So much to do!

Motherhood for me, up until this point, consisted of a lot of breakfast, lunch and dinner making, and not a whole lot else.  But now, all of a sudden I am BUSY!  Joe and Ben have been doing well in school, but it's half-day kindergarten so I have a little more than 3 hours to get things done while their gone and then on Mon-Wed-Fri Sam has preschool in the afternoon which gives me another three hours without him, but somewhere in there I have to make sure Violet gets her two to three hour nap, which doesn't seem like it should be to hard, but if I'm too busy with housework after I drop the boys off then I have to wait until after I drop off Sam which means she doesn't go down until almost one o'clock which means she's a cranky little beast at that point!   And then, on top of that, we signed the boys ups for different classes at the rec center which added more to and from and coming and goings.  But now, they're off track (year round school) and their classes are over and I feel like I can breathe!  

Everyone is well and healthy (or on their way to being healthy) and happy!  I have just little tid bits of information that I've been meaning to post about but haven't so here it goes.  Ben was in an art class and he did really good.  Every week the teacher uses a different medium and a different piece of his own original art to copy from.

This is the first week, they used water colors to paint and abstract painting.  This is actually a pretty fair likeness to the original.

This is the second week, they used chalk.  It's a cow holding flowers in it's mouth, there are mountains and a fence in the background.  

This is a picture of the original for week four, keep in mind the teacher does the originals before the class, and then shows them how to outline and color in during the class, and it's only and hour long.    They used oil pastels. Next is Ben's rendition: 

Ben said he got tired so he couldn't finish coloring, and I'm not surprised because that day, after we'd got home from running errands a bunch of older boys were outside boxing (friendly boxing) and my boys wanted to go out and watch.  After a little while the bigger boys were taking a break, so my boys ran inside and grabbed their own little boxing gloves and put on a show of their own.  They did pretty well in my opinion, and the older boys really got a kick out of it.  So I don't blame him, he probably was pretty tired!

This is the outline the teacher did during class and samples of coloring techniques.  I think Ben did pretty good for a six year old with no previous lessons or training!

This is my "art wall" downstairs in the basement.  I have a work table set up down there with all my sewing and knitting stuff, and the walls are just bare, unfinished cement, and the boys kept coming home with all this great art from school and stuff, so I figured why not display it all!

This is at the children's museum in Denver.  It's a totally cool place.  Obviously, this is the fire truck they have there, it's full sized and they have really life-like uniforms for the kids to put on and they can climb all over the truck and stuff, and over on a wall near it they have a phone set up where they can practice dialing 9-1-1 and practice giving the answers they would have to give in an emergency.  There's also a monitor set up where they answer quiz questions about what constitutes a real 9-1-1 emergency so that they don't make frivolous calls.  Then, upstairs in the museum they have all these rooms set up where they can dress up like Vets and take care of stuffed animals, or dress up like woodland animals and crawl around in big tunnels and fake trees ands stuff. There's also a child size grocery store with carts and food and cash registers with conveyor belts, and an art room where they can paint and a dance floor with music and mirrors and a puppet show stage...  It's REALLY COOL!  We had a blast!  Even Violet had a good time!

Here's Sam as a Wizard, and Violet is his princess (on the dancefloor).

Here she is on the dance floor still, she thinks she's cute!

This is Violet folding her arms, all ready to pray.  It was so incredibly cute, a couple weeks ago we were all getting ready for bed and it was time for pray so Karl called out for everyone to come kneel down and fold your arms.  He looked down at Violet, who we've always just let do whatever she wants to during prayers so far, and she had knelt down on the floor and folded her little arms, ALL BY HERSELF!  It was the cutest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of cuteness!

She has progressed to bowing her head and closing her eyes now!

So that's about it for now.  I can't really think of anything else, except that my parents and Holly came out for a visit over Valentine's Day and we all had a really good time.  On actual Valentines day we went out to Red Rocks (which is really cool all by itself) but it started snowing, and when we got up to where the ampitheater part is a string quartet was playing Canon in D and couples all around us were getting engaged and stuff.  It was really cool!  So that's it!  I'll try not to let it go as long next time!