Piper Update

Piper celebrated her eighth birthday in November. It shocks me that I am old enough to have an eight year old daughter! And she is getting so tall. She already comes almost up to my shoulder. Growing at this rate, she will definitely be taller than her mother. According to her pediatrician, she is an average size and wears clothing in size 8.

Piper is doing well in school this year. She is using a third grade computer-based curriculum which I had hoped would make her more independant but I do help her more than I had originally intended. She just doesn't like to read. She can read but lacks confidence and gets frustrated too soon if she doesn't know a few words. So I usually help her by reading the lessons. In talking with my sister-in-law who teaches in the public school system, I feel like I may have to require her to read 30 minutes a day because she is not going to read by choice. That being said, she is still excelling in math, bible, science and history.

Piper is taking dance instead of gymnastics this year. There are three sisters at our church who opened a dance studio this Fall so she takes a Jazz/Hip Hop/Lyrical class there once a week for an hour and a half. So far she seems to enjoy it. I thought she would miss gymnastics, but she hasn't yet. She also goes to Youth Aerobics at the YMCA once a week. She has loved it so much that I am also taking the boys now and sitting in on the class.

Piper is still loving Webkinz and plays a few times a week. She just loves stuffed animals in general so Webkinz are perfect. She will sit in her room for hours playing with her Webkinz and Beanie Babies acting out stories and pretending she is their doctor.

She says she wants to be a veternarian and would be great since she has such a love for animals. She really wants a horse but does not help out with feeding the animals we already have so there will be no horse in her immediate future. She loves our pets but I cannot seem to get her to get up and feed them!

Piper is a huge help in the kitchen. She loves any kind of cooking and is working on her cookie baking, casserole making, soup making and snacks & drinks badges (through her Keepers group) so we have spent a ton of time in the kitchen recently. There are days that I have her prepare lunch for her brothers and herself without any help from me. She does great and seems more willing to eat if she prepared it!

I feel truly blessed to have a daughter and pray that she and I can maintain our closeness as she matures into tweenhood and beyond.

Happy Sixth Birthday Cohen!

I just love all these pictures of Cohen! He is so photogenic.

This past Wednesday we celebrated Cohen's sixth birthday! It was crazy cold outside but we did manage to get to Target where he spent a little of his birthday money. Then we headed to the theater to watch Tangled. Tangled proved to be geared more toward a female audience, with the princess-y plot. He got antsy near the end and asked several times when it would be over but left saying he had enjoyed it. Chad had to work Wednesday so we will do something as a family to celebrate maybe today or Sunday.

As far as Cohen, here is a little run-down of what's up with him recently...

He is proving to be an easy student as he has learned so much listening in on Piper's schooling. He excels in math, already a year ahead. Reading is going to come naturally to him since he is picking up on the way words look. I have taught him using solely phonics, but he also recognizes words by their look. So much of reading is memorization, but I want the kids to have the phonics training to back it up.

Cohen is very strong physically with such an interest in physical activity. He is constantly asking "Will this make me grow?" when deciding what to eat and practices his pull-ups almost every day. He is an average size and wears sizes 6-7 in clothing.

He really loves heavy machinery, trucks and cars. He wants to know all about them asking such detailed questions about whether they are 4-wheel drive, whether they are front or rear-wheel drive, how large a load they can carry, whether they can pull a trailer, etc...

If I had to guess right now about what he will excel at as he grows up, I would have to say extreme sports. He wants to ride the 4-wheeler constantly (and he spends entirely too much time with it on 2 wheels instead of 4) and is getting a dirt bike for Christmas. He is always practicing wheelies on his bike so I cannot imagine him on this dirt bike! He is the kind of kid who will embrace something extreme and give it his all!

Cohen is currently loving The Dukes of Hazzard. They play 2 episodes every weeknight and he counts down the hours until they come on. He knows the intro song by heart (as does Abe) and sings to the top of his lungs everytime he hears it. He pretends he is Bo and Abe is Luke.

Cohen is such a good big brother (although a little rough at times) and Cohen is Abe's hero. Everything Cohen does, Abe has to do. Chad said he had always wished he had a brother and now I see why. These boys are going to be an awesome team if we can just keep them out of trouble!

Basketball

When we let the kids chose their extra-curricular activity of choice, Cohen was 100% positive about basketball. Chad tried to talk him into swimming, but nothing swayed him. He is now playing for the Nuggets at the local YMCA!

He had his first game this past Saturday. It was really cute and you could tell how excited the kids were. About 2 quarters into the game, the kids finally "got it" and the game became alot faster paced. Cohen had one melt-down because he said no one would pass the ball to him, although he had quickly forgotten about having the ball himself and not being willing to pass. The kids have a one-track mind when they have the ball; they want to score. They do not want to assist, they want to score!

Here are a few highlights:

Annual Cookie Baking

This past week Piper and I completed our annual sugar cookie baking and decorating. With the busyness going around lately, it took us two days to get them all decorated but we finished and they were sooo good!

Keeper's Christmas Party

Last night we attended the Christmas Party for Piper's Keeper's At Home group. Piper had prepared a green bean casserole and I made a sweet potato casserole for the gathering. There was so much yummy food and dessert, I still feel full this morning!

There are 10 girls in the group plus Piper and they are proving to be good friends for her. She seems to be more reserved (like her mother!) in a larger group, so slowly but surely she is letting her guard down and getting to know the girls and letting them get to know her. With 2 brothers at home, she is due some girl time!

Last month Piper wore her indian costume/dress to the Thanksgiving gathering, which comes down to her knees approximately. One of the other girls in the group commented directly to Piper that "her dress was mighty short to wear without leggings." Ever since then Piper has worn it with leggings in addition to wearing leggings with her other dresses. I know if I had said that to her she would have laughed and never considered it, but having a friend make the comment made her think twice. As a mother, I really love these conservatively-raised homeschool friends!
The Jennings men:

The boys being silly. Notice Cohen's front tooth hanging on barely...

well, it fell out as soon as we got home! He has already lost his front two bottom teeth, so this is his third tooth lost.

Parade/Snow Days

After the half-marathon on Saturday it started snowing, just in time for the local parade. We have not attended the parade in recent years since it's usually cold and the kids have been too young to stand and watch for so long. But this year was different, Piper was in the parade with her dance group! We were there to cheer her on as she proceeded down the 2-mile parade route dancing and trying to stay warm and dry. Both of which were impossible in that weather, but the girls were smiling and dancing. They did so good considering the amount of children I saw riding on floats and crying because they were so miserably cold and wet!

Piper is right behind the purple gloves in this pic, with the wild hair and black headwrap. I had a hard time getting any great pics since they were moving and my camera is not the best. And here she is passing by, kinda in the center of the pic (still with wild hair and a headwrap!).

The snow was so beautiful and unexpected! We got 2-3 inches which was like heaven for the kids. These are some pics of the kids playing in the snow yesterday morning. Abe refused to wear anything but boots outside and Cohen said he was comfortable in shorts, so here they are:

Abe did finally say he was cold and asked us to put these items on him! I guess at least he covered the extremities, right?!?

It's over!

My goal for the half marathon was 2 hours 9 minutes and I finished yesterday in 2 hours 8 minutes and 46 seconds!! It was a really hard run for me until about mile 8 when I seemed to finally get into my groove. I started out with my running partner Jaclyn and with Amber. We lost Jaclyn around mile 4 and I lost Amber around mile 7. I was on my own when I finally fell into my pace and felt more comfortable, but I do some of my best running alone. It was so crazy cold outside, around 28 degrees according to the weather report, so the cold may have affected me?!? Nonetheless, I did it in record time (a record for me!).

Here are a few pics from Amber sent from the race. They are all out of order, but I can't seem to get them arranged like I want. Here I am crossing the finish line: And a few other random shots:

Here is our group. We all trained together and encouraged each other over the last 16 weeks! And more importantly, we all completed the run!