happy pi day...

 

 I'm a math nerd at heart and love an excuse to eat pie!

PS.  This pie was brought to you by this and this.  =)

the gingerbread man...

A beloved member of the kindergarten class is the Gingerbread Man.  He makes appearances at the beginning of the year to help teach the kids their shapes, and then periodically throughout the first half of the school year to read his book and play shape games with them.  Unfortunately, in December, the Gingerbread Man ran away!  A cry for help went out the the families and friends and relatives of the kindergarteners to help look for the Gingerbread Man, and then write letters to the class telling them where they saw them.  Then in January, when the class studied different continents, they were so surprised to find out from the letters that the Gingerbread Man was traveling the globe and had been seen in Africa, Europe, North America, and South America!  At the end of the month, the Gingerbread Man returned to the classroom excited to tell the class about his adventures.  But being that he had so much fun traveling, he did not want to stay in the classroom anymore.  So he started traveling to each kindergarteners home, and they had to help keep track of his adventures by writing about them in a big binder that held plenty of paper to write on, all of his world traveling letters, his book, and a nice spot for him to travel to and from school.  The kindergarteners were reminded that the Gingerbread Man was a guest in their homes and they should be polite and treat him as they would any other guest.

G was beyond excited to finally have her turn to take the Gingerbread Man home, and took the responsibility of hosting him very seriously!  She took him along wherever we went, made sure she included him when she played, and introduced him nicely to the hairdresser, our neighbor, and her dogs.

G also set a place for him at the table to eat, and made him a comfortable bed to sleep in!

And here is what she wrote about his adventures at our house:  March 8.  The Gingerbread Man slept in my room.  I played the shape game with my brother and my mom.  I took him to Molly and Kacie's house.  They are dogs.  He went to my haircut with me.

G really likes to write little stories and journal and has been doing some outside work on this at school once a week since October.  G and a couple classmates would head to Mrs. K's room on Friday mornings, and had to write 2 sentences about anything they liked, as well as draw a picture about them.  The one rule was that the teacher would not help spell words for them (something that S and I do all the time for her, and are stopping most of that now! =), they had to sound the words out.  They also learned about simple sentence structure along the way too with spaces between words and periods at the end.  She is finished with that now, and we got a big book home with her page from each week.  It was so neat to see the progress that she made throughout the months she did that!  After seeing her journal from school and how she loved this Gingerbread Man project, we will definitely be doing more of this with her at home!

a gift for my new neice or nephew...=)

for: brother M and sister-in-law A's baby

pattern:  Lola Owl

fabric:  Panache line by moda (to match baby's room and quilt!), ivory corduroy, brown, gold and ivory wool felt

time to do this?:  brought to you by Mrs. L - she offered to take the boys for an afternoon while G was at school which allowed me time to get going on this project (thanks L!!)

can't wait to meet you little one!!!

the children's museum...

...or "fun family and friend field trip" as G dubbed the day.  When we traveled to Edgerton for the wedding last month, G missed a day of school and there happened to be a class trip to the Children's Museum on that day.  G was very excited about the wedding, but pretty bummed out that she had to miss a class trip.  S and I promised her that we would go together as a family when S had his next day off.

 To make it a little more special, we invited 2 of G's best friends to come with, A and cousin G.  A's family has a membership, so they came along with us too, which was a lot of fun.  We had a great time painting faces, listening to a very good storytime, and exploring special exhibits on art and legos, as well as all the great permanent exhibits there.

 I think they had a little bit of fun...=)

a blessed February 2011...

At L & J's wedding reception

February was about all things love and wedding!  My brother L got married to his wife J on February 12.  It was a fabulous wedding and everyone had such a nice time and a lot of fun!  The best part was seeing how relaxed L & J were about everything, how wonderfully the wedding and reception reflected their personalities, and how excited they were to be married to each other.  When S and I got engaged 11.5 years ago, one of my cousins wisely told us to plan as much for the marriage as for the wedding.  We took this great advice to heart and have treasured the gift that God has given us in our marriage.  It is not always easy, but that is why we work at it and rest in God's hands.  And we can see that L & J are going to treasure this gift of marriage as well.    I love L to bits and am so happy he has found someone to love and spend the rest of his life with.  And I couldn't be happier to have J as a sister-in-law as well!  And excuse me for getting a little (more!) mushy, but weddings are also such a great time to reflect on how thankful for and how much I love my husband!  So cheers to L & J, may God bless them and their marriage!  (and we would like a niece or nephew sometime soon, too - the wedding is done so we can start bugging you about kids, right? =)

At Calvin's Fun Fest

G notes:

• Her reading is continuing to improve.  She has brought home sets of phonics books from school and has been flying through them.  She is finally starting to enjoy reading out loud rather than whining and asking us to just read it.
• was SOOOOO excited about Uncle L and Auntie J's wedding.  She loved the dress we found her, and loved seeing everyone else dressed up too - especially Auntie J in her beautiful dress.  And by far her favorite part of the wedding was dancing at the reception.
• when getting ready for the school carnival, G told us "I am going to meet up with O & K tonight at Fun Fest, k?"  Umm....when did she turn 13?

W notes:

• LOVES kids books on CD. We got a number of them for our trip to Edgerton for the wedding and W could turn the pages at the right times and often asks to listen to them at home as well.
• has started waking up in the middle of the night and coming to ask Dadda to sleep with him because he is "lonely!"
• is very into the disney movie Cars.  He asks to watch "Race Cars!" every Sunday night.  I think G went through this phase and we know other kids that have too, but W has got it pretty bad.  He comes up with all sorts of imaginary play with the characters, sings race car songs, pretends to be a race car and zooms through the house, and of course pretends he is Lightning McQueen, G is Sally, and C is Mater.

C notes:

• is starting to sing songs!  His first one was "Holy, Holy, Holy" and you can hardly stand the cuteness when he sings this in his own way.  He can also sing the doxology, almost all of the ABC song, and "Cows" from Philadelphia Chickens (don't own this or know what it is?  if you have kids or know kids go and buy it - Boynton and friends are fabulous!)
• C is starting to be more stubborn with toys.  He is not as easily distracted anymore and if he wants something he intends to get it no matter who is holding it, and the same thing if he has something he won't give it up for anything.  This has led to a lot more fights between him and W... I know they are brothers and brothers fight, but do they really have to?
• has graduated to eating at the table without the tray on his high chair.  He still uses the seat, but it is just butted up against the table now and he eats off the table like everyone else.  He is pretty proud of this, especially how he has figured out how to climb in and out of the high chair and "skootch" it to the table himself too.

G's half birthday...

Birthdays are special days in kindergarten.  The birthday kid passes out a special treat during circle time an of course gets sung to.  They also get to sit in a special old fashioned desk that Mrs B has in the room for a Birthday Desk.  And for all the summer birthdays they celebrate half birthdays so that those kids don't get left out of the fun.  G's birthday is Aug 29, which would put her half birthday on Feb 29...of which there is no such date this year.  G realized this when looking at the calendar and had a small meltdown before I explained to her that we could celebrate her half birthday on Feb 28 and it would still be special.    We were looking at the Valentine clearance at Target earlier in the month, and they had big bags of tiny containers of play dough.  G thought this was great and wanted to use this as her treat, but then was torn because you couldn't eat it and most kids pass out candy or other sweet treats.  Thankfully right next to the play dough bag was a bag of Hershey's kisses - problem solved!  G handed out a small tub of play dough and 1 Hershey's kiss to each kid (and gave big envelopes of kisses to the teachers =).

G was excited about sitting at the Birthday Desk, but told me that she couldn't talk to anyone like she can do at their normal tables that have 4-5 kids at them.  I smiled at this because I knew that would be her reaction.

 

To make her day extra special, I came to eat lunch with her (parents are invited to do this anytime during the year), and I brought her her favorite "hot lunch" (she doesn't get school hot lunch and feels left out at times) - macaroni and cheese and peas.  It was a lot of fun to eat lunch with G and I stayed to help out with a craft project after lunch too.  Both Mrs. B and Mrs. Pf told me that they had fun watching G's excitement and delight at everything that day - doesn't take much to bring her joy and that is a wonderful thing!

G's fun day at school was topped off by tiny blueberry muffins at Mrs. L's house after school and sloppy joes for supper.  We were so glad she had a special and happy day!

say cheese...

this morning...

L & J's wedding! (part four)

So now wedding fun was over, right?  Oh, no!  On Sunday the newlyweds had a gift opening party at my parents' farm.  Everyone came for dinner (wedding leftovers, yay!) and then visited and watched L & J open all their presents.  We left around 3:30pm so that we could get home since G had school the next day (she already had to miss a class trip since we took her out of school on Friday, we weren't going to make her miss Valentine's Day in kindergarten!).  We had a really fabulous time and loved celebrating L & J and their wedding.  Thanks for everything you two, we love you!

Uncle K giving the kids a ride to the shed on the new sled he bought them

The party!

L & J were good kids and opened their cards first =)

Fun aprons from J's mom...too bad L doesn't like John Deere (kidding!)

beautiful quilt from Grandma K

L & J's wedding! (part three)

After the ceremony, we all drove to the reception.  What a fun time!  There was the announcing the newly married couple and wedding party, the meal (great food!), the kissing (had to pay $1 per second), the toasts, the thanks from the couple, the cutting of the chocolate cake and the eating of the cheesecake...and then the part of the night which was by far my daughter's favorite, the dancing.  (She obviously must have inherited this from her father because S will tell you the reason we didn't have a dance at our wedding is because C can't dance! =)  It was great to have so many people who love L & J gathered to celebrate them...what a good day!

* The reception hall

* G

* W

* little C

* S and I (thanks M & A for taking great pics of our family at the reception!)

the R cousins that were at the wedding (it has been a long time since this many of us were in one place!)

My grandma, my mom and her siblings

L & J's first dance (J's dress is just beautiful)

Aunt M dancing with W (so cute!!!)

G enjoying dancing...she loved the dancing so much it was really hard to tear her away to go home!

* During the dollar dance my Uncle H ponied up his dollar...not for a dance with J, but with L!  By far the best laugh of the night!  (video here - love it Aunt K!)

* my siblings...=)

Welcome to the family, J!  We love you!