First Day of School

Here she is - my big Kindergartner, Hope. Yesterday was the first day of school, and Hope had been excited all summer long to be starting Kindergarten. For the last week she has been counting down days, we picked out her outfits for the week, and then it finally came. She was a little reserved when I dropped her off, but with a little coaxing (and no tears) she went her way. Day two went just as smoothly today and I think this is a good way to start the school year. Hope is attending Kennedy Elementary, the very same school her daddy went to, so that's pretty exciting for her too. Her sweet teacher even sent home a little crafty poem for the parents on the first day that might have needed their own comfort too (something going along with a bag of tea). Now if I can just get used to getting my own self to bed at a reasonable time so I can be ready for morning, we really will have a good year.

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to my wonderful husband, Andrew. I'm so glad to have been blessed to raise three beautiful daughters with a sweet and intelligent man. Here's the breakfast I made for Andrew, next to his favorite, root beer.  The tie pic in his hashbrowns is a free printable from Shindig Parties.   

 I saw this clever idea online at Oopsey Daisy Blog to make "pop" wrappers for the soda-loving daddies. She had a printable Coke wrapper that was inspiring, but Andrew is more of a root beer fan so I decided to do my own version. 

 The Nutrition Facts I adopted from Oopsey Daisy, she did them so well. 

If you started your family in 2006 (the A&W logo says "since 1919", so we changed ours to since 2006), you're welcome to use this file. We used the mini cans (we found ours at Target). You can download it here. 

Preschool Graduate

Hope has officially graduated from Preschool.  We had her in a two-day a week program that she has really come to enjoy. It has helped her get used to the classroom routine and ready for Kindergarten. She'll be a young Kindergartener (next year they're bumping the birthday cutoff earlier), but we feel that she is ready. I don't know who is more excited, Hope or myself.  She's pretty excited that she'll get to attend the same Elementary School that her daddy went to. 

I'm not super into the ceremony of the whole thing, but her class performed a couple of cute songs which is always fun.

 

Here's Hope and her teacher.

I put together a goldfish snack, and using the patriotic ones that are in stores now, went with the One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish idea. Here's how they came out.

 I also signed up to bring a dessert and decided to try cupcakes in Ice Cream Cones for the first time. The novelty of it was pretty cool for the kids, but as usually they liked the frosting best. Note: very simple to try, you just put the batter straight in the cones and put the cones in a muffin tin so they have something to stand up in when you put them in the oven. The super hard part is the transportation because they kept falling over in the tin in the car (and yes, I was driving carefully).   

Happy Easter

The girls were pretty spoiled this year with three Easter egg hunts. Fortunately, the candy somehow disappeared and we managed to make it through without too many sugar crashes. Here are some pics from our Easter events. Here we are Egg dying with cousin, Giselle. I found a couple of great tips online, first, to use puppy pads (for potty training puppies) for easy cleanup for spills. It worked great, we laid it across our dying surface and it soaked up the spills right away. Second, to use a muffin tin for drying eggs. We still ended up putting some in the carton because each girl had her own segmented carton, but it just gets soggy with the dye that drains off of it.  Maybe next year we'll have a muffin tin for each girl to put her eggs in.  I liked the idea, because it'll drain off into the tin without getting the carton soggy.

 Serious hunting...

 Face full of anticipation

 I found an egg...in your basket

"Let me know when you find them all, I'll be on the slide" - Grace

 I can't even remember what bossy comment she was saying, and frankly I don't know if I even heard her over my laughter at her expression. The hands-on-hips stance is getting more frequent around here.

Grace's First Shiner

Exactly two days after her second birthday, and happy birthday pictures, Grace fell on the cement and hit her head. The bump on her forehead, drained down to her eye and in a matter of hours she had a black eye.  Hope commented that evening that Grace's eye "had a rainbow over it." Another day or two later and it just kept looking worse. Here's the t-shirt I made for the occasion and the shiner in all it's glory.

Changes in the Girls' Room

Last month we made some changes in the Girls' room, the most noticeable one was a bunk/loft bed for Hope and the twins. I had been looking at this bed about a year ago, and happened to think about it again and looked on Craigslist at the right time and found an amazing deal that I couldn't pass up. So, here's the Doll House Loft bed. The twins sleep on the bottom, and Hope loves her Big Girl bed on the top. I love that everyone is excited about their own bed, not that I don't make visits when getting girls settled down. 

Here's Hope peeking through her top bunk window.

Here are all three girls up on Hope's bunk.

And here's the other change I made.  Hope has her own dresser and that's fine for her.  For a while, with the twins clothes, I had three large baskets and I would simply sort their clothes into tops, bottoms, and pajamas. But then I felt like I was looking for things within the baskets a lot, or I'd find one top from a set, but not the coordinating top for her sister, which is frustrating when you know you have it.  So, thanks to Janine (another twin mom friend of mine) who said she hung all her twin's clothes up in sets, I was inspired to do the same. Things are a lot more organized and easy to find coordinating sets. Although, now Joy and Grace think they get to have more input in what they wear and try to pick things out without considering mommy's selling points, such as, how easily can they take off these clothes or will their knees get skinned up at the park in this outfit? Skinned knees have been a more frequent occurrence lately and create a lot of drama because neither Joy nor Grace wants to wear a band-aid, and they both can't handle seeing the boo-boo and persistently try to pull their clothes down to cover it. If they're wearing a dress, they're pulling it down every time they sit down.  I made the mistake of dressing in Joy in short pajamas one night forgetting about the boo-boo and had to go change her into pants because she was so distressed that she couldn't pull her shorts down to cover the boo-boo on her knee.

Birthday on the Farm

Since Joy and Grace were babies, we've been taking them to Ardenwood Historic Farm, minutes from our house. Periodically they have special Toddler Time sessions where the little ones hear a story about a farm animal, grind corn, and feed farm animals. Both girls love feeding the animals

and seeing all the different farm animals. It was only fitting that we should celebrate their birthday on the farm.

We met at the gazebo, and I made a no-sew banner (that matched the invite) for decoration with a simple, country feel.

We started off singing "Old McDonald Had a Farm" with some farm animal puppets and read/sang the story of "The Farmer and the Dell" for the kids.

Then we joined the Toddler Time story and saw the various animals on the farm - I think they mentioned they had 13 lambs this springtime! We made our way round to the chickens and fed them and the goats freshly ground corn, grown on the farm.

We made our way back to the gazebo and enjoyed lunches packed in felt farms (Thank you, Target $1 section - what a find!). I kept the lunches simple with Uncrustables PB&J sandwhiches, carrot sticks, apple slices, and a juice box. When everyone was done with their lunch, we filled their barns with a small farm board book, a farm animal that made a sound (horse said neigh, etc), and organic popping corn grown on the farm. We also sent everyone home with a Farm foam sticker kit.

After lunch, the kids enjoyed a little bubble time and playing in the grass. Then we sang and enjoyed birthday cake. I saw this idea in a party book for this darling graham cracker barn and silo, and knew immediately that I wanted to top the cake with that. We used our Little People farm animals to complete the farm scene on the top of the cake.

This was such a gorgeous day, we couldn't pass up this lovely field of yellow flowers.

I owe a huge THANK YOU to Albena for taking these beautiful pictures. I also owe a big THANK YOU to my mom, who made these darling dresses for Joy and Grace.

It's hard to believe these sweet little girls are two, but I truly feel blessed to have the privilege to be their mother. It's been a crazy, but enjoyable ride so far and I look forward to the fun times ahead!

"When Do I Get Scriptures"

Hope is officially no longer a Sunbeam. Last year she sort of adopted herself into the CTR class at church with the other kids that were turning five and older that year because she wanted to be with her BFF, Sara. No, she didn't actually use the term, BFF, but Hope loves and looks up to Sara. As I went to sit with Hope for the first few minutes of Opening Exercises last Sunday, I saw that Dawna has a set of scriptures that she was beaming about. She gladly tells about her scriptures, and the case she was given, as well as the pencil that goes in the case. So sweet. So, fast forward a couple nights later...Hope has been fevered on and off for a couple days and it makes for not entirely peaceful slumbers (big surprise in our house, I know). So, I hear her get up, thinking she needs to go to the bathroom, and instead when I get to her door, she's standing in the doorway asking about something. "Do you need to go to the bathroom?" No. "Do you want a drink of water?" No. So, I listen again to what's she's mumbling, and I think she must be sleeping still, or dreaming, or have just been dreaming, because she says, "when do I get scriptures?" I can't deny that, so I say tomorrow. I pat her back to sleep, and start on this project that I've been wanting to do for awhile and just been putting off. You know I'm always looking for an excuse to make something cute (and avoid laundry), so, I stumbled upon this scripture cover tutorial a while ago, and finally completed it tonight. I didn't add the tie, because I don't think Hope needs to tie and untie her scriptures, but I'm pleased with how they came out. She's actually been excited to read her scriptures too, so I'm getting called out on another shortcoming. Well, that's what January is for, right? Recommitting to all those things you've been meaning to get better at.