Kuh-Kuh-Kuh Max

Kaitlyn is learning the sounds that each letter of the alphabet "says." She's gotten especially proficient at identifying any letter "K" or anything sounding like "K" since that is the first letter in her name. Now, part of this, I must confess, is driven by our insistence that she practice the hard K sound, because she still tends to pronouce her name "Taitlyn" with a "T" instead of a "K." So, often Kaitlyn will say her name is "K-K-Kaitlyn."

Well, we were driving in the car the other day and talking about Max, when Kaitlyn felt like practicing her pronunciation. She loudly announced, "Kuh-kuh-kuh...Max!" I wasn't aware of the hard K sound that the "M" makes. I'll have to ask Ali about that since she's become our little grammatical expert--just ask her about the silent "E", and how vowels steal each others' sounds.

Speaking of Kaitlyn, I was working on the computer this afternoon and I heard her say, "Dad...it's almost ready. It's almost ready. It's almost ready." I turned around and found that she had set up a little tea party and was inviting Ali and I to attend. In addition to dirty toybox cups brim-full of water she also served pretend "peanut butter and sandwiches" (for some reason she doesn't like to give the all important jelly any credit). What a treat!



Later today, Ali sweetly called me upstairs and asked me to stand on a "magic towel." Upon following her request I discovered that she had set out an elaborate scheme to capture me and take me prisoner utilizing some sort of magic towel as a cover for a jump rope ankle trap. "Did you like my booby trap?" she asked me. She's a clever one, alright. Speaking of Ali, she also loves math these days. She wrote out her times tables for the number 3 in her notebook up to 3 x 20!


It was great to have Megan's family in town this past week. On a personal note, it was a huge help to me. We had Max on the second to last day of classes for first quarter, which left we with significant preparations to do before being ready to take exams this past week. Megan's folks were quite helpful with Megan and the girls (and the boy), which took a lot of the stress of exam prep off my shoulders.

Speaking of exams, I feel like they went well enough on the whole, but I have to admit that I most enjoyed a project that I had to for a leadership class: coming up with some sort of creative project to turn in. Of course, I did a song. If you want to download it to have a listen, click here. At this point it's just an instrumental. And it's not perfect. But, I think this is going to become Max's song since each of the girls got their own songs when they were born.

Megan was doing spectacularly with recovery, but the last couple of days have been a bit more difficult. She's been freezing one minute, then burning up the next. I think we'll have her go in and see the doctor tomorrow. Since I've had to hold down the fort while she's been recovering (and resting most of today), I've developed a newfound appreciation and awe for everything she does as a mom. Let's put it this way: I couldn't get the girls ready for church on time on my own this morning (we were 20 minutes late to the meeting), it took me 2 or 3 attempts at each individual ponytail, I can't remember if the girls had ended up in matching outfits or not, and I forgot the critical "church activity bag." And that was just the "usual" before 8:30 a.m. routine!

So, let's recap: despite the usual challenges that make life interesting, we're doing kuh-kuh-kuh...great.