Maddie can read!

Maddie has been showing lots of signs that she is ready to read. She knew all of the consonant sounds and then very quickly learned the vowels. I bought her this really cute series of books. I skipped the level Pre-K of it and went right onto the Level 1 because in the book store she read the first book in it completely by herself the very first time. After you read a book all by yourself you get a sticker to put in the front of the book. I let her put a sticker in the first book as soon as we got home. She was very excited.

This video is the second book in the series. She and I went through it twice before I took this video. And by went through it I mean she attempted to sound out the words and when she got stuck I gave her clues.

After this book I tried to get her to do the third book but she wasn't interested and I didn't want to push it. She hasn't wanted to do it since either though. But she did read a Dick and Jane book over the weekend with my mother. And my parents have been using sight word flash cards with her.

You'll see in the video that she is sounding out each word and is definitely not using the pictures to figure out what the words are. I'm so proud of her it's ridiculous!

(wicked long video)

Just for history's sake Jackson does not know any letter if you ask him what one is. Although this morning he was tracing an "O" in the super why game on the ipad and he said "hey! this is like a zero!" He doesn't know numbers by sight either. Except zero apparently.

just wanted to share

I'm not sure how many of you regularly read my photography blog but for those of you that don't I wanted to link you to an experience I had almost two weeks ago. If you've already read it thank you, if not bring your tissues. seriously.

Poor Jackson

I took the kids sledding today. On our way from the car to the big hill the kids found this teeny tiny hill and by hill I mean very slight decline. They decided it would be fun so sled down it. So they did. At one point I looked over and Jackson was at the bottom off his sled with a stunned look on his face. There was a huge snow ball like the base of a snowman next to him. I asked him if he ran into it and he said yes but he wasn't crying so I wasn't worried about it.

After we trudged our way through the two feet of snow (the kids were literally sinking up to their waists and needing help) we got to the top of the big hill. At that point I noticed there was blood on Jackson's face. He had little scrapes all over his nose, chin and forehead!

We slid for about an hour and trudged back through the snow to get to the car. On the way back I inspected the massive snow ball. Turns out it was a freaking piece of ice.

Hopefully next time he'll put his hands out to protect his handsome little face!

Snow overload

The day after Christmas we got sacked with a huge nor'easter. It was actually nice to be all cozied up in the house while the weather was howling outside. The snow started in the early evening on Sunday and by Monday morning when we woke up we couldn't see out any of our windows. The wind had been blowing the snow sideways and coated the house in a thin layer of snow. Monday afternoon we went outside to play but it was still really cold and extremely windy so we didn't stay out too long.

Our neighbor that we share a driveway with has a plow on his truck so we are lucky enough to have our driveway plowed for us. Chris just has to do a little bit of shoveling of the walk way and a path to the car.

The plow creates quite a snow bank so Chris got the kids up there to sled down it.

Since the snow was so deep and very powdery I got the kids to jump off the porch. They absolutely loved it!

Then we had a snowball fight!

Chris was on vacation last week so we were all able to go sledding. I believe it was Thursday we went and I was shocked at how much of the snow had melted. We went to a small hill at the Peabody middle school. It was fun but we wished we had gone to a bigger hill somewhere.

On Friday (New Year's Eve) we took them to the colonial in Lynnfield. We took them there the last two years too.

This year we brought Raffe with us and Grandpa stopped by when he was driving by. Grandma came by too later.

The side of the hill we went on last year was all grass so we had to go to the real big side. It was awesome sledding!

I went down a few times myself and had so much fun. One time I went down with Jackson and at the height of speed my foot jammed into the snow bringing me to a complete halt which catapulted me into the air, flipping me over, taking out Jackson, and flinging my glasses off my face. Jackson ended up face first into the snow. Then when we were all recovering another kid came down the hill and took Jackson out again!

It was 57 degrees that day so we were able to stay a long time. We were there for 3.5 hours!

Raffe and Jackson made many attempts to go down together but it just didn't work.

Right from there we dropped Raffe off at home and we stayed there to spend New Year's Eve with Mike and Kristen. Even after all that crazy exercise walking up the hill Maddie totally stayed up until midnight! Jackson fell asleep at 10:30.