little ones wouldn't last long (good job we weren't watching it at church). It was really lovely.