Baby GPS

Ella is simply amazing! She has a great sense of direction and orientation which to me it's quite something for a four year old.  She's always been very aware of her surroundings and could easily recognize and remember roads and places she had been to or just seen while driving by.  The other day when she went with daddy to the library, she gave him directions on how to get there. She had only been there once before on a walk with her classroom friends and teacher.

What's with the baby GPS? Well, just something cute she came up. She calls the cell phone GPS service we have, "the baby" GPS in contrast to the regular GPS (that we only had for a few days then returned it since something was definitely wrong with it.) Love that kid!

Family Home Evening Jingles

In my church we are counseled to set some time aside every week to spend with our families and use that time to learn something, play games, and just have fun together. It's called family home evening. Last night we had an activity at church where one of the ladies in the ward taught about "Family Home Evening Jingles" and how we can make the most out of this special family time by planning ahead, having something specific to teach each other, using object lessons, role playing, keeping it short and simple (especially when you have young children), and just thinking outside the box. I was excited to go because I know our family home evenings need some extra jingle. I'm not the "object lesson" type person and I need a lot of help and ideas in coming up with something fun that will capture Ella's attention. Some great ideas for games were shared, here's one that I'm excited to try in our next F.H.E.'s:

• The Scripture Bag: let every family member put a bunch of random things in a bag and then take turns pulling one item out at the time and telling a scripture story/event that goes with the object. For example, with a piece of fruit/apple, orange you could talk about Adam and Eve, Lehi's vision of the tree of life, and others.  With a toy boat you could talk about the flood and Noah's ark, etc. I love this one and can't wait to try it.

The bottom line is to plan ahead and pray for inspiration to know what your family needs to hear or be taught at that particular time. (I also got some great ideas from my dear friend's blog and her friends sharing their ideas in the comments section, read those too.)

I'm so grateful for my church leaders and their counsel to form this special family tradition that will bring us closer together as a family and help us teach values to our children.  Ella always looks forward to it.

And while I was getting more educated on F.H.E., my sweet hubby, Hrishi took Ella to our local library for Family Reading night where they had a great time. So grateful for him and what a wonderful father he is.

Blog2Print and gyms

I acted upon my enthusiastic discovery of the Blog2Print feature a few days ago and now I have my 2009 blog book ready to order. I'm so excited!

I started back up on my gym routine yesterday. It was good, maybe I exerted myself a little too much or ok, not a little, a heck of a lot and I had to deal with a bad headache the entire day/evening after that. I didn't have my heart rate monitor on me and I think I must have been in zones 3 and 4, almost the whole time, crazy me. I  also realized that I have to cancel my new gym membership at YMCA and "crawl" back to LifeTime Fitness! That's where we were going when we were back in Omaha and at the risk of sounding snobbish, I can tell you that it's more than worth the extra $20-$30/mo and the 20 min drive. Yesterday I realized that A/C in a locker room is a must-have! So good bye YMCA and hello LifeTime Fitness! Our experience at LFT was great from the very beginning, loved every minute of it. It's really like a spa. From the latest equipment, to excellent service, group fitness instructors, dieticians, children's club, that place is simply amazing! The other reason I guess we're switching is because of the swimming lesson approaches are so different at the two gyms and it'd be in Ella's best interest to continue on with how she started at LFT. At LFT they're not using  floaters and they're really learning how to swim on their own in a 3-4 ft deep pool whereas other places use floaters in a 2-3 ft pool with no 0 level. I'm not the swim expert but it just makes a little more sense to go with the first one.

I'm going to blog away!

Why? Well, just because I now have the extra motivation: I can actually keep our family history this way! I have discovered Blog2Print!  Yeay!!! Hooray for technology!!!

Student of the week

Adding some pics to go with the spotlight! Thanks for all your sweet comments, prietenele mele drage!!
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Ella received her "Student of the Week" award a couple of weeks back and although we made a big deal about at home as we are very proud of her I realized that I did not do a spotlight on her!
So here it is...

-Ella can now write all her letters and numbers and loves to practise them at home after school.

-She can write her full name and part of her home address.

-Ella loves wearing her school jumper and has demanded for more of those or some skorts at least (she only has one jumper right now.)

-Ella loves learning new things. She was very excited to learn about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Mon; they even watched a video on him and since then talks to us about all men/women being equal and being treated the same as Heavenly Father loves us all the same. Isn't she wonderful!

-Ella loves her gymnastics class and does best on the balance beam.

Something that I forgot to mention in my first version of this post:
-Ella is very creative, she sees things like shapes and animals in her food!

We love her tons!!! So proud of you, baby!

Temple

Let me first say that I love our new church schedule, we start at 8:30 am with Sacrament. It's really great to then have a proper lunch at noon and to not have to eat too early when you're not hungry or extremely late, and then have the entire day to rest, play, and just be home.
This past Sunday after a good nap, Hrishi made some yummy banana bread (in which he sprinkled some fresh raspberries), and then suggested that we go to the temple to see how far it is, what's the best route to get there, etc. I was very excited! We went and we were hoping the temple grounds would be open to walk around but we were not lucky I guess. We were satisfied though to be able to walk a bit outside its gates and take a few pictures. As I stood out there for a few minutes, I could feel an amazing peace and calm. We were standing on sacred ground. I'm so grateful for temples, and especially for my new temple here in the DFW area. It is really beautiful!

HERE ARE THE PICS!

It takes some getting used to...

No matter how much you think you're going to like something, a new place in my case, it's still going to take some getting used to. Although I didn't think it'd be the case, Omaha homesickness struck (me) eventually ... probably because I'm still not feeling (completely) well and back 100%. I think I miss our home. However I'm slowly getting to love this new city, its surroundings, the people here. I love it that I can find my way easily going places (granted that it's dr offices only for now.)

We've been coaching our little angel through the challenges she's faced her second week of pre-kindergarten when she learned that she was expected to know how to write all the letters and numbers. Remember from my earlier post when she by herself with no training wrote the letters of her name slightly in the wrong order (but she did write them) and we were so very proud of her! Well, we're still proud of her and are practicing at home with her to get good at writing all letters. It's quite amazing to me how the curriculum here at Primrose requires 4 yr olds to learn/know how to write upper and lower case letters and numbers. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great thing but with no previous practice like in Ella's case this is quite a huge challenge! She's such a trooper though, so dilligent, and willing to please teachers (and us), has asked for practice sheets from her teacher so she can practice at home. So we've been doing homework pretty much every evening. Another thing that amazes me is that she wants to do it and doesn't give up. I honestly thought I'd have at least another homework-free/school carefree type year but we're hitting the ground running here in Coppell. This is a blessing though that she is being challenged at an early age. It's definitely going to serve her well. However, I was hoping that she can have a few more months of carefree play in school. (Keep in mind this is coming from someone who did not want to learn to write or even recognize letters or numbers until she went to first grade... but then I had to hit the ground running and fast I must say but I turned out alright, didn't I ???? hahahah)
Her teachers are impressed with how fast she's catching up and they had a surprise for her today, they were going to award her the "student of the week" award as she proved to be such a good and quick learner.  I can't wait to hear all about it today when I pick her up.

I love being a parent, I love the challenge, and I think I love to live my childhood challenges (school related and otherwise) all over again through her. I feel she's matured a ton over these past two weeks. We're right there cheering her along the way! I too hit the ground running at work with new/complex projects requiring quick action and I think I like it, I like the pressure, I like the learning that occurs in those crunch time moments, etc. I think that when we're pushed we strive more, and we get better results. I think our Heavenly Father pushes us (gently) so we can learn more and more and get closer to becoming the kind of people that He wants us to be.

A long post I know... and when you think that I was not going to post anything today and that I was even considering putting this whole blogging stuff on the back burner for a while, just like I did with my facebook presence. But once I do start writing it's kind of hard to stop.

Otherwise, I really look forward to getting better (I'm taking a very strong antibiotic that knocks me off every night... don't like that) so I can connect more with families in the ward (we're thinking of inviting a couple of families over for a potluck, the former missionary to Romania, her husband and another couple from the ward about which I came to find out that she went to Romania and did social work at orphanages in Iasi. What a small world?!?!!!!!)

Let's see what else, oh I think we brought the freezing cold with us from Omaha, as we've been having below freezing temps this entire week. Very very unusual for TX... thanks goodness it's going to be in the 50's next week! Oh yeah, show us some lovin' TX!