My kids are cuties

Is there anything cuter in the world than little kids' voices? I love hearing Katie talk. One of her favorite phrases now is, "Come on, let's go," which she normally says while grabbing your hand and trying to lead you away to wherever she wants to go. She uses this when she wants to dance, when she wants her teeth brushed, when she wants to leave the house, when she wants a snack. It's pretty adorable.

I think Charlie's eye color has finally stabilized. Looks like they're going to be green. Is that awesome or what? All of my kids have beautiful eyes. Alek's are a dark, dark brown, like mine (although darker -- more like mine when I was a kid). He also has some fairly amazing eyelashes. Katie's are also brown, but they have a ton of green flecks in them. But her eyes are not quite hazel. They're just gorgeous, though, and they look so great with her red hair and her pale rosy skin. And it looks like Charlie will be our one non-brown-eyed child. I couldn't decide for a long time if his eyes were blue or green, but I would definitely say they're green. Not like your typical green eyes, though -- I mean, there is just a lot of blue in that green.

This is why I never became a writer. I have no ability to describe how things look.

Charlie has recently developed a great love of stuffed animals. He has this gigantic bear he got for Christmas that he loves to attack and bite, and he recently started sleeping with a little stuffed dog. When I put him down in his crib, he crawls over to wherever the dog is and lays his head on top of it. This morning when I went into his room, he was just lying on his back, awake, with his little arms wrapped around that dog. He looked perfectly content. It was so sweet.

One of the things Alek is studying in school this year is the lives of the saints (the importance of doing good deeds and the consequences that follow good behavior, rather than a religious approach). Last night, he drew a picture of a story about St. Jerome that they have been learning in school. It's good to know that he is absorbing the information from school and enjoys it enough to revisit it at home.