Our Quiet Days And One Loud Last Day Of 2013.

I just love having all of our kids home…Although days when they are at school have their own perks, I now am learning to cherish the time when they ARE home with us.

Robert has a cushiony job—he gets either Christmas or New Year’s week off plus all the Federal holidays at this time of year.  So basically, he was able to be home A LOT. This year, he had the week of the New Year’s Day off. So we did our Christmas thing, he went to work for Dec. 26th and 27th (with barely any patients) and then had ten days off. Nice!

We did a lot of relaxing.

Reading books is still part of the routine with Mark. He is the only one who has an armchair in his bedroom, although his bedroom is the size of a train compartment, or a small bathroom by US standards, hahaha.

Robert is reading “Hobbit” in the evenings with the big kids, and they are almost finished. We’ll need to pick another cool book to keep going.

Katya and Alex got only a couple of days to skip their piano practicing.  Both of them made a big improvement this year. It’s incredible to me to see that both of them are so very talented with piano, and that if only they gave 100% every time they practice, and did it for a bit longer, they would be playing  a lot better than they are now.  It’s something that they will have to realize themselves…and I hope they do soon.

Lots of playtime in our house. And lots of mild colds (besides that one scary episode of high fever and sickness from Mark a few days before Christmas).

Mark is still learning where to find tissues in our house…apparently.

These two have been playing a lot better than they used to a couple of year ago. Alex does have to tone his roughness down a bit, but I can see how good it is for both of them to play and disagree and try to find compromises.

I am going to try to focus now on giving older kids more responsibilities in regards to teaching Mark things. So now Katya is in charge of teaching Mark how to properly fold his clothes to put his laundry away, and Alex is going to help Mark to remember to put his coat, shoes and backpack away when they come back from school.

Here is Alex helping Mark do his “tin words”, his reading words assigned at school. By the way, I cannot believe that Mark is actually reading! He cannot read all words yet, but he is very good at sounding everything out.

Yay, I got a picture of al three of them grinning! My sweeties.

Here is another sweetie, wearing a hat (?).  That’s Robert trying to cross off items on his “to-do list of things that are way overdue”.

On New Year’s Eve we had a neighborhood get together. It was so much fun! They are all such wonderful people, very friendly and helpful. I am glad our neighborhood is tight.

After munching on yummy food, we all went outside and exploded some fireworks. Oh, the kids loved it!!!

“Please, mama, can we stay up late?”. And they did. Sort of.

Mark was in bed by 10pm, Alex by 11pm and Katya got the privilege to stay all the way till 12:20am, downstairs, with us, watching Gary Barlow entertaining London and then the magical London fireworks! Click here to watch. This was probably the best fireworks show I’d ever seen.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!!  We are back to normal life around here…as soon as we are done eating our delicious Ukrainian Christmas dinner.