Wordless Wednesday

Okay, this negates the “wordless” part…when we first moved here Buggy would stand on her tippy toes and try to see out of this same window…and she was too short to see!

Tap and Jazz!

We were so excited when Miss L announced that this year she is allowing 3 year olds to come to dance class! I thought Peanut would be thrilled, with all her interest in dance last year. She knew the girls routines and cried when she didn’t get a turn up on the stage. So I was surprised when she was a little hesitant at first. I guess it’s only normal since her only “teacher” has been Noni, both in Sunday School and AWANA.

I was really bummed that I had to miss her first day of dance. I had a doctor’s appt. and couldn’t find a time to reschedule it so Noni came and took the girls to their first day for me.

Unfortunately Peanut needed a nap and had to be woken up in time to get to class so she was a little grumpy. But she still looks pretty darn cute in these pictures Noni took!

So little!

Noni said she didn’t want to go on the floor at first, especially since there were other kids crying. She’s a sympathetic crier. If someone else is crying she is going to start too even if she’s not upset.

She did eventually warm up and get out there. And now that we’re on week 4 she runs out onto the floor without a backward glance!

Here she is with two of her friends from church. Cuties.

Miss A (their ballet teacher) came to help Miss L with the first day. Boo was happy to see her!

Three dancing girls!

I can’t wait for the recital! We’re going to have a dancer in almost every dance!

AWANA

The girls were SO excited for their first night of AWANA this year! They all three “stepped up” last year. Well…Peanut was in Cubbies last year, but only because T and I were both doing other jobs there and Noni is the teacher. This year she is an official Cubbie! And a silly one at that!

There’s my sweet girl!

Boo moved up to Sparks! Such a grown up girl! I get to see her slightly more since I am the Sparks secretary. She flew through her start zone and is already passing sections in her new book. It helps a lot that she already has most of the verses memorized thanks to the GT and The Halo Express CD’s. I can’t recommend them enough. LOVE them.

Our grown up Buggy is now in TnT (truth and training) which is the 3rd-6th grade. It’s so fun to watch her running around with the “big” girls! 

The first night is always crazy getting everyone registered, and figuring out where they left off last year, etc. I only managed one blurry picture of Peanut at game time, but you can still see they are having a lot of fun!

T is game leader again which is a perfect fit for him. He does an amazing job and the kids have a blast! For the first night he came up with a game where they put a plunger on their head and their teammate has to throw rings onto the stick part. It was hilarious.

We are looking forward to another wonderful year!

It’s A…GIRL!

Yes we’re four for four! Four beautiful, precious, sweet (most of the time, haha!) girls!

Poor Daddy is WAY outnumbered! But he loves his girls to pieces and he’s happy to have another little princess on the way. He is such a good Daddy of girls! They adore him.

We went to the store to pick out an outfit to let the girls know they were having a sister. We really don’t need any clothes, but he kept finding cute things and insisted we needed to buy them for our new baby girl. I think we got six outfits! Haha :)

We had to get a 20 week belly picture before we left the house that day! It’s so funny how huge I feel compared to how I look. It doesn’t look like much but it feels like a lot of belly! I’ve already been bumping it on things, like when I open a cupboard door, not realizing I need to step back further now!

We are happy to report that baby girl is healthy and looks pretty content in her warm, squishy home. Her heartbeat was 151 and she squirmed her way through the ultrasound.

We headed back to Noni’s to tell the girls the news! Buggy was slightly disappointed since she was the only one who was hoping for a boy, but I think she’s on board now. :) Boo was thrilled!

And this picture perfectly sums up Peanut’s reaction. Smug. The whole time she has adamantly told anyone who would listen, “I’m having a gull (girl).” No questions asked. So she wasn’t surprised at all to hear us confirm what she knew to be true all along. Haha :)

Our girls have such fun and different personalities…I can’t wait to see what the next one is like!

Funny Friday!

Me and Bug…

So true…times by three (soon to be four) piles of the kid’s clothes!

Happy Friday!

Labor Day

We decided to head to the farm for Labor Day! We hadn’t been out since the 4th of July. We got a few things done at home and then headed down on Saturday afternoon.

No idea what Grandpa and Bug are discussing here, but Boo thought it photo worthy and used my phone to take a picture. :)

On Sunday I wasn’t feeling great so I spent most of the morning on the couch. The girls played dress up and gave me a fashion show every few minutes.

Retro.

Vintage gal.

Bride.

I laid down with Peanut for her afternoon nap and we both woke up 2 and half hours later! I felt great after that! I guess I just needed some sleep!

On Monday morning we headed over to Auntie Nae’s house. Their town’s parade is on Labor Day so we decided to join them.

Cousins!

It was 51 degrees so we were all a little chilly! After a summer that was consistently in the 100’s and high 90’s our blood has gotten a little thin!

The start of the parade. Loved Peanut’s little hand over her heart as the “Merican flag!” went by. She loves “Merican” flags and points them out wherever we go.

This parade was a kid’s dream! A whole hour of group after group going by throwing candy! All three girls got half a grocery bag full! It was like backwards trick-or-treating…they came to us instead of us going to them. Haha :)

Boo was CRAZY excited! You’d have thought she’d consumed the entire bag of candy the way she was acting! Every time someone new came by (about every 2 minutes for a whole hour) she would shout “CANDY! THEY’RE COMING AND THEY HAVE CANDY EVERYBODY!” and jump up and down in delight. Consequently she fell asleep on the ride home after expending all that energy! Haha :)

It seemed so funny to me…our town is all about farming and in our town’s parade we have horses and tractors and other various farm equipment. The town where Auntie Nae and family live is a logging community and their parade was full of logging trucks. :)

And after the parade there were logging competitions! So different from where we live! We watched while we ate our lunch.

Their town days are also a lot more involved than ours…they had carnival games and rides and lots of vendors!

Waylon went fishing for a prize.

It was starting to rain so I told the girls they could each pick one game or ride to do. Boo chose balloon darts.

The guy was so nice. It was supposed to be 3 darts for $5 but he let her throw about 10. She missed the first three so he had her stand up on the ledge to get a better angle. She finally popped two balloons and picked a little hedgehog stuffed animal. :)

Bug chose to ring the bell for a prize and chose one of the teal dolphins in the background. 

Peanut surprised me by insisting that she wanted to chose “the fishy ride!”. After all her resistance to the rides at the theme park earlier in the summer I was shocked that she picked this, and when it got going I think she was a little shocked too. Her face had a look of I’m-supposed-to-enjoy-this-but-it’s-going-WAY-too-fast! Lol!

The rain started coming down so we hit the elephant ear stand and then headed home. What a fun day!

Wordless Wednesday

*18 weeks

“First” Day

I completely forgot about first day pictures! It wasn’t until I saw them start rolling in on FB that I realized it, so our “first” day pictures were actually taken on our third day. I’ll chalk it up to pregnancy brain. :P

Kindergarten! With a missing front tooth to boot. :)

Boo first said she wanted to be a Mommy, but then changed it to a dentist. Interesting! She said her favorite verse was Isaiah 9:6, and that her favorite color is blue. Her extra-curricular activities this year will be AWANA, piano lessons with Noni, and two dance classes: hip hop/ballet and tap/jazz. We are also considering softball in the Spring.

This is an outfit she picked during back to school shopping. Noni bought her the shoes. Before school starts each year Noni takes each girl separately for a sleepover and then they spend the day doing something fun together. They love it!

We tried to get a couple poses…I like the flowers in this one but the sun was really bright.

She was being so silly on the porch swing! In this picture it’s hard to see but she is sticking her tongue through the tooth gap.

And then laughed hysterically about it. Haha :)

Buggy is looking so grown up these days! I can’t believe we have a 3rd grader! I remember 3rd grade vividly! This is one of the shirts she picked out during our back to school shopping.

Her favorites this year were Psalm 139:14 and green and pink. Her activities will be the two dance classes, AWANA, guitar lessons, and softball in the Spring.

Bug also said she wanted to be a Mommy at first, but then changed it to artist.

Beautiful girl!

Peanut wanted her picture taken too. She had her Build-A-Bear’s shoes on! Haha :)

Funny girl!

First Day!

Our first day was Monday, August 31st! The local schools started on the 2nd, and our K12 school didn’t officially start until the 9th, but we were ready to get a jump on things!

I knew the extra week and half would come in handy in February when we have a new baby and are wanting to take it easy!

We started off the morning with strawberry-whipped cream-sprinkle waffles! Yum!

Peanut slept in until 9:45 (she does that every now and then) so it was nice to have a quiet start. :)

Buggy, as a returning student, had her lessons posted two weeks before the school’s start day so she was ready to go.

She can do Vocab, Spelling, Writing Skills, Social Studies, and Cursive Writing completely on her own. Math is a day to day thing…some of the lessons she can complete independently and some of them have teacher-led activities that I need to help her with. Literature and Comprehension is almost completely teacher led, using a teacher’s lesson guide. History and Art she could do on her own, but I like to help her, and Science is usually pretty involved so I do that with her too.

Figuring out the new laptop…

She began Cursive Writing this year!

Boo’s lessons weren’t up on the computer until Sept. 9th, the first day of school, so we worked ahead as much as we could using the teacher’s guides. As a Kindergartener she has 6 subjects: Math, Handwriting, Phonics, Language Skills, Literature and Comprehension, and Science which is her only elective. We were able to get a good jump on her lessons before they were actually posted.

I was only thinking how much easier it would be when they were up and was taken by surprise when K had a really hard time focusing while Boo is doing fun, brightly colored, online games! We’re getting it figured out. Pandora’s instrumental worship music and headphones make a world of difference. :)

Once Peanut woke up that first morning she wanted to do schoolwork too! She diligently sat and filled up a whole notebook page with her “writing”! So cute!

Our first week went well but I am definitely having to readjust my expectations. The last couple years we almost always got done by lunch every day. Now, with two students, K’s electives have to be done after lunch because we just don’t have time to squeeze it all in, but we’re still getting done by 2ish every day. We try to get started by 8:30, have a 30 minute break around 10:30, work till 12:00ish, lunch, work from 1-2ish. 

One exciting thing that is going to be happening this school year is that Bug is going to be starting guitar lessons! AND Daddy is going to take them with her! I’m hoping it will be a fun father/daughter thing for them to do together. They start in a couple weeks so we went the other day and they bought their guitars.

We had a celebratory first week this year. My friend B’s daughter started preschool Wednesday so we kept our tradition that we started last year and headed out to lunch and ice cream on the “first day”. It was actually our third day, but the girls didn’t complain! :)

Celebrating the “first” day at the soda fountain!

We’re looking forward to a great year!