Jack's Obsession

Do you know who this is?

(Forgive me.  This guy didn't want his picture taken.)

Or this?

And what about their friend, the duck?

Nope.  You are incorrect.

The 1st picture depicts Jacob Marley, the second picture is of Bob Cratchit and their friend is Ebenezer Scrooge (or "Frooge" to Jack) of course.  Jack is obsessed with the book, Mickey's Christmas Carol. 

We started reading it in December, but I haven't been able to put it away like the rest of our Christmas books.  We (mostly me) read this book almost every day to Jack.  Sometimes 2 or 3 times.  There is no other time that Jack will sit for almost 30 minutes.  Yes, this book is LONG! But, I have read it so many times that I can read it without thinking about it.  I can read aloud while planning our dinner menu in my head, that sort of thing. 

Here's Jack this morning "reading" his favorite book.  This is one of his favorite pages, where Jacob Marley appears first on Scrooge's door knocker.  Jacob Marley is definitely his favorite character.  He cannot seem to wait for those pages in the book.  "Where's Jacob Marley"?!  Also, Jacob Marley has become a game in our house.  Jack pretends to be the Ghost of Jacob Marley and runs after the other kids yelling/moaning "IIIIIm Jaaaacob Marrrryey ooooooooo".  And this morning, Jack handed me the book Go Dog Go  (another of his favorites, but not an obsession) and he informed me that it was not "Go Dog Go" but "Go Jacob Marley Go".  Yep, I read the whole book substituting "Jacob Marley" for "dog," which, by the way, was 58 times.

But Bob Cratchit has a place in Jack's heart too.  I have appeased Jack at night by giving him Bob Cratchit to sleep with (Our only Jacob Marley was pictured above.  He's a stamp.  Not something to sleep with...).  Notice that Butter is on the floor and Bob Cratchit has the throne.  Poor Butter.

So now you know what's up with Jack!

Where's Paige?

We ask that question a LOT now all of the sudden.  And the answer more often than not is "in her room reading".  Paige went from reading a bit here and there, to reading chapter books!  Right now, her obsession is with the Magic Tree House books.  She'll read a book in a day!  These books combine adventure with  history, two of her loves, so these books are perfect.  She also loves American Girl books, but prefers us to read those ones to her most of the time.  I know every kid gets here (reading chapter books) at some point or other, but to me, this is super exciting.  I love to read and I love that she has picked this up.

Here she is reading on her bed.

And in the car...

  I also love that she is sharing her love of reading with her brothers, especially Jonah.  She is the one who first found out that he could read so she sits down with him every day with their Magnadoodle.  She writes words and then he reads them and erases them.  Over and over and over.     She is so proud of Jonah and comes to me and says "Mom, Jonah read ___!  Isn't that great, Mom?  Jonah's doing such a good job"!  Yep, it is great!
Hope you all enjoyed READING this!

10th Anniversary

That's right!!!  Julie and I have been married for 10 whole years!!!  Best 10 years of my life (or at least I assume this, I don't remember the first 5 of my life very well, maybe they were better...).  We actually dated for 6 before we got married, so already 1/2 of our live's we have been together.

Anyway, we decided to spend the night out to celebrate.  Our actual anniversary was last Thursday, but we went out on Friday night.  We had dinner at our favorite special restaurant Palisade, located on the waterfront in a nice marina in Seattle.  It is a great restaurant, nice atmosphere, they pull water in from the sea and have ponds and a small stream running through the restaurant.  We were seated at the window though, which was really nice.  The food was great too!!!

After dinner we headed to a different area of the waterfront where we had booked a night at a hotel.  We had arranged for each kid to be with a friend at their house for the night.  The plan almost worked perfect, but Jonah's friends sister (another of Paige's friends...) came down with a fever.  Luckily the family Paige was staying with offered to take Jonah also.  That was so nice of them.  I am sure a grandparent would have taken Jonah if that didn't work out, but it was great that the kids got to stay with friends.  Anyway, after we checked in we decided to walk around the city a little and find a nice spot for dessert.  Well, this didn't work as good as we thought.  The majority of places were closed, other than clubs and a few nicer restaurants, and we ended up in the Hard Rock Cafe which was not the ideal place we had in mind.  But, the dessert was still good.  When we woke up the next morning, this was the view from our hotel window, nice huh? 

What a cute couple!!!  Maybe a little tired still, no coffee yet.

We headed up to Pike Place Market to get something to eat, and stopped first at the 1st Starbucks. 

After our coffee and some pastry's to eat we spent the next couple of hours walked around the market and downtown Seattle.  It was really nice, just to be the two of us!!!

The Monkey is 5!

Jonah had his 5th birthday last Sunday!  I can't believe my Little Monkey would actually be going off to school in the fall if I let him!  He really is growing up though, becoming more independent, being more helpful, obeying more, but he is still Jonah.  He is continuously climbing, talking and pretending.  But guess what!?  He can read!  Not huge words or anything, but I just have not been able to really "work" with him in this area, so it is an unexpected surprise.  I have always told Mike that Jonah is smart, he just has no desire to show it.

We started off the day by giving Jonah his presents.  He got a Spiderman bike and helmet from us and a cute robot card and a stretchy sticky hand from Paige.  Both presents were super cool to Jonah!

I love how Jonah was so excited about the Robot card Paige made him!

We all got ready for church and then went to Starbucks for breakfast.  Mike and Paige usually pick up donuts at Chuck's on Jonah's birthday, but they aren't open on Sundays!  So, the next best thing was Starbucks.  Hot chocolate and donuts sure start the day off right (sarcasm here).  But, they sure taste good!

Jonah had a dinner time party with the theme of "Robots."  We decorated with Lego and K'nex robots and lots of foil.  Paige made a "Pin the button on the robot" game to play with the kids (There were two other kiddos besides our kids.  The party (as usual) was mostly family.).  It was all very fun!  Oh, just so you know "Robots" is a generic term.  Not characters in a movie or anything.  Jonah just likes robots. I found a great book at the library on robots one day and Jonah has been loving them ever since.  He has seen some movies and shows with robots though!  He loves Number 5 from "Short Circuit"!

Here is the cake.  It was pretty fun to make.  And very easy and fast (if you're me anyway.  I am always messy and always fast.).

Here's our birthday boy blowing out the candles.

I collected a ton of boxes, toilet paper rolls and just random stuff before the party.  Then the kids made these adorable robots (on the hearth).  They really had a fun time making them.  And I am going to have to find a way for them to disappear one of these days (along with the foil chain garland...).

Happy 5th Birthday sweet Monkey Boy!

My "business trip" to Germany

In fact, I did take a business trip to Germany last week.  But, that would be a really boring subject for most people to read about.  But, because I was in the area, I was able to extend my trip a few days at the end and flew down to Bulgaria to see Zac.  He was there alone, as Fiona, Nuala, Bran, and new baby Maeve were in Texas where Maeve was just born a month earlier.  So anyway, it really worked out pretty well.  I arrived Friday afternoon, and we briefly stopped by their house to change, and headed to Rila mountain.

It was supposed to be sunny and clear, but the weather didn't cooperate. When we parked the car where we planned to start hiking it was starting to get cloudy.

The map I am holding is the wrong map.  The correct one was still on a table at Zac's house.  Oh well, someone from his work basically explained where we where going and we both had a GPS, so we couldn't get too lost...

The climb at the beginning was pretty tough.  The snow was really deep and hill was pretty steep. We climbed about 3000 feet in only a couple miles. 

We were having a great time though, both loving the outdoors a lot.  However, when the sun started to go down the reward was big!

It was not too long after this that the wind started to pick up and it started to snow again.  We were looking up to the top of the ridge line and had hoped to climb all the way to the top before stopping for the night, but with the snow starting to pick up and it getting dark pretty quickly we picked the last grouping of trees we saw and stopped there.  Turned out that was really smart, as we didn't really find any other good places even the following day to pitch the tent.

We didn't really plan for such extreme weather, so the night in the tent wasn't the best.  The tent itself was not a mountaineering one, so it didn't hold in the heat as well.  Plus, as I had to either bring my gear from home or borrow from Zac, I ended up not having a sleeping pad, so basically was sleeping directly on the snow.  The wind howled throughout the night, and was actually blowing fine snow dust into the tent through the air vents.  Look at some of our gear that was outside the tent, but under the rain fly.  When we woke up it was 19 degrees F outside.

So on our second day the snow was coming down pretty hard and we had a pretty constant wind blowing at us, gusting up to about 35 MPH.  So whenever we stopped we got cold pretty quickly.  Look at how the wind was blowing the snow onto one side of my hat. 

We basically followed the ridge line up to a peak (not the top of the mountain) where we really needed to decide what to do next. 

So we hiked over to the edge where there were some rock outcroppings that we thought we could get a little shelter from the wind (which was getting stronger) and have something to eat and drink.  Our drinking tubes to our water bladders were frozen, so we didn't have water to drink since we left camp. 

So the wind just kept picking up and by the time we had boiled water we decided instead of having hot chocolate and then oatmeal for lunch, we would just have chocolate oatmeal in order to get moving again soon.  The temperature had dropped to 17 degrees F.  Here are a couple of shots though looking out from where we were sitting.  The big patch with no rocks in it is one of the seven Rila lakes.  We were able to see five of them during our hike.

Because the weather was looking like it was going to stay bad and maybe get worse we made the decision to start back down.  We had already decided not to spend another night, because it was so cold and there wasn't a lot of good sheltered areas up where we were.  But of course as it would work out, when we where about half way down the sun started to come out again and we got a chance to see some great views while we hiked out.

So after we got back to the car we drove around to the other side of the mountain where a famous monastery (Rila Monastery) is located.  You can see the top of Rila mountain (snow covered) to the left of the monastery in this picture.

The monastery itself was really cool.  The entire inside was full of paintings (all done by the same artist) of either Bible stories, or of saints.  You can kinda see a couple paintings, and the idea of the style from this picture.

After visiting the monastery, we headed back to Zac's house, had showers, went out for dinner, and then both slept really really well in real beds.  The next day Zac took me around the area a little to show me Sofia (only a little though, because Julie, the kids and I are planning to go there next year), and then hung out at his house playing a couple video games (I am not good at video games) and watching a TV show about climbing Everest.  Then on Monday I had a flight at 6 AM to head home. 

It was a great weekend.  The hike of course was the highlight as it was the plan.  But just being able to hang out with Zac was pretty cool as I don't see him very often.

Blowing bubbles...and other tricks

Paige had been trying for sooooooo long to blow bubbles with gum!  She chewed a lot of gum when we were in Brazil this fall and became frustrated that she never got a real bubble.  But this last Friday she blew her first bubbles!  I have to say that I think it is partly (or maybe entirely) my fault that she hadn't made any progress in bubble blowing arena until now.  I think I bought the wrong gum.  Always Trident or something like that, but Mike bought Bubble Yum last Thursday night while he was out with the boys.  Yep, Mike's the hero!
You will get to see Paige blow a bubble in this video.  Jack too.  He thinks he's blowing them!  He LOVES bubble gum and usually starts asking for it after breakfast.  Sometimes he gets some after lunch.  Sometimes.  I was surprised the first time I gave Jack gum (a little over a month ago).  I thought he would swallow it, but I gave him the gum out of my mouth because he really wanted some and we were in the library (it was my last piece).  He was sure happy after that! He chewed it for over an hour before he wanted to spit it out.  No swallowing it for Jack!  Paige is the one who still accidentally swallows her gum.  Although she is the one who once swallowed a string of dental floss.  Seriously.  She was about 3 and wanted to floss her teeth so I gave her a piece of floss.  A minute or two later, she asked me for another piece.  I asked, "Where is your other piece"?  She responded, "I ate it.  It tasted like a Peppermint Pattie".

Blowing Bubbles from Julie Tull on Vimeo.

And here are some Monkey Girl tricks while bubble blowing.  Paige spent hours last Friday blowing bubbles and climbing doorways. 

ooh-ooh-ah-ah

The potty dance

So, the other night (after Jack had been throwing up all day...), Mike and I hopped into bed.  Right away I heard a noise coming from the boys' room.  I thought it was probably vomit again, plus I was warm under the covers,so I asked Mike if he would check on Jack for me.  Of course I would have gotten up to deal with the actual vomit...  So, Mike went into their room and found, not Jack throwing up, but Jonah running in circles on his bed (the top bunk)!  Apparently Jonah had to go potty and this is his "potty dance," but he wasn't awake enough to know what he was doing.  Mike got him down from his bed and placed him on the floor so that he could walk to the bathroom but Jonah just ran circles on the floor.  Mike then took him to the bathroom and he did the same potty dance until Mike held him at the toilet until he did his business.