Three (not so) little kids and whatever words come to mind…
Two feet of snow on the ground so far, and it's still coming. Lunn and the girls are working hard to dig out the driveway, although the roads still haven't been plowed.
The snow is so deep the girls can build tunnels under it, as well as sled on top of it.
De finished up her entire 2nd grade math book and has now started the 3rd grade math program. Very cool!
Jenya and her FLL team, Brick Busters, competed at the Western Pennsylvania First Lego League Robotics competition. It was the teams' first time participating, so they had made a fairly simple robot and went in not expecting to do very well.
To their surprise and satisfaction, their simple robot proved very effective, and they wound up placing 6th out of 72 competitors. Not bad at all! They all had a wonderful time, and I think it was an excellent learning experience as well.
In their new competition dresses…
De has gotten serious about gymnasics recently, and is practicing six days a week these days. Her christmas list is mostly gymastics gear — she really just wants a full scale gymnastics gym in the basement, I think.
Ana just made the Little Blades synchronized skating team, becoming the second member of the family to do so. She had her very first team practice today, and was ecstatic.
The team will be performing in the RMU christmas show on December 6th, and then in various local / regional shows and competitions throughout the spring.
Jenya is second from the right, Ana is fourth from the right.
So the girls learned the hard way that other kids can be manipulative — one of the older neighborhood kids rather successfully played "divide and conquer" on the girls in order to get things to happen her way.
They came home upset and had a chat about it. Once they pooled their info and figured out they'd been had, they all got angry — but De took it to a whole new level. She climbed up on a chair in the kitchen, thumping her fists and declaring, in a speech worthy of a politician or a preacher, *we will STICK TOGETHER* and *we will WIN*. She had her sisters chanting and cheering. I wish I'd been able to get a video of the speech. If she can keep that knack she'll be a helluva rabble rouser one day.
Jenya the mad scientist, De the vampire witch, and Ana the flying black cat, getting ready to storm the neighborhood.
Ana picked out a cat theme for both her pumpkin and her costume. All the girls cleaned out their own pumpkins this year — a lot of work. Ana worked hard and fast and got done first, so she was the first one to get Lunn to carve her choice of designs into her pumpkin.
Jenya carved her own, for the first time, with some help from Lunn. And De picked out a pumpkin almost as big as she is. Everyone is looking impatiently forward to Halloween tomorrow.
