Mid-Winter Break

After Valentine's Day, we had a nice, week-long winter break - that was mostly snowy and cold, of course. First I'll feature Jonah's art show and our Valentine's Day right before the break:

We had a late-start for school on Valentine's Day, which was perfect, because it gave me time to do justice to our breakfast, and get the lunches packed.

For lunch, I did English muffin hearts with strawberry cream cheese. I also packed some strawberry milk. And some healthier things. :)

I got the kids some books from the school book fair for Valentines Day. (I haven't done any sort of gifts on this holiday before, and I hesitated going there, because it raises expectations for the future.  But I worked at the book fair, and couldn't resist.) Tori got a kids' cookbook, which she has LOVED. She has really been wanting to cook lately, and has done much of it on her own. The more my kids can do on their own, the easier my life gets!

Here are the cupcakes she made us. (She's wearing the leotard because she and Maggie were pretending to be ice skaters in the Olympics.)

These pictures are from an outing to the Science Center. They had a new turtle exhibit.


They did a liquid nitrogen demonstration that we had seen and enjoyed there once before. Tori gave away one of the surprises with an answer she gave, so they stopped calling on my kids after that!

With this, they line up their faces, and see a mix of both kids' features.

The kids are trying to move a ball by limiting their brain activity.

They all had plenty of opportunities to play in the snow. Sigh. (I might not mind the snow and cold so much, if we didn't have to worry about crazy heating costs - but that's for another whiny post.)

My birthday was during their break.  The kids made me breakfast in bed. Tori made the smoothie, which she does pretty often now.

We went to Corning Glass Museum again, as well. Their cousin, Laura, had sent a flat drawing of herself so that we could take pictures of her in NY (like Flat Stanley in the book).

This woman was making a glass horse figurine.

One of my favorite things over the break was watching the Winter Olympics!! Eli is dying to be a snowboarder now, but the closest ski resort is over an hour away and is quite expensive.  It makes me sad to think that that might have been "his thing" if he'd had the opportunity. Tori really liked the figure skating.  Jonah got tired of the Olympics pretty quickly. He said something like, "We're finally watching tons of TV, and NONE of it is stuff I like!" I really miss it.