Making the most of it

Last week we had a rash of viruses run through the house again. Kate had a snot-producing cold most of the week and is finally about over it while Anna had an unrelated fever on Wednesday and early Thursday. I almost took her in to the doctor's, but she was doing much better by Thursday afternoon. However, I was getting a pretty bad case of cabin fever after being inside our house for almost four days straight!

A few weeks ago I had made plans to take the girls to the Milwaukee Public Museum on Friday because we didn't have anything on the calendar. The girls had each picked out an exhibit they wanted to see (Anna - The Streets of Old Milwaukee; Kate - The Dinosaurs; I picked the butterfly garden and the insect exhibit.). We had even checked out books related to these topics to get prepared for our first field trip to a "real" museum. After the confined week that we had, I was more determined than ever to make this trip work. So, even though it turned into a rather snowy day, I packed the girls up and we headed to Milwaukee for the day.


All in all, things went okay. The girls did great while checking out the exhibits and walking around, especially considering that they'd been under the weather all week. Lunch was a bit more challenging for some reason, as were the bathroom breaks that we took. Oh, well. If you ask the girls, they best remember the candy store in the Streets of Old Milwaukee (where they both got to pick out one kind of candy) and the scene where one dinosaur was eating the other one.
Actually, this week Kate has mentioned a handful of other things she remembers, too. We had a good time, and it was SO nice to be able to do something that wasn't inside our house!

We've also been getting geared up for Valentine's Day. Since "love" is Anna's favorite word (or at least that's what she claimed for her Show and Share at school one week), we're pretty excited about the day.


We don't even do gifts really in our house for Valentine's Day, but I think the cards are enough for Kate and Anna to be excited. Anna made all of her Valentine cards for school this year; it was a good activity during one of our sick days :)


We also made a batch of sugar cookies with some new heart cookie cutters that my mom sent, and spent an evening decorating them as a family. Not bad, huh?


I wanted to mention a couple of random things, too, that I keep forgetting to put in a blog entry, and since this blog is also a good record to help me remember when things happen in our life, I wanted to make sure they were included.

Anyway, this past December, Anna decided (with some prompting) that her new year's resolution would be to stop sucking her thumb except for when she's sleeping. Sometime last spring she stopped sucking her thumb (with extensive bribes from us) except for in her bed and since then she's been very good about following that rule. However, she would still take several "breaks" during the day and just want to lie in bed, "suck my thumb and sniff my blanket". We thought we'd try for the next step with the coming of the new year.

Well, we always suspected that Anna has a pretty strong will (how good or bad that is, is yet to be determined), but now we know for sure just how strong it is. She took one or two "practice days" at the end of December, but as soon as January 1 came, she stopped the daytime thumb stuff and didn't ever go back. The first few weeks there were moments when she'd say "I just want to go in my room and suck my thumb!" But she never did; she just wanted to tell us how hard it was. Even when she was sick last week with the fever and was lying in bed most of Wednesday just resting, she never did suck her thumb (until she told me she wanted to take a nap). Now we know the answer to the question "Does Anna have a strong will?" ... resounding yes.

The other thing to mention is that we're starting to run out of our preserved food :( How far we make it into February and March is always an interesting measure for me. Our pumpkins started rotting a while ago so we cooked up a bunch and now have plenty of frozen pumpkin, but we've officially run out of potatoes (they had a blight last year so we didn't get many anyway), peapods, broccoli, and pesto. We are down to our last bag of green beans, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries from Gerry's berries. We're also running low on peaches, beets, chili sauce, dried tomatoes, and canned tomatoes. However, we still have plenty of corn, zucchini, squash, salsa, tomato sauce, applesauce, and grape juice. Still, it will be sad now that I'll be needing to buy more and more veggies from the store. The girls don't seem to like them as much (and neither do Matt and I, to tell the truth).