February A.A.L.

After all the February birthday festivities, we still had Valentines Day to look forward to, which was nice. Everyone made cute valentines for each other, but the only ones worth preserving here are the darling watercolors Sam painted for everyone. The bunny for me, of course, and the drum-playing monster for Seb, and the Gandowlf for Malachi. Doggy for Zig, Caw for Gussie, Penguin for Daisy, Green Bunny for Teddy, Elephant for Goldie, Piggy for Junie. So good!!

Sebastian and his group of friends have the sweetest tradition where they buy a flower for every single girl at their high school on Valentines Day. They get donations to help pay for the flowers (over a thousand of them!) and spend all day the day before stripping off the thorns and putting the flowers in little tubes. It really does restore your faith in mankind a little. The boys get all dressed up in their suits to hand out the flowers out at school. Then, usually they have leftover flowers, so they go out to Target or the mall and hand out the extras to moms or girls there. I saw some posts on instagram from people who'd been on the receiving end of that. Cute!!

Aside from Abe's departure, the rest of the month was a pretty normal February. Zig wore a bunch of weird stuff.

Here he is playing his "trombone." Other than being backwards, it's a pretty good one! I think this is also part of his "Darth Vadar" phase (hence the cloak).

Gussie copied the cloak and marched around singing the Imperial March at the top of his lungs. The little boys haven't even SEEN Star Wars. Does that stop them? No.

I don't even know what this is.

Ziggy asked Sam to draw "the scary emperor with yellow eyes" for him during church. Sam drew this, and I guess it was a little scarier than Zig had in mind, because he was quite alarmed by it. He set it hastily down on the pew facedown, and when we asked if he liked it, he said "No!"

Here is Ziggy with a picture he found in one of those advertising/coupon mailer things. It is of a knee joint radiating waves of pain…Zig was fascinated with it and kept asking me all kinds of questions like "Will his knee get fire on it? Will his knee fall off and burn someone?" And for the next several days while he was playing, he'd suddenly announce to me "I got SO hurt that my knee is BURNING HOT."

Aaaand, Zig riding "no hands" on his trike. Daredevil!

Here are two cute little panda bears.

And here is THE MOST ADORABLE BABY in existence. I have this picture on my phone lock screen, and I gaze at it lovingly every time I pick up my phone. The other day I actually said to it, "Oh, you darling baby" before asking myself why I was talking to a screen.

Here is the snowy hill in different lights.

Here is Seb and his date to Valentines Dance looking like models

Here is Seb smiling to himself as he ran the 2-mile at an indoor meet, probably because he was beating everyone else by half a lap. I think he got seeded into the wrong heat, because it wasn't even close. He would have liked being in the faster heat because it would have pushed him to get a better time, but come on, you have to admit it is fun to win your heat so handily!

Sebastian got hired to build a couple more of these beautiful redwood planter beds for a family in our old ward. He took Teddy with him and they got them mostly done in an afternoon. Aren't they nice?

Teddy really is quite a good helper these days. When the nice man who is building our cabinets comes over, Teddy always helps him too. He even gave Teddy a tiny tape measure for his very own. Anyway, as a result of all this helping, Teddy spends lots of time playing and measuring and "working on" things around the house. Here's one of his measurement sheets where he carefully noted the length of some things in centimeters and inches. Cute.

Seb's cross-country friends came over one Saturday morning for pancakes after their run. They ate an almost inconceivable amount, but luckily Sam and I have to conceive of inconceivable amounts of food every day, so we were equal to the task. The only difficulty was keeping up with the speed at which they ate…but they slowed down eventually. It was quite fun to have a houseful of loud, hungry, funny boys. I like it when Seb brings friends over.

Here's Malachi with Grandma's cat…I took this picture for Abe, who loves this cat a surprising amount

My dear adopted Grandpa (through my friend Rachael) Gail Halvorsen died, and at 101 years old we were happy he finally got released from his mission here to go be with his beloved Alta again! We loved going to his funeral and hearing more about his amazing life. But the best thing was that Rachael and her family got to come down from Canada! We haven't seen them for too long. I only got this one picture of the kids playing a game together, but I wish I'd gotten one of Rachael and me too! Hopefully it won't be so long before next time.

Two little angels after their bath (you would NEVER imagine, looking at this picture, how they SCREAMED AND SCREAMED AND SCREAMED as we tried to scrub their feet and knees and heads. I don't know why; they both like the water, but if Ziggy gets his back up against the idea of a bath, then Gussie follows suit…).

Two boys smiling while wearing shirts of flaming fiery destruction

Gus watching me and Malachi play a game

It's a fun game. Sagrada. It's very pretty too. Kind of like Sudoku with colored dice.

The girls were playing a game where they were princesses and Daisy was a kidnapper.

Daisy made a million cookies for her Young Women's activity. A girl after my own heart!

Beautiful pale sunset

Cute note from Goldie to Junie

Clementine with some tiny baby orange slices

"Airplane" Daisy made for her siblings (complete with snack cart)

Making ravioli (to go with our day on "opera" for our Music Unit…it fits, right?)

Gus got a little blender for Valentines Day and he plays with it constantly. We make cocoa in our blender, so he is always saying "Make a cocoa!" and pouring things into cups. He does make smoothies as well. And cuts fruit in his hand.

Reading a book in boxes

Setting the…table?

Sunday clothes

Big Hat

We had our Music Unit Celebration at the end of our (long) unit and Daisy made this amazing kit-kat piano keyboard for it. So good! Everyone also got batons, because who can't use a baton?

More music things. Sandwich keyboard. Salami-and-bacon and tomato-and-cheese music notes. Bugles. Pretzel-and-marshmallow drum mallets. Cookie flutes.

Some of the subsequent baton-using

Tiny orchestra

A day almost nice enough to enjoy the playground :)

And let us end with some cute pictures of Clementine.

Looking like a gnome

Snuggled in

With a bit of a poik

Asleep with a bowl that she loved

Coming out the neck (Wrong! So wrong! but she's not the first)

Wearing boots (she looks like Robin Hood in his stork costume)

Fenced in

Sadly trying to crawl

And just being the sweetest and best. How we love our babykins!