Things we did in March besides puzzles

Elizabeth reading to Cynthia on the couch:

Cynthia reading to Elizabeth on the floor:

Elizabeth reading while walking around the house.  She has discovered chapter books, and pretty much read for most of March:

Henry with his afternoon snack all lined up in a neat little row:

I think it runs in the family:

And you know what else runs in the family?  Really awesome dance skills:

Cynthia being cute (for lots of pictures in a row):

She is such a happy, pleasant baby.  We can’t get enough.

Fine dining in the playroom:

Baseball season!

 

Cynthia turned five months old:

Right around this time, she decided to try out scooting, but she went about it in a very confused way.  She would lift herself all the way up on her hands and feet, but this always made her slide backward.  She’d get farther and farther away from the things she was trying to get, and she’d end up scooting backward completely off her blanket.  After a few days of being frustrated, she finally figured it out.

Mom, why isn’t this working?

Henry still takes great naps every day after lunch.  He usually falls asleep pretty quickly, but I guess one day after I put him to bed he was wandering around his room and fell asleep in the corner.  I was pretty shocked when I went to check on him and he wasn’t in his bed, and even more surprised to find him in this position behind the door.

And speaking of being shocked and surprised, here is a little story.  Tristan and Oliver found a real live big fat rat outside in our front yard.  At first I didn’t believe them, but I went out and saw it and they were right.  It gets worse, though.  They were trying to catch it, and it ran away from them and hid under our car.  It actually climbed up into the bottom of our car and was just hanging there for dear life.  I had to leave right then to take Rachel to dance, and I was so nervous getting all the kids in the car because I kept thinking it was going to run out and jump in the car or something scary.  I thought it would jump down as soon as I started the car, but it didn’t.  It hung on to the bottom of the van the whole way to dance and back!  I was so jumpy, and kept imagining little tickle feelings on my feet and think that maybe the rat had found a way to climb up inside our car (I know this isn’t possible, but you try driving with a rat hanging to the bottom of your car, and you will imagine it, too).   Anyway, the rat somehow survived the trip, but then got down from the car and went over to our neighbor’s driveway to die (it actually turned out to be a considerate rat). 

Now, imagine that you are outside on your front porch looking over at the dead rat in your neighbor’s driveway, and you feel something run right by your foot and you look down and a big brown thing is racing through the open door into your house, but so fast that you can’t really see it clearly.  You would think it was another rat, right?  Well, that was the first thought I had, anyway, so I immediately did the only logical thing which was to run screaming into the house and stand up on top of a bench in the kitchen.  And then yell for Oliver to come inside and shut all the doors (so it couldn’t go into any bedrooms like in Lady and the Tramp) and then find whatever had come into the house. 

Rachel actually found the thing first (Mom, there’s something brown with a tail under your desk!), and it turned out to be a giant lizard, which actually was a relief to me.  Not that I wouldn’t have had a heart attack if I had sat down at the desk and put my foot down on a lizard, but I was much more comfortable with the idea of a lizard loose in the house than a rat. 

And anyway, it wasn’t loose in the house for long thanks to this little boy, our resident wild-animal catching expert:

The end.