March...

First smile caught on camera!

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Johnny is seriously, genuinely terrified of his room and the whole upstairs. Most nights he refuses to stay in his room unless all of the lights are on and/or one of us sitting in there with him. More than once we have found him asleep like this on the stairs!

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Addie loves to draw and paint!

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We had a few sunny days last month. One afternoon the kids were begging to go play on the playground at the elementary school. It was nice out so we stayed for a little while and by then I didn't feel like going home to cook dinner so Daniel picked up Subway on his way home and we ate it outside!

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Crazy how fast 2 months flies by!!

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The little Children's Bookstore by our house was closing (so, so sad about this). Everything in the store was on sale so I snatched up a few fun things! I bought this set of blocks/shapes that you can build in to 3 different robot type things. It is a little too tricky for the kids but I was determined to figure it out! Addie and Johnny like to make their own designs with it!

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While we are doing school, Dia loves to get in to everything. I mean every.thing. She really wants to do what we are doing and tries so desperately to get my attention. I have done a lot of reading on blogs and Pinterest to try and find things for her to do. She loves our Do A Dot markers, until she starts rubbing them on her clothes. We tried pipe cleaners in a water bottle, then they end up all over the floor. I bought a big magnetic thing for her to put magnets on, she loves the Geoboard. For about 2 minutes. I am looking forward to next year when she is a little bit older and *maybe* we can find something that will entertain her for more than 1 minute!

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One of the projects that we/Daniel completed in March was the stairway lighting! The lights come on automatically when it's dark (so basically they are on all day!). They look really nice and I don't worry about the kids falling down the stairs in the middle of the night!

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Another project is my living room wall! I have had this vision since we moved in of what I wanted to do. It's finally done and I LOVE it! We had to design laid out with papers for awhile because I wanted to make sure I really liked it before we started putting holes in the wall. The finished picture below doesn't show my pictures in the frames. I only have 3 more frames to fill then I can say the project is officially complete!

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One of my main goals for Addie this year was to get her reading. She fought me so, so, so much in the beginning of the school year. For some reason she just didn't think she could do it and wouldn't even try. We used a book called 'Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons'. She finally completed the 100th lesson last month! She was super excited to be done. And when she looked back at the first lessons in the book and compared it with what she can read now I think she is really proud of herself. Now she is trying to read everything! We are to the point where we can't spell things out anymore in front of her because she knows what we are spelling! To celebrate her completion of the book we went out for ice cream! It was supposed to be a family thing but Johnny was absolutely rotten all day and even though I gave him more than enough chances to make better decisions, he still was horrible. So it ended up being just Addie and me!

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Some days are really long. Some days I want to sit in my chair and hold a sleeping baby and not get up. So some days the house is a wreck, toys are every where and the kids are shooting nerf bullets at my furniture. And everyone is happy! :)

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Smiles in her sleep. :)

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We had a field trip to Roach Gymnastics! Johnny was so fast I didn't get any really good pictures of him! They are all blurry! I did take some video but I can't find them. :(  He really loves it there and I think he would be very good. We did go in for a free class so he could test it out and he loved it! After the class the teach came up to me and said, "So he has done gymnastics before?". When I said no she said she just assumed he had because he was pretty good! I'm not sure if this is just a tactic to get us excited to sign up or what, but I seriously I think he would be great! If he wants to do parkour he needs to be able to do flips and stuff!

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Dia's new trick every morning. No more zipper pajamas for her!

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Last year we had a family of ducks that crossed our yard once or twice with their babies. They are back again this year! We have seen the mom and dad several times already (we are still waiting to see babies!). Of course we go outside to see them and the kids love to feed them bread, which I am sure we are not supposed to do! By now it's like they expect food from us. One afternoon they came up to the window and were staring at us like "Where is our food?!". Dia loves them and gets really excited when they come!