Jan 31

Caroline and Cecily eating cottage cheese.





Anna, Caroline and Cecily fixing cakes in the kitchen


Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

Caroline and Anna came over to our house and played with us last week and it was sad when they had to leave because they left on Tuesday instead of on Sunday because they got caught in a big snowstorm. I went with Mary to Bed Bath and Beyond and we were looking at these crazy wierd things and one of the things I found was this rubber back thingy and you could rub your own back or someone else's and I thought it was wierd and so did Mary. And she got a card for Jacob and Kara because they moved in their house. And she got a table with two chairs for the little kids and my sister loves it. It was easy to put together. Emma slept over at our house and then we went over to her house for a party because Jacob finally finished his PhD. I got to see their grandma, which I haven't seen for a long time, and she's like, "oh, you've grown so much". I also got to hold her dog and keep track of it for a while because it was a little stinker. There were so many people there and so much food and delicious desserts. And the chocolate fountain, of course. I don't want to go to choir anymore because I just want to sit and watch kids. There's only one other person who comes who's like a Young Woman and she didn't come today. So I babysat kids because no one else was there to babysit and there's a lady who has a husband who works in the oil fields who can't come home and watch his kids every Sunday. SO I decided I liked that more than singing because it's like doing service for someone else. I don't really need to get paid. We went to a fireside and the person who spoke in it was Jon Bytheway and he was really funny but also really good. And at the end we have eclairs with chocolate frosting on. I don't usually like eclairs, but these had chocolate frosting on so they were good. He said that when Satan wants to try to trick you sometimes he says "just come down a little bit" like to come down from what you know is right. Because then he's using a strategem to get you to come down little by little. And then you'll keep wanting to go down and you'll make bad choices and you'll end up at the bottom anyway. We're doing the MOnster Concert this year and the piece I'm playing is "The Entertainer" but I'm only doing the bottom part. I do the beats and stuff. It's hard but it's really fun. But when I tried to play the primo part, it just didn't work. I think one of the Moons' daughters is going to be my partner. She's the one who played "The King and I" duet with me. I think she's Jenny. Grandma and Grandpa Parnell know her grandma and grandpa from Cornell.
Love you.

Audrey


Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

We had a party for Jacob because he got his doctorate degree. And it was fun. We got to eat a lot of food and there was a chocolate fountain that my mom brought. The best thing I dipped in chocolate was a grape, but raspberries are the best thing I've dipped in my whole life. Next comes grapes. Caroline and Anna and Mary came. THey played with us and they went to church with us and they stayed here. The funnest thing was playing with Anna and Caroline. They liked playing the marbles but Cecily kept messing it up so Caroline got mad and they were fighting with each other and pulling the marble run to each other. Mary likes to talk to me and joke around with me. I had a basketball game on the 20th at 10:30 and we had pictures that day and we beat the other team 34-16. It was fun winning for once. I came home and we went to Jacob's house and I told him we won and he's like, "woah, that's a lot to win by." And I had a parent-teacher conference on Thursday. I made a deal to pass off my multiplication. And I had a goal to keep up my fluency and to keep up my reading. And I have to do a report on baby turtles because we're going to Mexico and we're going to see them. It's going to be cool telling all my friends I'm going to Mexico and it will kind of be like a notebook because then I can put pictures on that I took in Mexico and I can come back and say, "This is what the baby turtles really looked like when I was helping them." I played with Austin and we played on the Internet and we played this game on AVATAR and you pick a ball and there's this thing where you swing it and you try to hit the other guys palace before he hits your palace, and I won except one time I was lucky because Austin kept hitting my thing and one shot and my thing was dead and then I had a lucky shot with a small one and a medium one and he barely got my staircase blew up but he still had the center of the building and then I tried the huge one and I blew up his palace and I won. Maybe it's violent. At Nathaniel's party we went to the Celebration Center and it was cool because they had a climbing wall and a arcade and a soft play and this thing where you jumped on something and they had a carousel. They had a dinner place but we weren't in the dinner place, we were in the birthday place because Nathaniel had a birthday. I had two things of pizza and two glasses of 7-up. And we had a football cake and we had ice cream and I got 41 tickets from the arcade and I got two ninjas, an alien guy holding a cake, and I got a licorice stick and I got two tootsies. And I got a tootsie roll. And we climbed the rock climb wall and I got about half way up and then there was palm trees that we had to climb up and I got to the button and pressed the button on that one. Nathaniel's mom tried the rock climb wall and she got all the way up. It was cool. I played a lot of games. I had another basketball game against the Warriors and we won 32-26. It was pretty fun because it was a close game and when our group came out, we scored 12 points, the group that I was playing with, because I get out for one quarter and in for one quarter. And then out for one quarter and then in for one quarter. And we scored and it was cool.

Love you. Miss you.

Elliot

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

I miss Caroline and Anna and Mary so much. I woke up Tuesday morning and wandered around the house calling for them. Despite what Elliot says, we all got along really well. We loved sitting at my new little table and eating snacks. We watched the Backyardigans and Mulan and Baby Einstein a few times. They also brought some other Dora movies. We loved running. We would all run from the garage door to the fridge and then back- over and over. And then we would run from the TV to the stairs and back over and over. But we usually stopped and sat on the stairs for just a minute. Mary did a fun Family Home Evening where we ran to find clues, but we just ran around and around in circles with Jacob and Jonah. And the whole time we were yelling "running, running, running!" We also played that game while Paige was here and she really liked it. Then there were four of us running! Sometimes Caroline and Anna and I made each other sad, but quite often we shared and were so happy to see each other. I've also really started to notice that there are certain things I can do when Mommy gets mad that get me out of trouble. Like being cute. And I've decided that kitties are really cute. So now, when Mommy is starting to get mad, I start acting like a kitty and meowing and saying "I'm a kitty. I'm a kitty." So far it's working really well. On Thursday Mommy tried to clean the house and I was really helpful. First she mopped the floor and I came right behind with my little broom creating realistic wood-grain designs on the newly mopped floor. Then she tried to clean the windos and I found the squirt bottle from the ironing basket and a wad of toilet paper and followed behind her catching all the spots she'd missed. I'm a very tempermental 2-year-old, but luckily I'm also very cute. So I'm getting away with quite a bit. I've been talking a lot about Baby Owen. His picture is on our fridge, and Grandma has been at his house a couple of times when I've had to call her to talk to her about important things. I like Baby Owen. If anyone asks me anything about him, my automatic response is "Baby Owen is cute!" I need to go to bed!

Love

Cecily