New friends

We have started a play group with another family here in Shiprock who lives several houses down from us. They have three boys - the oldest is one month older than Lily and the second oldest is one month older than James (how cool!). Their youngest is about 3 months old. Lily is intrigued at times with the baby. Yesterday, another little girl who is almost 4 and lives with her family here in the medical housing joined the boys and their mom. Lily loved the "girl" power and pushed her entire Tinkerbell toy chest outside to join the boys with train play. James loves to go to their house as well since they have different Thomas train toys there. It's like a Thomas paradise for him. The hard part is convincing him when it is time to back to our house. We are really blessed to have several families who also live here with children close in our age to our own!!

Spring time in Shiprock

Hopefully we are finally past the winter weather here. The rivers are surprisingly high as we have had lots of winter snow and rain for this region. We had several unusually long cold spells in December and January but hopefully those days are over. The spring sandstorms are upon us now. We had the worst one yet two weeks ago since we have been here. Winds got up to about 60 miles per hour for about 24 hours. We have just finished up cleaning all the sand around the windows and doors. We had another one this week but not nearly as bad and long lasting. There are lots of green plants and Lily even found a tulip that popped up in our back yard. She was very excited about it. The trees have all started to bloom and we have some "grass" growing in our front yard that looks sort of like clover. We are watering it to see how long we can make it last. :) We are going to try to plant some grass (grass native to this area) merely to see if we can hold the dirt down and get the fire ants from colonizing in our yard.

We are excited to announce some progress in potty training for James. He can go potty on the toilet but still has accidents frequently. He is quite proud of himself when he does go potty on the toilet but doesn't have "time" to stop his play when needed leading to frequent accidents. We make him stop periodically which is a little painful for him at first but we are getting there happy to say.

Lily and James are growing so fast and their conversations are so funny at times. Lily was having a difficult time last night with "life" in general and complained she couldn't do something because she was too little. James looked over at her with big, concerned eyes and said "Aww, you're little." as if to affirm her in her time of trouble. You just had to be there - it was hilarious. James is talking up a storm and shows everyone - I mean everyone including total strangers at the grocery store - his trains if they are with him.