Marching through this Month

 Claire

She is getting really good at telling me what she wants and expressing herself and I keep getting memories on Facebook of when she wasn't even a year old so I keep getting reminded of how much she has grown. Whenever I show her pictures of her when she was a baby she calls herself baby Shay just like all babies used to be baby Shay. I still find that she is very picky and doesn't like to try too many new things without being convinced or tricked, but it's nice that she likes enough variety that she gets a good diet. There has been bribery too because she loves chocolate and we get her to eat the rest of her green beans she will eat two for one chocolate chip. She was really excited to get pretty for church today and kept twirling around in her dress and showing daddy. Her new game is to stack the crayons in a tower on the fireplace boarder and she keeps asking for help because it is pretty hard to get it all the way up.

Shay

Shay was copying Claire like she does with almost everything and twirling around while I was getting everything together for church. It is so entertaining to see the monkey see monkey do happen in real time when Claire does something and Shay immediately start right after or even the other way around. They like to play together more and more these days and will entertain each other in the backyard for so long while I'm watching out the windows and cooking. At the park, Claire will say "come on Shay" all the time to go down the slide, or over to the other side with the seesaw, or to the benches. If there are other kids there to play with Shay has a habit of going off and playing on her own while Claire makes new best friends with whomever is closest at the moment. She had this funny moment of cuddling with a huge teddy bear on the couch that made me laugh out loud at her being so goofy. She is also set of taking her cloths off whenever she can and we can only keep them on her if it is a dress, it's too tight, or they zip up. 

Chris

Classes are officially over for this quarter and now there are two finals to take and we will be able to leave for Idaho and a wedding! It will be great to have a break and get to see family again so soon and we are hoping for even better weather since spring is spreading through the rest of the country. We've had really great weather and I've enjoyed an elongated spring since it is my favorite season. We even planted a packet of flowers and try to remember to water them so Claire and Shay can watch them grow, unfortunately they now think they can play in the dirt...We are putting the planter that Chris made for me to good use with our green onions and have to figure out what else we are going to plant in the middle.

Craft

We have done flashcard alphabet learning and found they like putting the letters on the rug that Shay got for her birthday, but they were ruining the paper letters and numbers. Chris suggested I make some letters out of fabric (which I have been seeing on Pintrest and wanting to do) so I traced, cut, pinned, and sewed them all this week. I put some quilt fabric between two cotton pieces, sewed the initial traced letter then stitched around the boarder to make sure it doesn't fray. When Shay plays with her alphabet letters she likes to ask 'where did it go' but shortens it to "go?" with a worried questioning look on her face then will look and get excited when she sees it. Most of them she already knows where they go from memory but there are a few she still searches. Now we can test the girls on what letters they know and Shay only has a problem with finding the number 5. We can even teach them how to spell and hopefully start sounding out words when they start reading.