Happy Valentine's Day!

I love celebrating Valentine's Day with all my boys. What a special day for a Mommy.

Beach!

When you are talking about mood boosters... a little bit of beach goes a long way. We embrace the sandy shores of Bonita Springs with vigor. The boys did lots of digging as the grown ups sat back and soaked in the sun rays. Howie makes pictures in the sand with Nonnie and Johnny obsesses over where Paw Paw is at all times. We fill a little blow up baby pool with ocean water to let the boys play around our feet (thanks to my neighbor, Nicole, for the awesome idea!). Shells were collected for all our friends who requested them.
We left for the day with sandy feet and sun soaked cheeks. That would be the cheeks on our faces, of course.

Great Grandparents

Aren't great grandparents beautiful?

Grandma Sue

Our sweet Grandma Sue suffers from Alzheimer's. She has been in a care unit for over four years and is unable to verbally communicate with others or care for herself. The moments we spend with her are spent giving her kind touches and telling her that we love her. Today I saw her and I talked about all the fun things she did with me when I was little. We made paper-mache dinosaurs and spent weeks at the Michigan lake house. She read books to us on tape and I still cherish her neat handwriting inside the book covers to indicate which tape and which side the story can be found.
Although it is sad to see her fade away, it is sweet to watch my Grandfather care for her. He is there almost every day to feed her and watch over her care. He talks to her casually and genuinely enjoys her company. It cannot be easy for him, but he never complains. It's as if their relationship has simply evolved to accommodate this final stage of life. And I think that is true love.

Don't you love when little kids exchange Valentine's Day cards with their classmates? Howie made a huge effort this year in his card giving by writing each of his classmate's names on the envelope all by himself.

Learning New Words

Howie has started trying fancier words to describe his emotions recently. Today there was snow on the ground when we all woke up. On the car ride to preschool, he said, "Mommy, when I saw the snow, I was embarrassed. No wait, when I saw the snow, I was surprised!"

Reading in Bed

First of all, my kids are great sleepers. We are blessed with a 7:30/8:00 am wake up call from them.... shhhh, don't tell them that could wake up earlier.
Recently, Howie has been enjoying a reading session with Johnny to start the day. Upon getting permission, he goes in the room and climbs (literally) in bed with Johnny. They enjoy reading Johnny's books for 15 minutes or so until I am forced to go get things moving to start our day.

Lollipop Concert

We get to explore music with our friends at the Lollipop Concert. The children get to touch the instruments before the concert and see some people playing the instruments up close. After the experience, Howie said he wanted to play the french horn. We have fun watching the Cincinnati Orchestra perform Carnival of the Animals as students from the Creative and Performing Arts School come on stage to recite poems they have written. At the end, we walk out of the building as we are offered lollipops.... of course!

Explorations

A new friend who is wedding photographer showed me some things about my camera to help launch me from being completely "automatic" to playing with the manual settings. Now, I am no wedding photographer, but I have been enjoying some play time with my Nikon. I keep hearing over and over, "Just play with your camera and take lots of pictures."

So... today I experimented with taking some outside photos on the manual setting. I learned a lot in the quick 10 minute session with the boys... I mostly learned what NOT to do and took a lot of pretty bad pictures. But it was so rewarding to get the good ones!

I found it amusing that while I was experimenting with the camera, they were experimenting with the bubbles I had bought them at the grocery this morning. We were all learning stuff together.

Here are some of the better pictures I got. I wish there was audio with these images, Johnny was laughing so hard he was shrieking. And Howie was delighted with the bubbles he was working so hard to produce. Naturally, the session ended with Johnny dumping the container of bubbles out on the deck and saying, "Uh oh."

Mask Making

Auntie Sarah came over the other day and made herself at home with Howie's art supplies. Much to delight of Howie! She showed him how to make masks and together, they created several masks for Howie's doggie. Howie has gone on to make many, many masks for his various creatures... and loves every moment of it. Thank you Auntie Sarah!

Rick or Johnny?

Here are two pictures of two boys in the same shirt. One was taken in 1979, the other in 2012.

Can you tell which one is Rick and which one is Johnny?

Buddies

Isn't it the best to have a good friend? Especially one that likes to play all the same things you do? Yah, that's the best.