Friday (all day)

Happy Birthday Sophia! (our big 7-year-old girl)


Sophia's Birthday Shrinky Dinks


Twin Pinkys (from The Cute Book)


The Birthday Girl


Birthday Cupcake Picture

Happy Birthday to our friend Chris, too, who sometimes reads this blog and doubtless remembers Sophia's birth since she was there. :)

Thursday Afternoon

Happy Valentine's Day!


Ellie's Hearts



Margaret's Heart Scone



Anna

Wednesday Evening

The family that dances together, stays together. :)

Monday Morning

Rub a dub dub,
Three kids in a tub,
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick maker.
Turn them out, knaves all three!


Meanwhile, in the other room...

Happy Birthday, Anna-boo!

Yesterday our littlest JacobsCircus performer had her first birthday. We survived it, although just barely. Our original plan was to have a party at Grandma's house with family and a few friends, so Margaret and I spent the day making cakes and food and ignoring the mess the little girls were making all over the house. This backfired pretty badly when most of the family canceled at the last minute and we had to call everyone and invite them over here, instead. :)

Tony stepped up and did a quick clean-up, though, and Margaret and I served up the food, and our guests came over and we had a really nice evening. We have lots of food leftover, though!

Here's Anna with her birthday cupcake, flavor: pink.


Sophie and Zephyr enjoyed them as well.


Anna followed first birthday tradition and got nice and messy!

Happy Birthday Month!

Anna will be a big one-year-old next week, and Sophia will be turning seven the week after that, so we're getting ready to enjoy some birthday fun and try to get our minds off of sad things and too much snowy coldness. We got 6 inches yesterday but it was too cold to go out and play in it, so we're feeling a bit cooped up.

We heard a rumor that tomorrow is International Eat Ice Cream for Breakfast Day, but I can't substantiate it. We plan to eat ice cream for breakfast tomorrow just in case. :)

Margaret obtained this book with her Christmas gift card, so we're spending our time making very cute things that we will photograph and post here asap.

Bye Bye Blaise

We took Blaise to the vet last night and had him put down. We haven't blogged about what's been going on with him, it's been almost too hard to talk about. He has always had behavior issues that we couldn't seem to get around, and it finally reached a point where we couldn't live with the liability of owning him anymore. I wish things were different, but no matter how much we went over it we kept coming up at the same place. I'm sorry if I'm being cryptic. The short version is Blaise was an aggressive and unpredictable dog and we had to put him down.

In spite of the stress that living with him brought to our lives we all loved that little dog an awful lot. He was incredibly cute and smart and at times just the sweetest little guy you could imagine. I've decided that he was a good dog through and through. He tried very hard to be good, but sometimes he just didn't understand what we needed him to do.

Margaret and I took him in and we stayed with him until he was gone. It was very hard. Witnessing death is difficult. Life is fragile. Hug your loved ones today in honor of little Blaise.

I couldn't bring myself to post a picture, everything is too fresh and sad. There are pics and a video of him here and here.