Draw near with your lips

We've been having some rough homeschooling days lately (rough as in "let's take three hours to do a page of simple math problems" rough), so we're trying some new methods to promote some personal responsibility (or motivation? or something) and...we'll see how things go tomorrow. 

Phoebe has also been suffering a bit of a sleep regression recently, which is to say that we're all completely miserable over here because even her best sleeping isn't fabulous. But she's just about finished cutting her seventh tooth and then perhaps she will simmer down a bit.

Then again, perhaps not.

We scored a baby swing on the Buy Nothing group, which Phoebe was excited about for exactly one day before she realized that now that we have a baby swing she doesn't get to perch on the big kid swings anymore, so she screams and fusses about being put in the swing until I lecture her about how she's just a baby and remind her that if she would just get in the swing she would have fun.

Here she is being pushed by Zoë:

I love their mouths hanging open with glee—Phoebe with her full front teeth and Zoë without any front teeth at all!

For some reason Phoebe prefers to swing with her arms down at her sides rather than hanging onto the seat or the chain lately. I'm not sure why—is it to test her balance?

My mom sent us a game for Valentine's Day, which we played for FHE on Monday evening. It worked out rather well because Rachel gave a lesson on John 4:24—that we should worship in spirit and in truth—and one of the additional scriptures that we spoke about was Isaiah 29:13—about how sometimes people draw near to the Lord with their lips but keep their hearts far from him (and we actually also ended up reading Mark 7 during our family scripture study afterwards, in which Jesus paraphrases Isaiah 29:13). 

It worked out fairly well for us (in addition to being just fun) because the game was "Pin the Kiss on the Frog," so we were all running around, trying to pin lips to things. 

Alex taking his turn

After a few false starts, with kids complaining, "I can still see! I can still see!" and me losing my temper and telling them all that games are only fun if you follow the rules and if they can still see they should just close their eyes so the rest of us can have fun, we...all had fun.

Zoë taking her turn

As we went up in age, we increased the difficulty of the game as well by spinning the participants more and leaving them far, far away from the frog they were trying to find.

I don't think I've played pin the tail on anything since I was a child and I've got to admit—it was rather disorienting to be in absolute darkness (even in our own home).

Miriam felt her away across the carpet to avoid hitting anything, though I think she did hit the couch

Here's Rachel getting dizzy

Watching people make their way around the room blindfolded seemed to be half the fun for this trio of sillies:

To shrieks of delight, Andrew kissed the poster when he first arrived at it. He ended up getting his lips very close to the proper spot, second only to Miriam.

My lips ended up about at the frog's forehead, which honestly is probably where I would probably kiss a frog, should I ever be required to.

Rachel wondered whether frogs lick their eyeballs. Geckos, it seems, definitely do. I haven't come across anything saying that frogs do. But evidently when they swallow they seem to blink only because they are stuffing their eyeballs down their throat to help them swallow their food. So there's that.