Growing Up WAY too fast

I wish time would stop, but it keeps on trucking.  Luke lost both his top front teeth recently.  He has quite a new-looking smile!

 He also celebrated his 100th day of Kindergarten the same week as Valentine's Day.  He made this poster and a few other things.

 He also became a member of the shoe-tying club at school!  He now wears exclusively tie shoes and feels quite important.  

The other day he was riding in the back of the van with a buddy of his.  I overheard him talking about how he has two "girlfriends" at school.  "They just love me," he said.  Sheesh.

Valentine's Day at the Hall House

Valentine's Day was pretty fun this year, as Luke and Audrey were really into it.  Since I had 100 free prints at Costco, I convinced them to do picture valentines with suckers (and hershey kiss roses for their teachers).  They thought it was pretty neat and helped to write messages on the backs.  I was surprised how many compliments we got on the valentines, as I thought it was a pretty well-known idea.  I guess easy and cheap can still be awesome!  Plus, I have pretty cute kids, if I do say so myself.

I forgot to take a picture of Luke's finished product, but here is the picture pre-sucker.

Miss Audrey

My favorite project of the year so far was Luke's Valentine box for school.  This was NOT a knock-off of a Pinterest idea or anything else I found online (which is what I usually do), but was a total Aim - original.  Luke wanted Mario, and we managed to work together to pull it off in one hour with stuff we already had on hand.  I thought it turned out so very,very awesome!

I know you are dying to hear about all the romantic stuff I got for Valentine's Day from my sweetie.  He surprised me with the most beautiful bouquet of two-dozen tulips, and we went out on a fun date to play racquetball and eat Mediterranean (our food of choice right now.  Chicken shawarma is sooo good!).  We have a really good deal with a few friends right now where we trade off babysitting on weekends for date nights.  We are loving it!  I also received a very funny valentine from my Luke.  I had just been arguing with him about how much "screen time" he had left for the day.  I told him he had used it all playing Wii, but he insisted that I had miscalculated.  He left me this note:

 Translation:  Valentine from Luke to Aimee.  I have 1 hour for screens.  I love you so so so so so so so so so so so much.

Funny, funny guy.  Already trying to butter me up.  It didn't work, though.  I'm a hard-liner on screen time.  :)

Max Whistling

Random Goings-On

This winter feels like a bit of a blur - and not much of a winter!  Last year I'd had just about enough of shoveling snow at this point, but we have only had two snows this year.  Crazy, but I'm not complaining.  Here is a little sampling of some things we've been up to:

Here I am with my Activity Days girls right after a snowman relay.  (We haven't had a leader for a while, so I've been filling in.  It is lots of fun!)

We've been having lots of friends come over to play, and here are a few of them making all kinds of things out of sugar cookie play dough.

Luke was able to spray a real fire hose on a trip to the fire station with his "group".  One of these days I'll have to elaborate on that.

A first real snow!  This is the only time we've been able to go sledding this year, and everyone had a blast.

We were able to have Sis. Carol Ehambe over for dinner one night.  She is an old friend from our Grosse Pointe Days, and now she leaves near us in Royal Oak, MI.  We decided we need to do this more often, and it was a lot of fun.  She taught the kids a new card game and told us lots of great stories.  She has had such an interesting life growing up and raising her own kids in Detroit, and she has a lot of wisdom.

Here are the kids creating some gumdrop/toothpick sculptures.

Max is going through a ketchup stage.  He is hilarious!  Basically, he eats a little bit of food with his ketchup.  I'm not sure where it came from, since none of the rest of us are that way, but he knows what he likes!

A friend gave Audrey an Easy-Bake Oven, and here is her first creation.  It is pretty hilarious, since in half the time it took to cook her mini-cake, I cooked the rest of the batter into a big cake.  She was pretty proud of herself, though.

Luke helped me frost the bigger cake.  He thought is was so funny that a lightbulb baked Audrey's cake!  Come to think of it, it is pretty funny.  :)

Ringing in the New Year!

I am so sad that I only have two awful pictures of our New Year's extravaganza, but there's nothing that can be done about it now!  We have thrown some lame-o parties before, so we were hesitant to give it another shot.  But, welcoming 2012 turned out to be very fun!  We invited a few friends: The Duncan's, the Parks (America), and the Parks (Poland).  We designate countries of origin when we talk about them, so I thought I would do the same here so that we can remember.  We had lots of good appetizer-style foods and group games.  The kids ran around crazy playing all sorts of things.  Then, at 7:48 or so we "dropped the ball".  Go ahead and laugh, but kids started crying very soon after that.  It was perfect for a gathering of young families.  

Every year I create some sort of ball to drop.  Last year was a left-over plastic animal cracker container filled with Christmas lights and decorated with glitter and stuff.  Clayton always shakes his head at me and my fire-hazard ways.  This year, I had the brilliant idea to use a piñata as the ball.  We did the pull-string kind, and everyone pulled their string after we counted down.  It was a lot of fun!  I wish I had pictures, but I was busy playing hostess.  

Then, for New Year's Day I decided to start a tradition of a "lucky" meal.  We had traditional black-eyed peas, complete with mac and cheese and collard greens.  It was actually really good, and I felt very "Detroit" making these traditional African American dishes.  Again, Clayton just shook his head at my crazy ideas, but he knows when to just go with it.

New Year's Resolution # 28:  Take pictures of our New Year's Party for 2013!