I am a creature of habit

*sigh*  I was looking at some other peoples' blogs, and I thought I should jazz mine up a little bit.  I looked at my options.  I picked one.  I hit "cancel".  It appears I am more like my mother than I thought - I am a creature of habit and I don't want to change.  Now, this is not a big thing to change, but if I won't even take the plunge with a blog, what does that say about larger life changes?  To look on the bright side, my life rocks, so why change it?

So here we are, in the same old style.  Maybe I'll change the background colour or some other element that doesn't require learning new things...

The kids!  That's right, I'm here to talk about the kids.  They are absolutely fantastic.  They love the book "the princess's secret letters", which comes with little notes and little envelopes.  Tom wants to write on them.  So I told him if he learns to write his name we can write people secret letters.  Shazam!  This was the trick to get him to learn to write!  He's really excited about it.  I guess we'll see if that excitement lasts until tomorrow?

Will is at that stage where he can say everything now.  He's so smart.  I remember when Tom was at this stage, too.  It makes everything better - I now have a chance to reason with Will, instead of just talking at him.  And it works both ways - he can tell me what's wrong, he can interact with Tom, etc.  It's fantastic.

The kids spend 3 days a week with my parents, and they love it.  All of them.  It's so nice to have that kind of support - we spent a long time "making it work" before my parents moved to town, but life is just so much better now.  At the end of April they will have been here for a year - time sure flies!

Will is two now.  TWO!  He's a little boy.  He can say everything, he forms complete thoughts and sentences, and he can engage in conversation.  It's a lovely thing.  Here is Will opening one of his birthday presents with his dad, which we did at 8am because his dad had to go to work:

That means that by 4pm when Grandma came over, Will was saying "Give me my presents!"  We will curb that behaviour, but it sure was cute.

When Dad got home from work we got out the cake - I made a Mater cake because that's Will's favourite character these days.

Tom was very helpful, and made sure Will could blow out the candles (read: Tom blew them out.)

After birthday festivities were over, we got back to life as usual.  Here are the kids after being outside to play.  They're warming their feet by the wood stove!

And finally, here are three great shots of Tom - he's spent the past 2 years not letting me take his picture, so it's very refreshing to be able to take a good shot these days!