I have had a really hard time finding time to write lately, so my annual post about Nicole is a little late this year. Here is what I wrote about her last year.
Nicole has grown up a lot over the last year. She started preschool at the beginning of November. She really likes it and is learning so much! She can now spell and write her name and has developed a new interest in letters and letter sounds. 
I liked this little picture that Nicole was given in primary on Sunday, so I used it as a centerpiece for Nicole’s monkey birthday:
Nicole started off her birthday with a batch of apple-spice pancakes:
This year Nicole had a small party on the Saturday before her birthday (May 4th). We only invited one girl (a friend from Nicole’s preschool class). Nicole wanted a monkey theme.
We started with Monkey coloring pages and then made sock monkey bracelets.
We made a monkey snack:
Nicole opened a gift from her friend:
They played in the playroom and outside then sang the birthday song and had cupcakes:
And we sent home monkey gift bags:
As I child I remember coloring eggs at “Pittsburg Grandma’s” dining room table. We would use wax to make decorations and Grandma would tell us about how they color eggs in Lithuania.
We were too busy on the days preceding Easter to color eggs, so we colored them for family night on the Monday after Easter.
We decided to try an idea that seemed popular on the internet (baking instead of boiling eggs). The kids loaded the muffin for me:
I maybe went a little overboard getting Easter things this year. I wanted Easter hats and new Easter clothes for the kids as well as a small gift for each kid:
We went on an Easter Egg Hunt on the Saturday a week before Easter. It was a special needs event that we were invited to through Nicole’s preschool.
They had a fire truck to explore:
We’ve been renting our house in Washington which means that we can’t build any book storage on the walls next to the kid’s beds like I want, so book storage in the girls’ room has been a mess. I bought these under the bed storage containers thinking we could sort the books out and have each girl store her own books under her bed. To my dismay, the beds were too low and the containers didn’t fit underneath. So I bought a 4 X 4 and had Zach cut it into blocks which we used to prop up the beds. 
Now we just need to drill holes in the bottom of the beds and in the wood blocks so that we can use some dowels to make them more secure, but even without the dowels, none of the beds have come off their blocks.
One of the kids’ favorite treats from the Asian market is Ramune soda. I love this series of pictures depicting Thomas’s response to it:
Here are some of the things Thomas likes to do in the kitchen:
(He has vanilla, but the lid is on)
He loves to pull out our plastic utensils and put them away in different places. The oatmeal box is his favorite, but sometimes I find them in cereal boxes and other places:
Here he is hiding some of our plastic kid dishes:
These are his favorite thing in the kitchen, I usually can’t find them when I want to use them because he gets them out and hides them so often:
I just thought these pictures were fun, so I had to share them with the internet. Charlotte was sharing an apple with Thomas. She’d take a bite and then offer him a bite. Thomas loves apples and so do Charlotte and Ila. My kids eat about 6-7 lbs of apples a week:
Here’s Thomas with apple slices in each hand: 
I love that my kids are friends. I hope they will always be good friends. They do get in little fights at times, but they get over it and love each other again soon. Today I had a chance to take Charlotte out with me all by herself which does not happen very often. I asked her if she’d rather go with just me or take another kid. She responded that she’d want to bring someone along and instead of just one sister, she wanted all 4 of her siblings to go. Luckily I was able to talk her down to just one sibling. 
My little girls love to make little beds. It kind of drives me nuts sometimes. Here are some of the beds they made in March:
I love a nice crisp close-up. Here are some of the ones I took in March:
Yes, I know. I have way more face shots of some children than others, but it all comes down to opportunity and some of my kids are at school much of the day.
2.22.13 My friend Heather is just as crazy as I am, by which I mean she also has 5 little kids, only she’s slightly more crazy because her oldest child is a little younger than Charlotte. When we go out together, it kinda looks like we’re running a daycare with our 10 kids!
2.1.13 I started off February by potty training Ila which went rather well, once she figured it out:
Playing with “mommy things”;
