Snow day retribution and other stories

To make up for all of the snow days we had in December, starting this week Ellie will be going to school 10 minutes early for the rest of the year. Mika can hardly container herself. :-|

After last week's blog posting from Sacramento we had a great time at Shell & Mia's birthday. Check out the Flickr page for some new photos. Special thanks to Doug and Anne for letting us crash at their place and Uncle Dan for letting us drive his "baby"... note we are not referring to Mia. :-) Some of the memorable highlights include Maile sleeping through the party, Goldschlager, Maile on the exercise ball, Shell's bowling four strikes in a row and Ellie's distinctive ballerina bowling technique.

This past week Ellie's school had an Art Gallery event that Roger took Ellie and Nisa to. The school really does a great job with the kids' artwork. Go to Flickr to see some photos from the evening event.

This past weekend Roger and Mika had a nice Valentine's Day dinner and evening concert at the Portland City Grill up 30 floors in the heart of downtown Portland. Special thanks to Grammie for watching the girls. :-)

Sunday was a beautiful day so we all went to the park. There were tons of families out enjoying the great weather. Also, Ellie had a big weekend with both a birthday party to attend and a play-date. Another thing that happened this weekend is we got Nisa her own JumpStart computer game like Ellie. It is an educational adventure game that Nisa is quite into. It is amusing watching Nisa get so intense with these computer games while wearing a princess dress-up costume.

We had some great quotes this week. Ellie's quote of the week was, "I love boys. They are so funny. Did you know that when you chase them around that they scream like girls?"

Here is Nisa's quote of the week. "I want to have kids some day so I can tell them what to do." She went on to clarify, "I have lots of ideas for what kids should do AND grown-ups too." :-)

In a close runner-up, Nisa decided that she was going to call the chocolate chip pumpkin muffins that Mika baked, her "sweet babies." We got a lot of mileage out of that one.

As for Maile, she has been a lot of fun lately. She still is high maintenance, keeps her diaper on when sitting on the potty and when you try to put her in her crib you would think you were trying to make her sleep outside ("NO DADDY NO!!!!"). But all that aside she is always smiling, being cute and finding ways to be silly. Recently Maile had this hang up on bugs, and then she got bugs confused with boogers and started telling people she had bugs in her nose. We straightened that out, but now she refers to peoples' noses as their "boogers". :-P

That's all for now. Tomorrow not only does Ellie need to get up early, but Roger needs to report for jury duty. :-(