A few more pictures of Nathan and Nia ...

After quite a busy weekend in our lives, Monday rolled around pretty quickly. Our last Monday with Nathan and Nia ... only Thursday left, and then they go all the way home to San Antonio! We read three new books today and Nathan asked me if I had gotten them at the library. I asked him if he ever went to the library and he said that he did ... all the time! So we read "The Three Trees", "Bear Stays up for Christmas" and an nice children's nativity book. I wondered what else we could do today that would be new, fun and interesting ... and then I remembered my flannel graph Bible stories. I have only had opportunity to use them a few times with some of my 3's groups at church but there are SO many children there and it is difficult for me to interact with all of them at once!
Nathan Paul liked this way of telling a story very much. I only have the cutouts for a few stories and I figured we may as well start at ... well, the Beginning! So Nathan and I talked about God making everything we can see out of absolutely nothing. He liked putting all of the animals on the flannel board and insisted the kittens be put in the lake with the fish ...

... and the panda bear was placed up in the sky "where he could see everything" (to quote Nathan). We also did the Jonah story, but I think Nathan was disappointed I didn't have the Veggie Tale version. We did the birth of baby Jesus too.

Nia Madelynn seems to be cutting multiple teeth and I think felt a little out of sorts today. When she woke up from her nap, I scooped her a tiny bit of peppermint stick ice cream which she enjoyed very much. Nathan completely rejected the entire idea of ice cream!

Here is Nia responding to Grandpa Jones's request to "smile please" for the camera. She has a very pretty smile!

When we were down in Texas in October, we brought a playdough set for Nathan's 3rd birthday. While we visited at their apartment, Nathan didn't really seem too terribly interested in playing with the playdough and so it didn't occur to me to get our set out here at home for him to play with until this afternoon ... I figured we'd give it a try.

Mr. Nathan was VERY into playdough today, cutting it (notice the upside-down knife), shaping it, making doughnuts and cookie shapes ...

It was very fun to watch him have such a great time. When we color, it's usually me coloring with Nathan dictating what colors to use and just exactly how he wants the picture to look ... and he seems to really enjoy just watching and directing but definitely NOT coloring himself. With the playdough, however, he needed no help at all and really wanted to do everything himself.

The Queen was happy as long as we handed her the playdough toys so that she could pass inspection on them ... she didn't seem to realize she wasn't being given any playdough.

At one point this afternoon, Nathan gave me a huge bear hug and a very deliberate kiss on the cheek saying, "I give you hugs and kisses, granny!" I like that very much, Nathan! We had such a nice day with these kiddos! There is nothing quite like the JOY of grandchildren ... each one of them different ... each one of them so very precious.