Imaginary Fishing

Bracken played "fishing" for over an hour. He caught huge Daddy fish, Mommy fish, baby fish, and mean "traitor and tyrant fish" (He'd asked what traitors and tyrants were after we sang "Praise to the Man" and I told him it meant mean people who didn't tell the truth and were bossy...so he decided the mean fish were traitors and tyrants), then put them in grocery bags or rolled them up in washcloths and towels. I pretended to eat one for dinner and he had a fit because he told me they were pets, not for food. Ooops. This kid has an overactive imagination.

Notice how nicely all the towels and washcloths are folded and rolled. Bracken's new hobby is folding washcloths, towels, and blankets. I'm not complaining!

Bathtime...A Favorite Time of Day

Bracken and Chandra love taking baths and getting blowdried afterward. During the day Chandra will often go and pull herself up by the side of the bath and lean over the edge trying to get into the empty tub. If I put Bracken in the bath, but haven't put her in yet, she starts waving her arms, kicking her legs and talking like crazy, then starts squealing if she can't get in too. I think they look forward to being blow dried as much as the bath, they'd lay on the floor wrapped in their towels for twenty minutes if I'd keep blow drying them.

Little Puppy

I came in the kitchen to find Chandra happily eating her brothers spilled snacks off the floor. Sometimes Bracken calls her "Little Puppy" because she crawls around with her tongue out and eats everything she can find off the floor. It sounds bad, but most of her first foods have probably been from her grabbing them off the kitchen floor rather than me purposefully giving her a new food. Eggs, cheerios, goldfish, and bread are all on that list! She loves crawling around under the table, around the chair legs, and over the table legs. I usually get dishes done while she'd doing this, and she's probably trying to find little snacks.

Nap Time

Bracken's naps have become less and less frequent...and so much more appreciated.

Acting out the Scriptures

Bracken and I have been trying to sing a hymn together each day. We were singing Hymn #13 "An Angel From On High." He started asking me, "What does 'the long silence broke' mean?", "What is 'descending'?", "What sacred record?", "What does, "Sealed by Mornoi's hand' mean?"

I started doing a lot of explaining, then had an idea. "Do you want to act out the story?" He thought this was a great idea, so we headed to the kitchen for cereal boxes and aluminum foil to make gold plates. ("Mom, we have to have rings too. Like in the picture." Thankfully I had little rings in my craft box) He pretended to be Moroni and wrote some scriptures (scribbles) on the plates with permanent markers. Then we found sunglasses for the urim and thummim. He used his tools to pretend to make a stone box to put the gold plates in and we buried them. Then he was Joseph Smith and I was the angel Moroni and I told him the gold plates were in the Hill Cumorah. He had to come back 4 times before he could take them out. Then he put on the Urim and Thummim and "translated" the gold plates. He thought this was the coolest game ever, and we played the same version at least five times that day. That night when he went to bed he said, "Let's act out the scriptures again tomorrow!"

Visit from Grandparents

My Grandma and Grandpa Gunderson came to visit us on their way to Arizona. We had lunch together and a nice visit. Chandra really liked her Grandpa! My Grandpa got a nice DSLR camera for Christmas too and I had fun trying out his cool lenses. I wish we lived closer so we could learn how to use our new cameras together!

Grandpa and Grandma gave us a big box of Idaho Potatoes. Yummy and thanks guys! I grew up on these delicious baking potatoes, they were one of the few things I'd eat as a super-picky-kid. After my grandparents left, I was reading in the living room and Bracken was quietly playing in the kitchen. When I went to check on him I found he had taken every pot and pan out of my cupboard and filled them with our Idaho Potatoes. When he saw me he held out his hand and said, "Don't put them away yet! I'm cooking!" We had potatoes for dinner that night.