Shannon News

Our sweetheart spent the last fifteen minutes of Sacrament Meeting calling "Nursery!" "Nursery!" She struggled to run around the cultural hall at the same time. She's getting strong into the toddler years. She's also started to try out simple sentences like "Good zrbrt Mommy" and "I like candy" and "Want go down stairs." (Does anyone know the official way to spell zerbert?" I like it with no vowels. It looks Slavic.)

She enjoys being in a house with other kids and their toys. The preschooler is big into not being a baby, and tries really hard to exclude her, except she can't resist a good game of chase or spotaneous dancing in the living room; happily the first grader is really happy to have Shannon around and likes to play with her.

She likes collecting seashells and digging in the cold sand, watching the flock of seven wild turkeys that come by every day to the backyard, feeding bread crumbs to the squirrels, playing in piles of orange and red maple leaves (including throwing them up in the air), and generally discovering new aspects of the world that Jesus created for her. We watched a small songbird fly up to the window, perch on a plant hook inches from the glass, and then swoop right into the corner to eat the enormous spider we'd noticed there. It was spectacular. That spider had the biggest abdomen I've ever seen in the arachnid family. Shannon loved it.

She tries to climb the three flights of wooden stairs that twist around this crazy New England home, and has slipped down them twice. Scary. She got bumps on her cheek and the back of her head the second time. We try really hard to police the place. It isn't at all child-friendly as structures go, even though 12 kids were raised here.

She's still a happy girl. I think she's especially glad to have daddy around.