I think Katie did a good job on that self portrait!

     

Grace is going to sign for a Christmas music performance at their church. She and Katie showed me the routine. I'm not good enough at sign to know if they did it well. Looked neat though.

When they want paper shredded they give it to the hamsters. This guy is the star paper shredder.

     

I think this is a picture of my sister deciding to give her camera a workout. She took about half of the pictures of my Georgia visit in this set. Thanks Tonia!

Katie wanted me to read this book to her, so I did. It features the "push them and pray" method of learning how to ride a bike. Gladwyn told me about a better method when I was teaching Jayme. What you do is lower the seat so that the kid can push himself along while sitting. Then you walk around the block with him on the bike. After a while he gets to the point where he is coasting between push offs. Then they naturally start wanting to pedal, and before long you are running to keep up. If they learn to put a foot down before they learn balance, they don't fall much at all. It worked out great for Jayme and I!

   

  

  

  

I made my favorite eggplant recipe for them for dinner. In this case the ingredients were a huge eggplant, a couple of onions, a couple of potatoes, three beets, a jar of tomato sauce, some garlic, soy sauce, and olive oil. Basically you chop everything down to cubes that are convenient to fork into the mouth, throw it all in a microwave safe bowl, and cook the bejesus out of it. One of the things the cooking does is drive off a lot of the water from the tomatoes. It's done when the eggplant is mushy and everything else is tender. Stirring it at this point makes the eggplant kind of a thick gravy for the meaty vegetables. When I cook it at home I like to put the potatoes and beets on top of everything else so they kind of get a chewy crusty quality instead of the mushy boiled quality they get when submerged in liquids while cooking.