January and February

I am making up for not blogging by going back and writing all the things that happened in our family the past months.  These are our happenings for January and February:

- All the kids have gone crazy for reading.  We started going to the library again once a week and checking out shark and snake books for Coleman, Sister's Grimm and Beverly Cleary for Rosie, and John Grisham and Mike Lupica books for Bud.  Rosie and Bud take advantage of their downstairs bedrooms and read later than I like them to stay up many nights.  One night Coleman was reading to me and said, "This looks like a young mom," pointing to the picture.  "Am I a young mom?" I asked.  "No," he replied.     

- It was Rosie's turn to read outloud at school from their Civil War book and she read the word "damn" not knowing it was a swear word.  She felt so bad when kids gasped or laughed.  She came home from the bus stop demanding that I teach her all the swear words she doesn't already know.  Apparently, her dad's colorful vocabulary doesn't include that particular swear word.  She is still writing wonderful poetry that makes us laugh.

- Coleman had a swearing incident of his own.  He told me after school one day that he and his friends whispered the swear works to each other during lunch.  He taught his friends a new word they didn't know and he taught them how to spell it.  I was expecting to get some phone calls from angry moms that day.

- Jono and his friend Jon won a golf tournament in St. George.  There was an article with a picture in the Utah Golf magazine about them.  Very exciting!

-After learning about Martin Luther King, Jr. at school, Coleman decided that the holiday should be spent with Utah, BYU and TCU becoming friends.  He is also learning about cooties at school.  He said to me, "Sometimes when I'm in bed I think about girl cooties.  Do you think about Daddy cooties?"  On his report card comment section he wrote, "I like to do division in math."  And, he really does know division!

-Bud has played with his friends the Ashby boys on Saturdays for years and years.  Lately, Coleman has also been playing with them.  Sometimes Rosie plays also, then Jono and I find ourselves without children for several hours on Saturday, yay!  One Saturday, when it was our turn to host the boys, we took them with us to the Utah basketball game.  There was a contest sponsored by Great Clips and everyone in the arena won a free haircut.  We stopped on the way home and got all six kids free haircuts.  It was so hilarious!

-Bud discoved the different between elementary school and junior high make-up work when he spent a week doing five hours of homework each night to catch up from our Hawaii trip.  It was a nightmare!  It was beginning of term and he had three "F's" in his online report card before his turned in the missing work.  We will plan accordingly for our next vacation and not miss so many days.

-Coleman has the same keen sense of smell that Jono and Bud have.  I ate a late lunch of leftover Cafe Rio before the kids came home from school.  Coleman walked in the door and said, "I smell Cafe Rio" while opening the fridge.  He took it out and ate what was left.

-Rosie has turned from the girl who would eat anything to a picky eater.  We served sloppy joes for dinner and she carefully picked out all the meat with her fork, leaving the rest behind.  I made her eat everything, so she ended up eating what was basically an onion sandwich.  The next time we had sloppy joes for dinner, she ate everything all together and was the first one done!  She loves corn chex cereal for breakfast, which I was thinking was a healthy choice, until I noticed that I was filling up the sugar shaker quite often.  She was pouring way too much sugar on her cereal.  When I talked to her about it, her response was, "Just fill it up again!"  Rosie's sisterly insticts are just now kicking in.  She likes to pack Coleman's lunch and includes a napkin with a sweet note written on it.

-Rosie is obsessed with a boy in the other 5th grade class and she talks about him non-stop!    It has become very annoying to everyone in our family, and I think she's way too young to be liking boys.  One day she was especially kind and helpful.  I asked her why and she said she was pretending this boy was watching her.  Then, on her Valentine's cards, she drew hearts on some of the cards for boys in her class and on one card wrote "I love you!"  Luckily I checked the cards and made her change them.

-Also: Coleman taught us to T-Bow, Rosie played Jr. Jazz basketball, Jono organized the garage, we rode trax to the Children's Museum with cousins, ate Banbury Cross donuts, played in the snow, Bud sewed a pillow case in CTE class and Coleman ate too much Valentine's candy!