The family is fine.  A few of them have a minor cold, but nothing dramatic.  Michael just put out new pictures of everyone yesterday so you might want to check it out.  Mackenzie can now sit up all by herself.  She's working on crawling too. We've fed her some solid food and she's getting better at eating it.  The first few times we tried, she didn't know what it was and kept spitting it back out, but now she just swallows it and asks for more.  She is also very clingy and picky when it comes to who holds her.  If she knows who you are, she'll be okay with you holding her, but if she's not seen you before or in a long while, she'll start crying.  When she's sitting down and you walk by her, she'll stretch her hands out wanting you to pick her up.  If you walk up to her and stand right by her, she'll actually hold onto your pants and try to lift herself up to you.  She has this really demanding cry and I mean demanding.  It really sound like, "I want to be picked up and you better pick me up NOW!!"

Zachary.  He just started school two weeks ago and so far, it's been okay.  I think it was the third day of school, but I get this phone call from the teacher saying that hit ran into another Zachary and got a black eye from it.  It was very funny because I left my cell phone at home and did not get the voicemail until after Michael picked him up.  So when I got the voicemail, I immediately called Michael asking about him and all Michael said was that Zachary said he ran into Zachary.  Since then, we haven't had any more "Zachary" incidents.  He still very impatient and is trying to learn to sit tight at school.  He's slowly getting better at it.  He had an assessment test last Friday and the teacher said that he's far above most of his classmate because he can recognize his letter and count all the way to 15.  The one thing that he's still not good at his writing the alphabets and his name.  Our fault for not asking him to do so when he was younger.

Nicholas.  He's starting to get use to the third grade.  His homework pattern is different and I hate it.  He has homework every night and has to turn it in the next day.  Although we carpool to work, we normally don't get home until 6:30 or so at the earliest.  Because we carpool, we don't get to work until 9 AM so we don't get off until 5:30 most of the time.  By the time I get home, make dinner, the boys eat dinner, and they do their homework, it's time for bed.  It sucks!!!  Michael and I were just talking about imagining life if I was still working up in Rocklin where I didn't get home until 7:30 or 8 PM.  Nicholas just has so much homework now.  I swear, they think all families have one parent that doesn't work so that parent has plenty of time to work with the kid on homework.  GRRRRRR....