Missing Kyra!

Kyra's been gone a few days, and we miss her quite a bit! From the sound of it, she's having quite a good time in Seattle with Leslie & Kate. We'll post some of her pictures when we can- she gets back tomorrow night!!
So this week, we had a nice visit at Wheeler Farm (no relation to Sarah) with some good friends of ours. This is me and my good friend Andrya (pronounced just like I say MY name!)

That's her youngest daughter on her lap. Some other pictures of our kids together that day:



Callie's electronics kit came that afternoon, and she's had a great time building a lie detector, a doorbell, and a recording device. Inexplicably, the recording device plays random Christmas carols after it plays back what you recorded! That was good for quite a few laughs.
That night for family night, Brynn got to choose the game. She chose to draw a hopscotch grid on a large piece of paper that was padding Callie's electronics kit during shipping. We had a lot of fun playing hopscotch:

Tuesday we lost Kyra to a big babysitting job - she went up to Tim's new house and watched the boys while they went gallavanting off around the countryside. Because they planned to get back so late, Kyra stayed overnight and we got her back the next morning. Then she turned around & left us again for ANOTHER sibling! She was very excited to go, though, and it sure was fun to watch her head off on another adventure Wednesday afternoon.
Thursday morning Jack came to play with us for a couple hours while Sarah & Carter were busy. It was fun to hear his great laugh all morning. At one point, he came to me and said "Brynn's telling stories, and they're NOT EVEN FROM A BOOK!" He was amazed she could just make it up. But that is one of her favorite things to do. When she says "come play with me, mommy" what she REALLY wants is an audience for her stories. Jack and Brynn played really well together and I got quite a bit done that morning.
I spent Friday frantically looking all over my house for a $300 check from a client that I have apparently lost. I'm still hoping to come across it but have no idea where else to look.
Saturday afternoon we took Callie & Brynn swimming. They wanted to wear their life jackets, and it was funny how uninhibited they were with them. Brynn was just everywhere doing everything. She especially liked floating, and would yell "I'm flotationing!" every time, which made other swimmers (including me) laugh. Callie practiced dogpaddling and eventually got pretty good at it.