A lot has happened in the last 6 months, but I thought I would post a little update about Christine and Jacob.
Christine is 4.5. She has recently started loving My Little Ponies. Of course her favorite pony is Twilight Sparkle, "because she's purple". Its actually a pretty good show. I'd probably watch it, even if I didn't have kids (to quote Bryan Reagan). Christine loves coloring and drawing, and she is very good at it. In fact, last family home evening we talked about making the family run smoothly, and for the activity we drew trains. Christine's train looked much better than mine. She no longer draws stick figures. Her favorite things to draw are flowers, her name, Gigi, and Pooh Bear. Yesterday, I found our new watering can labeled with blue chalk "Christine". Yesterday we found a drawing with a typical Gigi written on it, but for the dots on her "i"s she had used hearts. I can't believe we are already to that stage.
Christine's favorite thing to play is Legos. She invents the cleverest things with her blocks. She has made beds, flashlights, cars, cupcakes, leprechaun traps, and her most recent was a camera tripod. She then put her toy camera on top and took pictures of her Hello Kitty dolls. She loves her brother, but sometimes gives him overly aggressive hugs.
Jacob will be turning 2 in about a week. He is crazy. He is exceptionally smart and has a lot of energy. He is also absolutely fearless. We went with the cousins to the park, and little Jacob crossed the swinging bridge, climbed to the very top, and barreled down the tall slide all on his own. He knows a lot of words, but the clarity of his diction is somewhat lacking. Angela can always understand him, but sometimes I have to ask for an interpreter. The other day I was changing his diaper, and he was buzzing his lips. He was also getting very frustrated with me, and I couldn't understand why. Interpretation provided by Angela, "Oh, he just wants you to blow raspberries on his belly." Sure enough that is exactly what he wanted. His clearest words are definitely Dora, Mickey, show, bottle, bubbles, snack, shoes, stuck, socks, outside, apple, banana, milk, water, diaper, and book. His favorite phrases are "oh no!" and "awwww maaaan" (like Swiper the fox from Dora) His favorite songs are "If you're happy and you know it", "Let it go", and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Christine sings him "Twinkle, Twinkle" every night so he knows that song well. When he sings the song the words "up above" are the clearest.
He loves running, jumping, and climbing, especially on his mommy. He likes to climb on the living room table and jumping across on to the couch on to Angela's stomach. He likes to set up his pillows and kid couches so that he can jump off of things on to them. He discovered that if he spun around in circles it would make him dizzy. He then started doing it over and over.
Jacob loves playing outside. He especially likes chasing the wild bunnies around the yard. He also loves playing with the water. He helps me mow the yard and insists on helping to push the lawn mower.
We went Easter egg hunting with some people in the ward over at a local park. The kids loved it!
...because of the candy of course.
