The first week of 2013

 This first week has been a little hectic. It was mostly filled with work for me, and squeezing in kids activities when possible! We had our longtime nanny, Kiri, come for a visit. She has graduated from college now and is working in another place now, so we miss her a lot. She has been with us since Markku was about 15 months old! So, it is still fun to get together with her whenever we can. She brought the kids some great Christmas gifts, so of course they loved that!

 

 

Note in the picture above we had an orange cast on Markku's arm. On Thursday we went to see the doctor and he reported Markku's arm is healed, and now we can use the brace for about 10 days and then we are all done! Markku was so happy to remove that cast and itch his arm. He was laughing so hard when they were using the saw to remove it.I guess it really tickled. So, now we can take a bath and sleep with nothing on that arm. The splint is only needed for play and exercise. Hooray!

Now that the cast is off, we get to go back to basketball! We had the first game in about a month-we were a little rusty. But Markku seemed to get the idea of defense a lot better. Look at how huge the player on the other team is. It is not a wonder that they were a lot better-I think they must be older!



 

Kai really wanted to be with Markku, so time out was his favorite! Here he is with his bestest buddy!

 



 

 

Suvi has had off from preschool now for 2.5 weeks as well. She is going a little stir crazy and keeps asking when she goes back to school. Markku on the other hand does not want vacation to end, because in his words, "they make me work too hard! All I do is work, work, work". I sure know what he means. Kind of  sad that there was this big change in school playtimes from kinder to first, especially since he will be working the rest of his life! Thank goodness for vacations. Suvi got a special gift from one of my co-workers as well. Look at these gorgeous barrettes. They are princesses made from ribbons. Can you see Rapunzel and Ariel? Thanks Chrissy, Suvi loves them. (I think she should sell these they are so awesome).

 

 

We ended winter break with a fun family movie night since Heikki was finally back in town. Then today, we all went on a family hike. We used to hike so much b.k. (before kids) and I really miss that. Partly because we now live in Texas, where you have to work a little harder to find good hiking places that aren't super crowded and partly because everything is so much harder to do when you have kids! But, I am going to try to enjoy as much of Texas as we can this winter-before it gets super hot again.





This was just a local hiking spot in San Marcos, just south of us in Kyle.

Kai was trying to walk the whole way. We only went about 2 miles, but it was too far for Kai. He was yelling at me, "Nooooo momma. Noooooo!" in the above picture when I was asking if he wanted me to carry him.. We finally convinced him to take a ride, but he was not happy about it. As it was, we finished at sunset.  Now we are all off to bed, getting ready for a new school week to start.