Prayer Time: Fold Your Arms

#4 Boy trying to fold his arms

"Prayer time" is usually quickly followed by the reminder, "Fold your arms!" This has always been for the benefit of the older children. However, #4 Boy has recently started to fold his arms either when 'prayer time' or 'fold your arms' is announced.

Puzzle Man

#2 Boy has always had a knack for puzzles. This is when he was about 8 months old putting a puzzle together. Of coarse at this age I was still helping him a little but he had figured out how to turn the puzzle pieces when I said, "you need to turn them around."

About the time that he turned 2, #1 Girl and #2 Boy got a bunch of 25 piece puzzles for Christmas. #2 Boy loved helping to put those together and by around 2.5 years he was able to complete some of them all by himself. I would leave him in the kitchen at the table with the puzzle and about 30 minutes later he would let me know he had finished it. I was amazed the first few times (really amazed that he stuck with it that long).

Then a couple of weeks ago #2 Boy came home from church with one of his primary papers....
..looks kind of like a puzzle, huh? The teacher said that he was the only one in the class to actually put the clothes together like that and I thought back to when #1 Girl had done this same lesson and the clothes were all over the page. Later #2 Boy requested that people were drawn and said that the shorter set of clothes was him and the taller one was Daddy. So cute!

However, that said, he still gets things a little confused some times...words out of order or even the wrong words. One of our favorites is, "Three Men" for the restaurant called Five Guys. :-) Right idea, totally wrong words!

Paint, Mirrors, and Clips

I have been wanting to figure out a place to put the hair bows and flowers that I keep making for the girls' hair. One of my last ideas was to put ribbon around the outside of a long-back-of-the-door mirror so the bows could clip onto that. However, when we went to the mirror sections I found these mirrors and fell in love with them. I loved that the colors went so well in the kids room so I wanted to do something besides put ribbon all around the edges. This is what I came up with: A flower in the corner with three ribbons coming down.

This shows the mirrors at the kids level, behind the door, with the hair clips attached.
On Monday we went and bought paint for the kitchen and on Tuesday night I painted: a pale yellow on top and a bright green on the bottom. It is hard to tell the color in this picture, but you get the idea. We are going to put up a chair rail some time too.
We have also been going through our things trying to get rid of stuff that we don't need and don't use that often. I have a HUGE mound in the corner of our bedroom. We have posted some of it to sell on craiglist. Whatever doesn't go by Friday night will be donated to the Stake Gift of the Heart exchange. I might just have a little more space around here.