:(

My hard drive died.  I'm bummed.  All of our pictures were backed up except for the last two or three months.  I'm going to take it to the Apple Store tomorrow and hope they can salvage something for us.  Cross your fingers.  That's what I get for slacking on the blog, hey?  Thank goodness I did a post for Apple's birthday or those pictures would be gone.  I guess when you are using a 6 year old computer, you should back up things a little more often.  I haven't taken that many pictures lately, but I have one picture in my head particularly that I am really sad is lost.  It's one of the girls looking at the Christmas lights right after I set up the tree and Mango has the most excited look on her face.  I wish I could draw. 

Life is just going fine otherwise.  I think Mango may have finally topped 20 pounds.  She's really in to shoes and loves to play with balls.  She also likes to stand on things and loves to find things to sit on as well. Apple is starting to read.  She has gotten much better at talking well since she started Kindergarten.  She has started writing stories and sounding out the words and doing pretty good.  Kinder teachers are amazing.  Strawberry is learning decimals.  I have sort of a hard time helping her with her math homework because I don't know how to explain things to someone who doesn't already know them.  I forget that she doesn't know things and so the way I know how to do them doesn't make sense to her.  Like metric conversions, you just move the decimal.  Easy.  Except she is just now learning about decimals so it isn't so easy for her.  I seriously think it will be easier to help her with Algebra and Calculus.  She's reading the BFG now.  She looooves it.  It's nice to know all the reading I did as kid paid off because I can help her pick books that are awesome reads.  I keep trying to convince her to read A Wrinkle in Time, one of my all time favorites that is in her level, but she is a little intimidated by it.  Anyways, I'm rambling.

Luke is doing great.  He's got his orders for Maryland and he is supposed to be checking in this June so we've got lots of getting ready to do.  School doesn't get out until pretty well into June here; it was the 17th last year.  I'm not sure what we'll do.  The kids are really excited.  Apple keeps talking about how we are going to build snowmen as soon as we get there.  I'm really hoping there is no snow there in June, but who knows.

So that's us lately.  Not too exciting.  But we're happy.