School was closed on President's Day, of course, and I took the day off to hang out with the girls. 

Abby's school had a free ice skating event in Castle Rock.  Although we went to check it out, it was much too cold to be outside with the way the girls were dressed.  This rink is brand new to Castle Rock this year and is a really nice, covered venue, so we'll be sure to visit again.  We watched a few of Abby's classmates circle the rink a few times and then drove up to the Denver Children's Museum downtown.

The girls loved the museum.  I would have loved it more if it weren't for the fact that the entire kid population of Denver was packed into this building!  We still spent a couple of hours there and got to do several hands-on activities. 

The first exhibit that drew the girls' attentions was the rocket crafting area, which included an area to launch their paper rockets to see how well they fly.

The girls were mesmerized by the Newton's Cradle activity.

Abby enjoyed hammering anything she could get her hands on.

Kayleigh being proficient with a screwdriver.

Playing in the pizza kitchen next to a mock supermarket.

Admiring the pizza they assembled

Crawling down a mole hole

My two little baby birds

The girls LOVED the Big Backyard and Kayleigh jumped up and down the whole time, making it impossible to get a decent picture with her in it!

Exploring a fire engine

Before leaving the Children's Museum, the girls got to scribble on Hopscotch, one of the many cow sculptures all around the Denver downtown area.

After the museum, we went to the Cherry Creek district for lunch. Abby found a place called the Egg Shell and wanted to try it because she was able to easily read the name!  We actually enjoyed a wonderful lunch there - Kayleigh had potatoes and eggs, I had a chicken sandwich, and Abby tried a Belgium waffle for the first time and loved it - then we took a relaxing walk around all the stores and stopped at the Wizard's Chest to find gifts for one of Abby's friends' upcoming birthday parties before driving home.

I sure wish we had the time to do this more often! 

At the beginning of February, Abby started taking violin lessons at school.  It is an extracurricular activity offered through the school.  One half hour private lesson and one group lesson each week.

She is thrilled to be learning an instrument in a group setting, which was something that was missing from her piano lesson days.

During private lessons, she seems to be focusing very well because she wants to do well when she's plays in the group with her friends.  There are about 6 kindergarteners taking violin together and more seem to join every week!

For anyone with a Suzuki violin background you know the first few weeks are all about the Twinkle variations!  We have just endured a month of them and - you know what? - Abby is doing exceptionally well!  We are so proud of the progress she's made and she seems to have a real knack for it.  Her rhythms are good, her tone is actually very good, and when her posture is good, she plays really, really well.  She has an excellent memory so picking up fingerings and remembering the notes has been easy.
 






Abby plays a 1/4 size violin.  It's so tiny!  The violin does measure a little small on her, but apparently that's the preferred fit for a Suzuki method learner.  The bow is much, much longer than the violin and does not fit in the case.  Again, a preference for this music method. 



I learned Suzuki songs when I took piano lessons at 6 years old and I adore the music.  I never learned via the method, though, so it will be interesting to see how effective it is for Abby.  Nonetheless, I look forward to hearing all of my favorite pieces.

As for practicing at home, Abby doesn't mind daily practices at all.  It's a chore for me to interpret her teacher's private lesson notes regarding what Abby needs to work on, but once I get it Abby is very willing to practice.  We keep daily practices around 15 minutes right now (and we do skip days here and there), but I hope we can increase them to 30 minutes daily.

Preschoolers get a brand new Benny Bear backpack.  Babies and toddlers get tote bags, so graduating to a big-kid backpack has been much anticipated.

On February 11th, Kayleigh moved up from Early Preschool II to Preschool.  The 3 year olds class, even though she's a couple of months shy.  She was more than ready and for weeks had been missing her closest friends who had already moved up to Preschool.  Kayleigh had been spending time over in Preschool because the teacher over there loves her and always requests that Kayleigh go over there because she's just a popular girl who's one of the most well-behaved!  It's funny for us to hear how Kayleigh is consistently the model student - following instructions well, mature, social, overall good kid. 

One criteria for preschool is being potty trained and Kayleigh was more than ready.  In fact, she is the only kid in Early Preschool II who has never had an accident. 

I never mentioned how the whole potty training experience went with Kayleigh, so maybe I'll summarize it here.  It was very different from Abby's, but completely stress-free and easy.  Abby potty trained at 2 yrs 9 months, approximately, but because she started so late, she was ready and it took a day and a half for her to be completely day and night trained.  With Kayleigh, around 2 yrs 4 months, she one day decided she wanted nothing to do with diapers.  So we said ok.  At school she had already used the potty a few times and knew what to do.  A few days went by of her going back and forth between diapers and underwear.  At daycare, she was in diapers, but at home she just wore underwear.  Things went pretty well.  A lot of successes and a few accidents, but no one stressed about it.  She had trouble knowing when to anticipate BMs and that took a month before she nailed it, but again, no major accidents. All in all, it took her just a little over a month to be full-time in underwear with no accidents.  What was nice about her potty training was that we never had to push her; it was completely self-directed.  On her second week in Early Preschool II, her teacher asked if we wanted to try having her come to school without diapers because she had been staying dry all day.  We had only tried no diapers a couple of times at that point, but if the teachers were brave enough for it we could give it a try.  As I mentioned before, Kayleigh never had an accident in that class, so by the school's standard she was probably the easiest kid in the world to potty train!  The only time she gave the teachers worry was when she decided she didn't need to go every 15 minutes as was their schedule for the newly trained.  When she decided to stop, she would only go when she needed, which meant just about twice during the school day.  The teachers were expecting her to explode by the end of the day, so kept warning me during pick-up, but of course she was fine, just being the non-conformist, self-assertive Kayleigh that we know.

Anyway, Kayleigh has adjusted extremely well to preschool.  She loves her classmates, she loves her new teachers, and she comes home announcing she has so much fun at school, so all is well.

This will be the last full-time class Kayleigh will experience at Primrose.  In the fall, she will be joining Abby at the Montessori school.  Both girls will most likely still attend Primrose for no school days or long breaks when we will not be able to take time off from work; we will be relying on school camps and Primrose still.

Oops, these pictures turned out a bit dark and didn't get edited......Oh well.

Puck loves toy balls.  So, when we are out at the pet shop, we will sometimes pick up a new toy for him.

One day, we accidentally got catnip filled balls and didn't realize it until all 4 of our cats went crazy around them!

I think we spent an hour just watching them go nuts, laughing at them as they rolled around the family room.







Check out this cute sculpture of Puck made by Abby in her first art lesson in clay! She even made a food bowl filled with tiny bits of food!

That's what Valentine's Day is all about. 

Grandma Newell made the girls each a pair of adorable mittens for Valentine's Day.  They were thrilled opening up their packages.


We don't celebrate Valentine's Day, traditionally.  So, the partying for the girls occurs at school.  Each of their schools had a small Valentine's Day celebration.  At Abby's school, nothing sweet was allowed, so Valentine's contained an extra dose of stickers, tattoos, erasers, pencils, and notepads. 

This is how the girls looked at the end of the day.

Last year we had a fun blizzard in February where schools were closed and most people took the day off from work or worked from home. 

This year, we were rewarded with another beautiful, heavy snow fall out of nowhere in February.  We had been experiencing beautiful weather and then one morning, we woke up to this.

The snow was a bit dry for building snow creatures, which was what the girls wanted to do, but they still had a great time playing in the snow.  Paul towed them around in sleds and they tubed down the driveway and on the empty street.  

And to think that the day before Kayleigh was in a sleeveless dress!  Love this crazy Colorado weather!

We ended up with over a foot of snow, which promptly melted the next day.