This has been a crazy week!

Not as crazy as last week but still! Last week was Christmas, of course. Two days after that was Natalie's birthday. The week ended with the old year ending and a new one starting. Natalie turned six this year and is very much into My Little Pony. It started long before now with me finding a few ponies while we were still in Beaver Dam. I had also gotten one from my older sister to give to Natalie. Just before we left for Korea, I had found a few more. If I remember right, I left them all here though because I had enough to carry to Korea with us. They were put into the locker though and left there until we returned to the US. This was pretty much the extent of her collection until I stumbled on a whole bunch of them at a garage sale last summer (almost didn't see them too!). That added quite a few to her collection. Before her birthday, she had somewhere around 20 ponies. Between Christmas and her birthday, she managed to get about 15 more (give or take a few). I happened to find an ad on Craig's list with quite a few ponies including a rather large one. My one older sister bought her a couple in the store. I bought her a couple more from the store and found two for her on eBay. Well, I found a lot more than that but I only got two. She loves them all and plays with them constantly. So does her sister only her idea of playing with them is to steal them, chew on them, and bang them on the table. It's all in good fun though.

Natalie also enjoys looking them up online and finding out what their names are. Of course, she wants more, especially the ponies that are currently on the My Little Pony show she enjoys watching. I don't find them the most attractive though and would rather get ponies for her off of eBay. I think they have gotten considerably smaller than they used to be and not as well, pretty. Their eyes are one color and there is absolutely no imagination really as far as their design at least not compared to the ones that used to be made in the past. Hasbro really has lacked in imagination as far as ponies go this current generation which I find kind of sad. The ponies all pretty much look the same. Which is too bad because when I was growing up, there were all kinds of different ponies and all kinds of styles and designs. There were ponies with full body cutie marks (if you don't know what a cutie mark is, it is the picture that is on the flank of the pony). There were ponies with fuzzy bodies, with jewels for eyes (okay, I think those are kind of creepy like Total Eclipse of the Heart kind of creepy), ponies that were scented, etc. Now, most ponies you find in stores are just slightly larger and with a little more hair than the ones you can find in your child's happy meal. And for the amount of money that is charged for these little ponies, I can find some really pretty ones on eBay. And I have.

Fortunately, she loves whatever ponies she gets and plays with them all day long. I think I could get rid of pretty much the rest of her toys so long as I leave her ponies. And that I can understand as I remember my younger sister and I playing with ponies all day long back when we were kids. Do not ask me why ponies are so much fun to play with when they are more limited than Barbies are as far as dressing them and stuff but they are and I still wish I had my old collection of ponies, especially since some of them would fetch a pretty penny now! Of course, I wouldn't sell them. lol

So the girls got all their new toys and things Christmas Day and really, we didn't do much else. I didn't plan to do a Christmas dinner because as far as I was concerned, Thanksgiving was enough! Plus, we were pretty much broke since Christmas was right before payday. Two days later, we had Natalie's birthday and Natalie and her dad went out to Target and to the local party store. They picked up some things at both places and Natalie got a very large My Little Pony (big enough to be a pillow). While they were gone, I baked her cake (which, like last year, failed to come out looking decent. I think the problem is is that my pans are not quite large enough and there's a tilt in the oven or something so the cake spills a little over the top which means it sticks to the pan at the top and then fails to come out cleanly. But, it's a tasty cake and along with my cream cheese frosting recipe, tasted really good. But before we could eat cake, we needed to have dinner. We had talked about going out to eat but didn't quite get that far so we ordered pizza for dinner. Finished that, lit up the candles, had the cake, and opened the presents.

Wednesday, we got a break since nothing was planned but Thursday Natalie's friend came over and they got to play. Friday was a New Year's thing at the local children's museum and so we went there and got a year long membership. Both the girls got to run around and play and Natalie even had a chance to climb on the climbing wall. Saturday night was New Year's Eve and she got to have her friend from next door spend the night. My town also does fireworks which she still gets very excited about and so both girls were up at midnight watching the fireworks both on TV and outside.

We got a couple of days of rest before this week really got going. A friend of mine asked if I could babysit her two kids: a boy who is almost four and a girl not quite a month younger than Isabelle. She's not able to pay much but it's extra money. It's also chaotic having them over. The little girl plays with Isabelle and they're both pretty quiet. The boy, however, is very rambunctious and active. He cannot sit down and because he can't sit down, my older daughter starts getting very hyped up. This is definitely one of those cases where the place we live in is a huge problem. I can't send them outside because there is really nowhere for them to play and nowhere for me to really watch them either. So they run around the apartment, climb on things, jump off of furniture, and scrap like a couple of siblings. It definitely gets chaotic. On the other hand, it has helped me get the two girls on a better schedule. Now, they're getting lunch earlier in the day and Isabelle is taking regular naps at a fairly consistent time. Still need to work on breakfast but that gets tricky when I'm not able to feed all four kids since we're pretty limited on food. Still, they're getting something to eat in the morning and they get fed an early enough lunch now that there's not going too long before getting a full meal. And they do eat before then, just things like fruit, bagels, basically anything they can carry around and eat. I won't be getting them tomorrow or any other Friday. That day I set aside for ME to get a break from children and to do things that NEED to get done (like the eight loads of laundry I'm planning to do tomorrow). Next week they'll be here four days. I'm sure as time goes on, it will get easier to get things figured out. I think the biggest challenge though is figuring out how I'm going to be able to do ANY kind of homeschooling with Natalie. Not that we have been doing all that much but watching two other kids is definitely not going to make that any easier.