our week in photos

I’ll be back with more words later, but for now, I have some photos to share, and I’ll let them speak for themselves (for the most part – I’m a writer, not a photographer, so I know myself well enough to know I won’t be able to keep entirely silent here!).

We’re still singing “I’ll Fly Away” more often than any other song around here. CaiQun can’t really form the words yet, but she’s got the basics of the tune, and it’s clear that she’s singing right along with Miranda.

We love to read. All of us. This is actually such a blessing. The first few days we were home with CaiQun, the only book I could get her to “sit” through in its entirety was Eric Carle’s From Head to Toe, and that only because it includes motions on each page, and they were what kept her interested. Now she brings me books and plops herself down on my lap, ready to read, multiple times a day. Her attention span and interest in books are growing – and we, in this nerdy, book-loving family, are celebrating that. We’re enjoying our books, and she’s even started to find some favorites of her own – so far, Ten Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed (she does the motions, and it’s adorable – and every once in a while, we’ll be doing something entirely different (like changing her diaper), and she’ll burst out with yells and a wagging finger, explaining to those monkeys that there should be “no more monkeys jumping on the bed!”) and Caps for Sale (for which she also does the motions – I’m particularly excited about this one since it was one of my favorites as a little girl)! (Don’t mind the piles of laundry in the background. You can’t keep all the balls in the air all the time. And when one has to land on the floor…well, putting the laundry away is often my ball-on-the-floor of choice.)

My “big artist” and “little artist,” as Miranda calls Matt and herself.

One morning this morning I got up early and went out to breakfast with my friend Liz before she took off with a group from our church on a one-week mission trip to Brazil. Consequently, Matt got the girls up and dressed that day. Here is the result.

CaiQun loves to rock…and she continues to love her hippo (and the mystery has been solved – it’s Uncle Danny we have to thank for the hippo!).

We’re into pigtails and alphabet blocks.

We’ve also started to venture into the kitchen as a group of three girls – we haven’t been too ambitious yet, but here we are making granola bars for the first time since getting back from China.

Miranda and I had planned to work on her United States puzzle one evening while Matt was giving CaiQun a bath, but she was so eager to get started that she couldn’t wait until little sister went upstairs, and amazingly enough, it actually went well!

And no photo post would be complete without some documentation of our glorious snow day on Sunday. It was lovely. Most people around here are rather less excited about it, as they were hit with a huge snowstorm (or two) while we were in China…but since we missed that, we were excited to have the opportunity to get outside and play!

Note that there are no photos of CaiQun actually playing in the snow. She thought it was beautiful from the inside – she couldn’t stop staring out the windows and declaring, “no!” (snow!) to anyone walking by. However, she was significantly less enthralled with the possibility of actually coming into contact with it.

Later that evening, Matt and Miranda went back out in the snow. I attempted to take CaiQun out again, but it was not happening. She dissolved into tears, and we came back in and rocked in the rocking chair until she calmed down. In my absence, Matt and Miranda constructed this snowman named Ozymandias. I’m not sure what else to say about that.

And now that we have that out of the way…I think we’re ready for spring!