Celebrating Reese

Today my sweet Reese turned 5 years old. She has enjoyed a week of celebrations with her "friends" party at bouncing bonanza, her school party and today a family party. Lucky girl!

Turning 5 has been quite monumental; she has anticipated this birthday for many different reasons. First of all, she decided some time ago that five was the magic age for getting her ears pierced so today was the big day! Nana decided to have her ears done as well, so we all went together.

the few tears dried quickly when she saw the beautiful results!

Avery and Reese hold Nana's hand while she has her turn!

I busted Pops trying on some of the merchandise

The rock climbing wall was another reason that this day was highly anticipated. You must be 5 years old to climb and Reese finally got her turn! Watching her you would never know that this was her first time to climb. She shot straight to the top, rang the bell and bounced down like a pro.

This morning Reese came to me and handed me this note:

As we were eating breakfast she said, very seriously, "I feel very different today!"

I love it. What a great kid. What a great adventure it is to have children. I thank God for the blessings He has given me!

swim meet pictures, courtesy of Pops!

not-a-lot

We had a long weekend of swim meet fun. Pete was a swim team kid and his mom told me that the parents had t-shirts that read "swim meets are parent abuse". I think I need one of those shirts. As much as we love to watch Soren and her teammates swim, the meets can be quite a beating. We are there for about 8 hours (total over a 2 day meet) and Soren swims a total of about 8 minutes, so most of the time you are sitting on metal bleachers trying to keep your 4 year old entertained waiting waiting waiting.

That sounded pretty negative. sorry. I am so happy that Soren has found something that she loves and it is a lot of fun to watch her swim!

This was Soren's first BB meet and she has a lot of work to do to climb back to the top like she did in the previous category. She is pretty motivated when she sees swimmers who are faster than she is, so it will be interesting!

Pops got some good pictures that I will post if he will send them to me.

happy valentine's weekend! No school tomorrow, yea!

working women

I am SO excited! For 3 years I have wanted to replace the ivory flat paint that is on every wall in my entire house. I have been overwhelmed by the thought because I have rounded corners and it seems that you have to repaint the whole house if you paint at all. Lucky for me I have a very generous sister with impeccable taste and a mom always willing to work. Friday I took everything off of the walls downstairs and taped the edges. This morning at 8:30 Kara and I started faux finishing the walls with mom doing all of the "go" work. We broke for lunch and by 7 pm not only was the job done, but everything was back in it's place. I cannot believe the difference. We were the perfect team. Had it not been for mom, Kara and I would be long from finished, and had it not been for Kara...well, it would either look terrible or it would have cost me considerably more (I only spent $100 and we only used half of what we bought! sweet!) So here is the finished look. It won't mean anything to you if you did not know what it looked like before, but it is an amazing difference. Thank you so much Mom and Kara for sacrificing your weekend and working so hard all for my benefit!