These days

- We're in the end-of-the-semester scramble as Luke finishes his teaching, grades papers and finals until the wee hours of the morning, and longs for the light at the end of the tunnel.
- Noelle's been in swim lessons.  Isaiah gets to "free swim" while she's in lessons.  I've been in w/ Lucy a few times.  She loves it, but gets chilled quickly.
- I made some awesome chocolate zucchini bread.
- We had a Fun Group teddy bear tea party.
- Lucy's been a little more interested in walking w/ help, but she will only walk or stand on tip toes.
- Luke and I spend a lot of time looking at Longview houses online and I've been especially enjoying watching House Hunters.  I'm SO excited to get to be the ones to walk through houses and imagine our lives in our own home.  We're headed down in a few weeks for the big house hunt.
- Noelle and Isaiah have been very interested in playing "zoo" with Lucy's Little People toys, stuffed animals, etc.  They get lost in imagination together for a pretty long time.
- Luke took the big kids to Malibu for a very special southern Californian experience - the grunion run!  Grunion are little silvery fish that come up onto the beach in April to lay eggs in the sand.  It is quite the event to see thousands of these little guys flipping and flopping around in the moonlight.  The trip involved us waking the kids at 9:30pm to drive to Malibu, where they had a grunion orientation w/ a Pepperdine biologist (and grunion specialist), who then took the group down to the beach to see it all in action.  They stayed for about an hour down on the beach in the middle of the night watching the spectacle.  Pretty awesome, and definitely not something we'll be able to do in Longview!
- I've been working on my photography business.  You can check out my website-in-progress here - www.hollytallonphotos.com
- Lucy wore ponytails for the first time today!

Here's our Teddy Bear Tea Party.  This month we've been reading a book called Another Celebrated Dancing Bear.  One of the activities that these Russian dancing bears love to do is to drink tea together.  So, the moms put together this little tea party.  Everyone got to bring a bear, drink real tea from real teacups, and enjoy lots of treats.

 And this isn't a great pic, but these are some of the homeschool moms from my co-op that have been such a blessing to me this year.  I'm so thankful for Katie, Tina, Tara, Angela, Lori, and Marilyn!  They are amazing women with big vision for raising their children very intentionally.  I've been very thankful to spend every Friday with them this year and I will certainly miss them when we move on.

And here's our big girl with her first ponytails!

 And here she is not loving standing.  She's had some happier standing/walking moments, though.  And she'll even give a big nod sometimes when we ask her if she wants to walk.

 She'll be running around before we know it!