Ella's 1st Karate Tournament

Ella has been taking Karate for awhile now. She started in 2009 in Utah and took classes in Las Vegas and now out here in La Verne. She loves her class and was able to compete in a quarterly tournament on Feb 22nd. She was awesome! She took first place! She is our amazing little martial arts girl!

Happenings in February

Ella had a second grade patriotic program at school on Feb 9th. She had a little speaking part she had to memorize. She did great!
Andrew had a little Valentine's program in his preschool on Feb 11th. He was so cute, I especially liked the songs with actions.

I went on a field trip with Kaitlyn and her fellow GATE students to the Richard Nixon Museum and Birthplace. It was super fun and very interesting.





Andrew turned 5 on the 20th, we went bowling on Sat. the 19th to celebrate. He got a twin bed, too bad the first night in his big boy bed he ended up crawling in with us, he wasn't used to all that space, he's used to being all curled up! He also got a baseball and mitt. (I searched 7 stores to find one his size for a lefty!) He went to Target to use a gift card he got from Grandma and Grandpa Callahan and picked out a hot wheels track toy. He had a so much fun, and enjoyed eating the brownies he chose for dessert. Can you tell which piece of the brownie is his favorite?

Fun Times at the Library!

Our little La Verne library had a Chinese New Year Celebration Party on Feb 5th in the afternoon. We went thinking the kids would color a picture and they would pass out fortune cookies or something... But it was awesome! They had a lady face painting with an airbrush, complete with glitter and stencils, she also did crazy balloon shapes, there was cake and drinks, we played a jeopardy style game with Chinese themed categories-our team came in third (at least we weren't last place, which was fourth), there was a treasure hunt throughout the library to find gold coins, there were treat bags filled with toys, chop sticks, fans and fortune cookies, and a craft to make a dragon out of foam board. The lady putting the event on designed the dragon craft and cut all the shapes out of foam board. You probably can't tell from the pictures, but there are four pieces that make up each of the dragons, pretty detailed. We were there for 2 and a half hours! James came with us, so that was the most we had seen of him all week! Best of all, it was all free!

Math Olympian

Kaitlyn was chosen to represent her school and compete in the district Math Olympiad. She had practices twice a week after school to prepare. She had a lot of fun working with her team (4 girls and 1 boy). I guess boys are late bloomers...She even gave up sleeping in on a Saturday. It was held Feb 5th from 7:30 am til noon. We are so proud of her!

Snowboarding Birthday

January 8th was James' birthday. He was so excited to go with a bunch of dental students up to Snow Summit for a day of snowboarding. Since he went on his actual birthday, his lift ticket was free! And not only that, but his buddies filled up our car with gas on the way home! These pictures are of the night before, getting ready for the big day. Andrew was in his underwear, good thing I made James put his clothes on for his picture!

Deep thoughts and Chocolate

The other day Kaitlyn was eating a dove chocolate candy. I was in the kitchen when she was eating it and she was telling me she likes the chocolates because they have a message in the foil wrapper. I told her that was nice and was cleaning things off the table and was about to take her wrapper, she said, "no, this one is pretty good." I asked her what it said and she read the message: You don't have to clean like your mother. She laughed and said she wanted to keep it. I thought she was joking, but I found it in her room a few days later. She usually likes to keep foil wrappers and twist them into roses, but this one was carefully pressed smooth and flat.