This will have to do for February

My sister scolded me (nicely) for not exactly keeping up-to-date with my blog, and I promised to blog before the end of February. I have a few hours left and no creativity or energy, but I did upload all of my photos from February to the computer today, so here's a selection.

One of these frogs is named "Doggy", but I don't honestly know which. Doggy got frog-napped by the neighbor boy who had been frog-hunting with my boys, so now there's only one frog singing all night in a hamster cage on the back balcony.

  It was REALLY hard to get photos of Elisabeth trying to crawl, as every time she saw the camera, she sat up again and grinned! This evening I tried and tried to get a video of her crawling, with no success, as again, when she saw the camera, all she would do was pose. She's been kind of moving for a few weeks, mostly backwards, or with a combination of throwing herself onto her tummy and then sitting up again, which got her in a different place with each maneuver, but she couldn't steer. Several times in the last week she crawled a bit forward, but she didn't seem to know she had or that she could. Yesterday, however, she figured it out, and today she was all over the living room and I pulled two bits of paper and a Lego out of her mouth. One would think I would know how to baby-proof by now...

The next couple of photos are nice and quiet: I've been enjoying making bread, at least one loaf a day, often two. We got a bread-machine just over a year ago, which has been great, and then had a happy accident about six months ago. The socket into which the bread-machine was plugged got turned off by accident (outlets here have individual switches), so figuring I had nothing to lose, I put the bread in the oven to finish it--and we all discovered that we like it better that way. That makes NO sense to me, but whatever. And I can make two loaves in a morning that way, too, by only using the bread machine to knead the dough the first time, then taking it out to rise and kneading it by hand the second time. We're seriously considering getting an actual mixer so that I can do two loaves of bread in one go. (The idea of doing the first kneading by hand is just not worth considering.)

 The children formed the above pieces: Katie the snowman at the top, Marie the pretzel, the boys the two cinnamon rolls, and Helen the...bread.

 Jacob got hold of the camera the other day. I didn't actually delete his photos, but did put most of them in a separate folder for him to deal with. This one of Lukas, however, I kept:

Jacob won the favorite-child award on this evening, getting Helen to sleep:

The Sunday before last I went to the playground with the three little girls. We only stayed for about 20 minutes (it's just not as much fun without big brothers and/or friends along!), but I liked this photo of Helen:

And at Katie's request, took about 20 photos of her before I got one (blurry) photo of her in mid-air:

And just to finish off, a reminder to me that Helen (whose hand is pictured) CAN be very sweet to her little sister: