This whole week, the kids have all been into numbers. Julia and I made a number chart from 1 to 110, demonstrating the repeating pattern. She's picking up the idea that if she knows the numbers 1-10, she can get all the other numbers as well--"cracking the code," we call it. Emily is very into adding numbers over 100, figuring out how numbers work the same whether they're ones or thousands or ten thousands. Sam is able to count up to seven, and he's enjoying adding smaller numbers together. Counting is a very big thing for him right now.

The girls have also been doing a lot of work with currency, learning dollars and cents and how to write them out with the appropriate symbols. The American Girl catalog is quite inspiring! They've been adding up all the things they want, and I think Emily's up to more than $300 now. Big surprise!

Sam's still obsessed with Zoombini's and the pizza troll (he's down there playing with dh now, and we played together this morning--he's really getting good!). Last night we had a dinner guest, whom Sam had to ask whether he found the pizza troll difficult as well. It was actually a very precious exchange: Sam came into the house saying when he was a parent, he was going to have a weed wacker. Then he turned to our guest and very generously offered to share this weed wacker if he ever came back. Then he tried to talk our guest into helping him play Zoombini's, which he'd been waiting patiently to play with daddy when he got home. Poor Sam! He was pretty crushed that no one would play Zoombini's with him last night, though I got him to fall asleep in our bed pretty happily to Star Wars: Phantom Menace.

This afternoon, we took the puppy into the vet for her one year check up, and she weighed 67.5 lbs! The kids had weighed themselves earlier in the day, so we talked about how many kids would make a Boo. We also read several pamphlets on different types of worms--YUK!--talking about the different organs they attacked, their life cycles, how they are transmitted. Thankfully, Boo's heartworm test came back negative.

We've also been playing a lot with language lately, coming up with as many rhyming words as possible, free association, alliteration. Last night, we were trying to come up with as many "F" words as possible. When we finally gave up, we looked in the dictionary at how many F words there really are! Whew!

Afterwards, dh and I were watching LOTR Return of the King and the kids watched the first part with us before going to bed. Today, Emily decided she wanted to watch it, so we talked about the scary parts and being able to fast forward, cover her eyes, or just turn it off, but she felt ready to watch it, despite the "dead orfs" in the Mines of Moria that had plagued her last time she tried to watch it. So, we all watched The Fellowship of the Ring this afternoon--Moria, Balrog and all. The kids are looking forward to seeing the other two as well, and I think they handled it very well.

Right now, Julia is making a kite with some paper, scissors and string; earlier today she began making some flower fairies. She loves all things creative! She also discovered that she can climb the door jamb all the way to the top today--I think she's part monkey! She's absolutely incredible on the climbing wall, and apparently anywhere! This I discovered while I was taking a shower and she began shouting "Mommy, I can climb the pole!" (We have a fireman's pole on the new climber, which she can climb all 7 feet of!) When I poked my head out of the shower, commenting that we had no pole inside, I saw that she was at the top of the door frame, hanging from the upper molding! ACK!