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Mom and Dad said that as soon as I was able to ride my tricycle well enough I’d get a big girl bike. See, they got this tricycle when I was 2 years old and couldn’t reach the pedals. My tricycle may have been pretty and red, but it was hard to ride. Even after I figured it out, it wasn’t very fast.

My tricycle days are over! I’m cruising in style now on my pink princess big girl bike. It was just different enough to pedaling the tricycle that it took me a little while to figure it out, but after a day and a half, I’ve mastered it. My dad tied his remote controlled car to the front of it to help me go up hills. I don’t even need that anymore!

What’s next? I still need to figure out how to stop. I hear that if I pedal backwards it will put on the brakes and stop, but hey, one thing at a time. For now, I just turn off the sidewalk into the grass, and that does the job. Also, Dad has just been running after me (sometimes with Heidi in a stroller). Pretty soon, we can all go on a bike ride together!

Below is a picture of a bug in our microscope. Tru and I got a microscope for Christmas. We’ve been using it to explore the miniature world around us. This weekend, we’ve been looking at all of the bugs we could find. The picture below was taken from our flip video camcorder.

As an advertising gimic, they are giving away free 3d glasses just about everywhere (I picked mine up at Kroger). They are for a super bowl commercial preview of the Aliens vs. Monsters animated movie. If you are like me and too impatient to wait for the super bowl commercial, you want to use them now. They are not the old school blue and red glasses. Instead, they are “ColorCode 3-D” glasses. You can click on the link below for a gallery of cool stuff to look at while you are waiting for the super bowl.

http://gallery.mac.com/csvendb

Heidi turned 8 months old today! It’s hard to believe that she’s getting so old. She’s just beginning to show some interest in crawling, and she’s becoming much more personable and interactive. A couple of days ago, I was using my computer with Heidi standing in my lap. I was looking around her at the computer screen. (Shameful, I know.) She leaned her whole body over to position her face between mine and the screen, forcing me to may eye contact with her! It was the sweetest, cutest thing she’s done yet. She’s also much more interested in her toys and in interacting with Tru. Tru loves to entertain her little sister. She sings and claps with Heidi and shares her toys with her, too. Heidi loves watching Tru play!

Here are some videos that we’ve taken recently. We have a tiny little video camera called a Flip that Tru loves to play with. She took some of these videos herself using the Flip! We have one that Tru took of Heidi walking down the hallway (at not even 8 months old!), a video of Tru and Heidi watching home movies from when Tru was about 18 months old, a video of Tru showing off her GeoTrax train set, and a video of Tru’s 4th birthday party. Enjoy!

Heidi Kinda Walks

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Tru and Heidi Watch Homemovies

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Tru Shows Off Train

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Tru’s 4th Birthday

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[ download high quality movie ]

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We purchased a “Thomas Big Loader” for Tru. I, Michael, remember having one of these growing up and thought it would be lots of fun again.

Watch the video and you won’t even need one of your own to have all the fun!

Thomas Big Loader in action

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We are thinking about getting an electric train for starting a Christmas tradition. We’d start with just the train. Each year, we’d go out and get a village and a street light or something. Here are some of the things available at Michael’s in case anyone else thinks it is neat and might want to do the same thing. In case you are, the train itself is at HobbyTownUSA for $89 and the little houses and such are at Michaels arts and crafts store.