2 Years of 5kids and being a family of 7

This time of year while most people are celebrating a festivity that the O'Hara household abstains from for so many reasons, we do take the opportunity to celebrate the creation of the O'Hara family consisting of 5 kids. We have turned this into our family birthday celebration and this year we stayed home and had fun.

Though we are fighting colds and sickness in our family, Saturday night we spent doing special family fun. Everything from doing charades, which I would like to say, Kimberly at 6 did the best in acting and guessing them, in my opinion that is :)


Tracey also had a couple of special treats for us. She had made some fun "eyeballs" out of tapioca, gummy lifesavers and jelly beans, as well as making doughnut hole eyeballs covered in white chocolate with a chocolate chip for the pupil and some fun drizzly red gel for the veins. We watched some tv and basically enjoyed hanging out as a family.




It is hard to believe that we have been home for 2 years with Alyona and Tanya. They truly are O'Hara kids. Though they have a lot more to learn due to the fact that they only really have 2 years of loving education under their belts, they are doing incredibly well. Tanya has, as far as I can tell, forgotten her Russian and completely embraces English as her language. If you were to run into her on the street, you would not know that she is not from America. Meanwhile, Alyona still has her Russian accent, though she is not actively using her Russian, she does chat in it every so often to her friends, though it often has a splattering of English mixed in with it. My desire is that they continue to expand their English grammar skills, though they both allow many words to go past them in conversation without having any idea what they mean.

Alyona is continuing to work on her "driving" with dad and I think that is adding to my gray hair forming more obvious patches. Sometimes she does incredibly well, but there are many times I have to tell her not to let her parents bad habits influence what she does behind the wheel. Kids get confidence before they get skills behind the wheel and that is a scary place to be. Alyona also gets to try out for Basketball next Monday. This was an eye opener for her that she actually had to try out and "prove" that she was good enough to play. From her perspective it has always been that if you want to play you get to play. My understanding, though it only comes from trying to interpret what my daughter has told me, is that she will try out for the "freshman" team and depending on how well her tryouts go, she may be "bumped" up into the Junior Varsity team. It will be a good experience for her no matter what happens. She is also taking voice lessons that we have had to shift the time on due to the fact that Basketball practice will be 5 nights a week.

Kimberly and Tanya have been taking swimming lessons and Alexis will start Basketball next week also. She is so looking forward to that. I also filled the old hot tub two weeks ago, knowing there is a leak in it somewhere, only to find out the electrical plug was shot. I had to order a spendy little GFI plug for the power cord and got it this week, so the tub heated up and the kids were able to enjoy it all weekend. Kind of like an old toy you put away for a while. When you bring it back out, it is like brand new. So, til I get time to figure out where the leak is, I simply fill it with water every few days to keep it topped off for them. Declan even got to enjoy it for a bit yesterday. We wrapped up his cast in plastic wrap and he and Kimberly enjoyed it for a while.

Kimberly made apple dip for us all to enjoy!!