Happy New Year!

Okay so I'm a little late, but that is how things go now a days. The girls have been home for 2 months now and we were so blessed to be able to celebrate Jesus' birthday with them and to bring in the New Year! The holidays were insanely busy and I am personally glad they are over. I am happy the kids are back to school this week and we can get back to our boring routine life. All of the kids had a great Christmas and got a lot of presents from Santa, including a new Wii. This has been in a big hit in our house, in fact the entire family is playing on it right now (except me). My mom, grandfather, brother and wife all came up for Christmas. So we had a very full house, but it all worked out well. The kids (except Sivencia) all stayed up until 12:00 on New Years to watch the ball drop.

Falancia is enjoying the first grade and is working on her reading skills. We worked hard on some phonic and sight words over the break. It is funny, because she is picking up some of our slang. She keeps saying "Oh man", when she is playing on the Wii.


Jiovenda is coming out of her shell and seems to have a smile on her face a lot (except when being disciplined). She loves to give hugs and sit on her daddy's lap. Her English is improving and she is growing more confident with it daily (even if we don't always understand her).


Sivencia is also greatly improving her English. Her favorite question is "What is this?", but she always said in Creole. In the past few weeks she now says it in English, along with a few other phrases. We are working on getting her to use her "words", instead of just pointing or asking for things with one word.


Brison loves being the big brother, especially to Sivencia. Him and Falancia are getting along a lot better lately, but still have their spats. He is doing great in 2nd grade and we are very proud of him with his piano playing.


Walker loves having more kids to play with. He treats the girls like his brother though and is constantly tackling them and knocking them down. Walker's new thing is chess. He has learned to play through a "no stress chess" game we have, where you use cards to pick the pieces you are to move. He is very good and it is a little scary to play him. He turned 5 on 12/26.


The latest thing at the Shira household is our skating rink Brian and his brother put in our backyard over Thanksgiving. It finally froze over Christmas break and the kids have had a blast skating on it. They all got skates for Christmas and they have loved being on it. They are all pretty good at it for beginners. Falancia scares me most of all, because she has no fear. She skates all out and just falls down. Emergency room here we come... The neighborhood kids have also enjoyed skating on it and we love having everyone over to skate.


Well that is it, hope you all had a Happy New Year! Hope to write again soon, but you know how that goes. If you have specific questions, please ask, it helps with ideas to write about.
God Bless!


Love,
Allison


PS Tried to upload some pictures, but am having problems with my computer. I will try again later.