Novemberish

The weather feels, well, a little Novemberish.We have moved our activities to mostly inside, and we miss the outdoors. But we’ve found some ways to stay busy. For instance, JT is becoming an actual help in the kitchen. He is suddenly proficient in things that really do save me time, instead of causing more work to teach him how to do it, which is how I’ve spent the last two years. It’s nice to see the pay off! We made pita pizzas the other night for dinner, and both kids built their own pizzas.

 Then JT chopped the fruit for the salad while Haley tossed it all together. They make a good team.

Our pita pizzas – yum!

We’ve also brought back out the “rainy day toys,” like puzzles. Low and behold, Haley can do age appropriate puzzles just fine. I hadn’t seen her sit still long enough to do one!

One night this week, I had a great idea. I built a fort for the kids as a surprise, and they got to watch Ratatouille on their sleeping bags inside it. So fun!

A few random things… Haley’s Vans from cousin Alicia finally fit, and they are adorable.

JT is now fully capable of taking the mail out. I can see the mailbox from our front door (I’m standing in the doorway taking this picture), so I stay inside where it’s warm and he gets to burn some energy running there and back. Speaking of energy, I don’t know what we’re going to do with all his boy energy all winter long. Thank goodness for preschool… the other day I assigned him five sets of bear crawls up and down the stairs just to get some peace!

And finally, our spider. We’ve been watching this spider since early September. It has a huge, beautiful web right outside our front door. (Like, if you’re tall enough you might get some in your hair…) We check it often. We’ve seen it catch bugs, eat bugs, and fix the web. Then we watched Charlotte’s Web and the kids are practically proud of the spider. We’re waiting for him to hibernate, but he must do very well on our porch because it’s getting cold and he’s still there. JT and I zoomed way in on this picture to see his markings and fuzzy legs.