Field Trip

My kindergartner is on her first field trip today!!! She is beyond excited to ride a school bus for the first time. They are going to a pumpkin patch. Hay ride, corn maze and pick your own pumpkin. I wish I was there to see her excited giggles, wiggly little legs and uncontrollable smile. These are her school pictures!!! I wish I had mine to show you the similarities. Just imagine adding huge bangs and darker hair and that is what mine looked like. That is NOT her real smile!!! The class picture is more accurate. I should have known she was going to be in the front and put her in pants that are a better length. She insists on wearing socks with her shoes. But I think it just makes for cuter memories!!

Spotify

It's like I'm back in the TSC computer lab downloading songs from Napster when I should have been studying!!!!

Some things I like about my kids that I want to remember

A few months ago Philip wanted to do a taste test night. He went to the store and bought an assortment of snacks with different flavors. We lacked blindfolds so we tried wool winter hats, but this picture is about how long they lasted on their heads. It was July!! They both thought it was hilarious to close their mouth and have us put food in it. Now both of them are addicted to doing this and make each other "test" food all the time and occasionally I hear a sentence I dread, "mom, close your eyes and I am going to put something in your mouth" all sing-songy and then pop goes in a curiously warm fruit snack, or a soggy cracker. Gross, but still cute.

This is Ben's toy. The way it came about our family was very lame and dramatic, but it has slowly become one of his favorites right now. (I will spare you the long story of me alone on a trip to UT, stopping at a McDonald's in Primm for lunch, multiple fits about not getting the right toy, food, drink, you name it and a middle aged very annoyed man loudly criticizing me to his partner so everyone could hear his disgust in children and people who shouldn't have them, namely me!!!! Not kidding). But aside all that, what I love is what he has named him, Powerful Dog. I think it might have derived from the movie Up because it looks like the scary dog on there, which was one of the reasons he didn't want it at first. We have some great names for the toys in our house and all are completely their own. Enna, Buster, Princess, Powerful Dog, Ramasaucy and Petty (Philip's personal favorites), back it up guy, gray guy, van-truck, hospital bear..... It goes on. Amelia takes the more creative approach and Ben is a more call-it-as-I-see-it namer. But I live to hear the names of their toys and imaginary creatures.

These are my kids legs, side by side. They fell asleep next to each other today and for some reason I love the contrast of their skin so I had to snap a pic and share how tan she is and how stark white he is. In my family Amelia is considered pale!! So does that make Ben albino??

Here's all their cousins on my side (minus one) to show you what I mean. I also love this pic because he is freaking out, my nephew is just so happy to hug him, my other nephew is trying to calm him down by rubbing his leg, and Amelia is perfectly posing for my sister's pic totally unphased by his drama.

It only took 9 days!!

That's all it took for Amelia to violently shake free of my hand when she approached her classroom. Obviously she didn't want her teacher to see us holding hands. My heart dropped a little. Luckily she had no problem giving me a big hug and kiss and yelling out "I love you" so I will just chalk it up to the fact that she doesn't like holding my hand (which she usually doesn't like to hold hands even as a baby, she was always breaking free to do it by herself) and not that she has already out grown me!!!! This is a pic of picking her up after her first day of school. Her face looks like this every day after school. Grinning ear to ear.

My first day of school all over again

Amelia went to Kindergarten today!!! She could hardly get to sleep last night and was up at 6:30 this morning because she didn't want to be late. I was starting to think she was abnormal because she has been so excited (for nearly a year now) with no sign of nervousness about school at all. Just sheer excitement. I finally got to see a little glimmer of normal first-day-of-school-nerves when she told me that she couldn't finish her bowl of cereal!!!! That's a pretty big deal for her. She's usually a 2 bowl girl and I have to cut her off. But she put on a good front and didn't admit to anything less than total excitement. I like this series of pictures because it shows her from the leaving our house to where we leaver her at school.


This is her making her way to her classroom. Notice the hand wringing!! It slowly progressed to nail biting!! But she still is smiling.












This is outside her classroom.















And this is her classroom. She was one of the first kids there, so she got to pick her seat and she chose the table with no one at it in the front of the class. She was really starting to loose the smile at this point. Luckily she had to wait about 10 minutes or so until the teacher started and the parents were asked to stay the first 10 minutes after that to go over what to expect. I think this really helped because by the time we were ready to leave, she looked bored and ready to do something. I had given her a kiss and said my goodbye's when she first sat down, so I made Philip go up to give her a hug and kiss goodbye (so I didn't break down crying in front of everyone) and she waved and blew me a kiss and was smiling and that was it. Just like that we got down graded from the most important people in her life to sharing it with someone else now!!! I held it together just fine. I think Philip was more emotional about it than me!!! Now I just wait to go back.


Guess what the first thing Ben did when we got home???? Get Amelia's Jessie doll, a toy he is typically not allowed to play with. It cracked me up how he is wasting no time taking advantage of free reign of the house.

Guess Who......

..........Just turned 5!!!!

And to celebrate, we had an entire weekend of festivities for her. She has been wanting a Tangled birthday since she saw the movie almost a year ago!!! I am always happy to oblige especially when it's a theme I can sew and bake for. To kick it off, we went to the zoo and she got to feed the giraffe. She was so excited and did a great job not dropping the lettuce or jumping back, which is surprising since she is terrified of cats and chihuahuas. It's really hard not to just reach out and pet the giraffe, but I managed. Our entire day was choreographed around the Tangled Soundtrack: in the car, at home, and spontaneously a capella if there were no electronic devices. Amelia is very robust in her singing. After being henpecked all week about when she gets to open her presents, we decided to let her open one present Saturday and Sunday. She basically knew and saw almost all of them, so it wasn't too big of a deal. She was really excited to get a Rapunzel doll from Ben and was a great sport about acting surprised when she opened it, since she had very specific instructions for Ben as to which doll he should get her and how to wrap it up. He was very accommodating (of course). The doll accompanied us on all our activities!!















Next, she got to be recognized at her church class on Sunday. This entails getting to stand up in front of everyone, wear a special birthday hat, have them read special things about her, give her a big birthday sticker, sing to her and give her some candy. Seriously, she thought she was a superstar. She could not stop grinning all day. I didn't see it, but I heard about it and it was pretty cute how excited she was. You can see the sticker in one of the pictures. It stayed on the entire day!! Then she requested that as a family we watch Tangled with previously mentioned doll which she used to reenact all the parts of the movie!!! She loved it.

Since today was her official birthday, we did cake and all that amidst running around getting last minute forms for school (can I just say sending a child to school who requires medicine is a quite a chore and with all her food allergies it is terrifying. You have to totally trust that they will protect her and that they understand how severe it is while also not making too much of a deal so she is not considered "fragile" and left out of everything......hmpf, it's exhausting mentally). Amelia helped me decorate the flowers on her tower cake. She also requested that we eat hazelnut soup, which if you don't know, is Rapunzel's favorite thing and her mother makes it for her on her birthday. Since Amelia is allergic to nuts, we used chicken noodle!!! She knew I made her a Rapunzel costume because she had to have it fitted on her multiple times, but I did all the details while she was asleep, so the final product was a little bit of a surprise. She wanted to wear the dress while she ate her hazelnut soup!!! It was a great day and a great end to our summer.
A few fun things about her:
She is not shy of the camera and hams it up, poses and all.
She loves being fancy and all things girly, pink and sparkly. Think real life Fancy Nancy on our hands!!!
She loves being a "mommy" to dolls, animals and Ben
She may have a bigger sweet tooth than me!!!
I love that she believes I can make or fix anything.
Although she is the first to fight and torture Ben, she is the first to stand up and protect him when we go anywhere.
She has tons of energy and loves learning and life.
She said 0n her birthday questionnaire that she wants to be a mommy when she grows up and her favorite holiday is her birthday. I couldn't agree more!!!
She is so excited to start Kindergarten tomorrow she can hardly sit still. She got to meet her teacher today and see her classroom and she is ready to go to school, without us, she reminded me!! Good, then no one has to see me cry as I watch her grow up right before my eyes.
I love this little girl and will miss her all morning while she's gone (or at least for the first week or so until I realize how easy it is to just have 1 child at home again:)

Green girl

Ben is terrible at remembering names. He can never tell us who he has been playing with. Today he was naming off (in a prayer) who he was glad he played with..."T.J, and green girl". He was referring to a little girl wearing a green dress. It made me stifle quite a laugh!!