A Little Behind...Let's Catch Up!

 The day before Valentine's Day I made mini pancake muffins for breakfast, half of them had blueberries in them and the other half had chocolate chips. I put a couple of drops of red food coloring into the ones with chocolate chips so they would be pink and then a sprinkled all of them with some mini heart sprinkles. They looked cute and tasted yummy! I had to work on Valentine's Day so I wanted to make sure to do something special for the kids the day before. Me and Dave also celebrated the day before by going to dinner and a movie. We ate at Chili's and ordered off their "lighter" menu. We both LOVED what we ordered and will be definitely ordering again. The chicken I ordered had the most delicious habanero & sweet orange glaze on it, I want to try to recreate it at home. After dinner we went to see Identity Thief, it was pretty funny!

That night before bed we set up the kids' valentines on the couch so they would get them in the morning. They each got a stuffed animal, some chocolates, a cake pop, and a card. They loved it all.

While I was at work Dave sent me a picture of what he made the kids for lunch. Little heart sandwiches. Awww!

Ashlynn is tall enough to reach the figurines that we had on her dresser and she loved to grab them and play with them. Luckily, because they are glass, she was very gentle with them and would cradle and rock them. It was really sweet actually but we didn't want her to break them and hurt herself so we bought some shelves to put up on her wall. Brandee helped me hang them up one night that Dave was at work... it was quite an adventure but we did it!!

The rose on the bottom shelf is a rose that Dave gave me a few months before we got married. It's usually in our room but I felt like the bottom shelf needed something tall on it so I'm letting Ashlynn borrow it for awhile.

The other night Dawson and Ashlynn were playing in Ashlynn's room and they got quiet so I went to check on them and found them like this:

Dawson said he was holding her like a baby. *lol* That's a BIG baby! I love the way they love each other.

Dawson loves to play games. We play Hedbanz, Apples to Apples, and Candy Land a lot. The other day when we were playing Candy Land we decided to change it up a little and use Jake and Izzy instead of the little people that came with it. Dawson got a kick out of it.

Also a couple of days ago (sorry this post is jumping everywhere... that's what happens when I get behind)  the kids had a dentist appointment. Both of their teeth look healthy and strong but Ashlynn's top teeth super narrow....the roof of her mouth by her front teeth is really narrow... I don't know if that makes sense at all but the dentist said it's probably because of her binky. I've noticed the shape of the top of her mouth not looking quite normal for awhile now and I figured it was because of her binky but I knew it was going to be hard to take her binky away so we didn't. Mostly laziness on our part. :( She really only uses it at nap and bedtime but after going to the dentist I knew it was time, even if it was going to be hard. Tonight is her third night without and it's definitely getting easier for her. She still cries a little bit but if I go in there for a minute to comfort her she's fine. She'll probably wake up a few times tonight but luckily she goes back to sleep pretty easily. I'm thinking she'll be completely over it in another three days or so.

Oh, and before they left the dentist they got to pick out new toothbrushes. Cars 2 was playing on the TVs during their checkups so the dentist knew how much Dawson loved Cars so he gave him a Cars toothbrush (it's actually the same toothbrush he already had but his old one was due to be replaced). Ashlynn got to choose from a princess one (it had a few princesses on it, I can't remember which ones), a Cinderella one, and an Ariel one, she chose the Ariel one.

I'm hoping that when they go back to the dentist in 6 months Ashlynn's teeth will have started to move back to where they're supposed to be. The dentist said the sooner we take her binky away the better chance they had of going back to normal.

Me and Dave are still doing well on our weightloss journey. Our official weigh-in day is tomorrow but I think together we are down about 17 pounds! We're doing really good about eating healthy, staying within our calorie range, and drinking a lot of water. We really need to start exercising more. I think it will be easier when it isn't so cold so we can get out and walk and eventually start running again.

Dawson has been really interested in math lately. He's always telling us things like if I have two toys and you give me two more toys I'll have four toys! He does some subtracting, too, and will ask us to help him. He'll ask things like if I have eight candies and you give me eight more how many will I have? And we'll help him count on his fingers to figure it out. I've also started doing his reading lessons again. We started them last summer and made it to lesson 10 or so and both Dawson and I were getting too frustrated with it so we stopped doing them. He just wasn't ready yet and that's ok! We did lesson 4 today (there are 100 lessons, you are supposed to one a day) so we are not that far into it but I can see a HUGE difference in how he's doing. He's actually excited to do them, it isn't a fight at all. I think he's ready this time.

I posted awhile ago how Ashlynn was not interested in reading time at all. Luckily that did turn out to be a short phase. She LOVES storytime now and often asks me to read her two stories before bed. She tries to see her ABC's... it goes something like this "A-B-C-D-F-Geeeeeeeeeeeeee  A-B-C-D-F-Geeeeeeeeee!" It's pretty cute. :) She's also been into dancing a lot. I LOVE to watch her dance. We really need to get her into dance classes soon, I think she'd love going to them. I'll leave you with a little video of her dancing. (Sorry it's so dark, the light bulb in the living room needs to be replaced)