Happy 5th Birthday, Matteo!

I can't believe he's already 5! (I probably begin all birthday posts with that sentence.)

We had a really fun day celebrating Matteo's birthday today!


There was cake, of course :)


And balloons - from Aunt Ginny :)

Cards and presents!

From Uncle Rob...

A telescope from Aunt Mary, Aunt Dot, and cousins Katie and Heather. It is my duty to watch the instructional video that came along with it after I finish this post :) We're all really looking forward to using this!!

A fun musical Star Wars card from Grandma and Pipa.

And, a Winter Olympic Wii game from Grandma and Pipa. This was thoroughly enjoyed this afternoon by all the kids....Don't tell anyone that I gave the kids the afternoon off from school to play Wii - terrible teacher, I know!

Elena enjoyed the wrapping paper.

Cars from Aunt Ginny. These are some of the coolest cars ever made. The pieces all come off and interchange with the other cars.

All of the kids enjoyed them!

Happy birthday, sweetest boy!! We love you!!!!

Please take a look at the post below to see pictures from Matteo's previous birthdays!

Matteo: The first 4 years :)

Matteo was born 5 years ago today in Salt Lake City. He was a surprising 11 lbs at birth.

Here's a look back at his first 4 years. Stay tuned for pictures from today's birthday in a later blog post.

Here he is during his first bath...



Here is the 1st time that his older sisters met him...

This is the first time we met him :)

This was his Baptism. He was a month old when he was Baptized on Easter Monday. His birthday was during Lent so we had to wait until after Easter to have him Baptized.

Here he is on his 1st birthday...

2nd birthday...

3rd birthday...

4th birthday...

Here is a video including Matteo's first bath, first steps, birthdays, first swimming lessons (on his 3rd birthday), and early reading. Enjoy!!

It'll take a long time to melt all of this!

Over the past week, we haven't had any new snow. The temps have even risen above freezing on several of the days. But, it will take a lot of these days to melt the 12 days of nearly continuous snow that we had starting on Feb. 5th. Now you can actually see the bushes that are covered in these pictures.

You can see in the picture that the snow nearly reached the top of this fence.

This is our backyard. A tree branch fell knocking down a line during the first snow storm.

Other branches heavy with snow hung on other power lines, but, thankfully, they never fell.

The city comes to pick up our trash on Wednesday mornings. The first Wednesday, they were unable to come, but hopeful as always, I dug a path and put out the trash on Tuesday night. Last week, I went through this routine again, redigging the path. You can see that we had so much trash by this time (2 weeks worth) that we couldn't fit it in our trash cans. Thankfully, the garbage trucks were able to come out last Wednesday!

Winter seems to have calmed down for now, but it will be a LONG time before the huge piles of snow outside, along the streets, and throughout the city finally melt. As someone born and raised in the south, I still find all this snow quite amazing!!

Elena - Almost 10 months

About a month ago, I promised Zio Luca (and by extension, the whole family) 9-month pictures of Elena. Well, that didn't happen. So, I'm jumping the gun on her 10-month pictures! She'll actually be 10-months-old on Wednesday.

This video will give you a great idea of all the things Elena is doing these days. She's not crawling, but she's great at transitioning between sitting and crawling position. She's babbling. She loves to sit on the floor and play. Her hair is getting thicker, though it's hard to tell in pictures because her hair in blonde. She doesn't have any teeth yet, but I'm not complaining :) She's a good eater. She eats some baby food about twice a day - cereal and fruit in the mornings and fruit in evenings usually. However, if she sees me eating something, she usually wants to sample! She's still our wonderfully happy baby, though she has moved into a new level of separation anxiety...she usually cries whenever I leave a room!

As for her numbers - at her 9-month appointment last month, she weighed 19 lbs 2 oz and was 28" long.

Family Chapel

I know over the past month that my blog posts have been few and far between. There are 2 reasons. First, I've changed where I keep my computer in the house so that it's easier for us to use it for school when needed, but more difficult for me to use it at other times. It's good for me to spend less time on the computer :) Second, I've been busy moving around our playroom and schoolroom.

Until now, we had a separate school room and playroom on the 1st floor of our house. It seems that this would be a good thing, but I found that during the school day, the little ones didn't want to be away from the rest of us in another room. So we were spending the majority of the day squeezed into the smaller room (the former school room being a bit smaller than the playroom). The younger ones would bring toys in there to play with. It was very crowded and at the end of the day we had 2 rooms of toys to clean. Also, I started thinking about what kind of message we were sending to our children by have a room to enthrone toys! Encouraged by the example of a couple of other families, we decided to combine the school room and playroom and convert the former school room to a family chapel. It has taken us several weeks to reduce the number of toys in the playroom, move our needed school items in there, and finally set up the chapel. It's been well worth the time and effort. It's so nice to have a separate quiet place for our periodic times of family prayer throughout the day and for individual private prayer and spiritual reading. I still want to hang some more pictures, but here is what it looks like so far...

There are 2 more small book shelves on the other side of the room. On the altar, there are statues of Mary, Jesus (the Sacred Heart, and Joseph with baby Jesus). There is a candle and Catholic Bible. On the bottom shelf there is a bowl of Rosaries, Matteo's prayer book, and a book for us to write prayer intentions.

SNOW!

It started snowing a little after 12noon yesterday (Friday) and quit around the same time today.

Look at how much we got!



Snow collected in the windows...

...covered our cars...

I went out and measured along the path made from our neighbor plowing the sidewalk.

This showed 16" (40.5 cm).

There's a bush under there somewhere!

This measurement showed 18" (45.7 cm).

Looking down the street...

...and up the street.

The kids had fun playing in the snow. This was the most snow they had ever seen!

Dany had the fun task of digging our van out of the snow so that we can go to Mass in the morning.

The kids had fun playing in the huge piles of snow that he made.

It took Dany nearly 2 hours!!

He says that he's driving the van until the snow melts from his Taurus because he's had enough digging! :) :) Temps are not supposed to be above freezing (in fact it is supposed to be down to 6 degrees F -- that's -14 degrees C) for the foreseable future, so we'll be waiting a while for that snow melt!



Here are some videos that we took today!

Nothin' an art project can't fix!

Cati had a sad morning. On Saturday, after months of begging, I took Cati to get her ears pierced. (See this post.) She was so happy. She was really looking forward to changing the earrings in 4 weeks to some strawberry earrings that she picked out.

Unfortunately, we had to take out the earrings this morning. We will have to leave them out and let her ears heal. Yesterday, she developed a rash around both ears. It seems that she has a sensitivity to the metal in earrings, even though they were 14k gold. She's had many allergies and sensitivities since she was born, so it's not shocking, but still sad to a 7-year-old girl.

You can get see how red her ear is in this photo, although you can't really see the rash.



She sat in my lap and cried for a few minutes after I removed the earrings. Thankfully, I remembered that I had an art project planned for her today. Nothing makes Cati happy like a craft does! So, soon those tears dried...

...and Cati's pretty smiled returned! She's still a bit sad about her earrings, but she's definitely feeling much better after a healing art session!