Here’s Hailey and Mallory with the chocolate roses they got for Valentines day today.

A couple weeks ago the girls and I were home alone. Like most late Saturday afternoons, they had exhausted all of their playing ideas and they were complaining of boredom. Up to that point in the day they had watched a Barbie movie, had played with Barbies, had danced for a while in the front room and had done who knows what else. Unfortunately they had grown tired of all these distractions and needed something else to do. As I tried to figure out what I could do to help, it dawned on me. I headed downstairs to rummage through the boxes of stuff sitting down there and after a few minutes of intense searching came back upstairs with my old Nintendo Entertainment System. That old gray box and I had shared countless hours together growing up and I figured it was about time to introduce my girls to someone who had a pretty big influence on me as a kid. It was time to meet Mario!

After a bit of blowing into carts, I got Mario Bros up and running for them. It took them a good half an hour to really get the hang of it, and even then neither of them made it to the end of world 1-1, but they had fun. We played a little Excite Bike, some Wild Gunman, some Duck Hunt, and we tried to play some Rad Racer as well with some pretty sad results. The only game they really “get” at this point is Duck Hunt, but they had a blast blowing ducks out of the sky. They’ll need some more practice before they’re really any good at Mario, but at least it’s an activity I can get excited about. I know it’s wrong and I know I should be happy just to spend time with them, but I just have a really hard time getting excited about playing Barbies.

The weather men have been telling us that snow was on the way all week, but the first 2 nights we were supposed to get snow it just drizzled. Last night however, much to the relief of weather guessers everywhere, brought the snow they told us to watch for. There were a few flakes coming down when I went to bed last night, but when I woke up we had a good 3 inches of snow.

In the past, snow has been somewhat troublesome for us because it turned our whole yard into a gigantic mud pit. However, this year we have grass. This is good for a couple reasons… first, the yard won’t be a vat of muddy sinkhole ready to claim any victim dumb enough to leave the sidewalk, and second, because the girls can now go out and play in the snow. Hailey and Mallory have been a little deprived the last few years because they couldn’t really go out and enjoy the snow because we were worried they’d get stuck in the mud and, much like the dinosaurs, would never be seen again. So to celebrate this occasion of being able to play in our yard now, we went out and made a snowman.

The yard is just about ready for top soil and seed (yeah, yeah… I know… IT’S ABOUT FREAKIN TIME!) so the girls have been enjoying the last few weekends they have left to romp around in the dirt. Today they were apparently building a castle for the bugs in our yard. As far as I could tell, they were going to build a big castle and then notify all of the nearby bugs that they were welcome to come and live in the newly erected mansion. As the pictures below prove, they didn’t get too far on the construction of said castle. Guess the local bugs will have to find another castle to reside in. Too bad.

The girls love High School Musical. We got invited to a premiere party on Friday night to see High School Musical 2 and it could not come soon enough! Grandma taped it for us and I think they have only seen it 10 times already. We call this picture “The High School Musical trance”!!