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!

cuties

This is the 2009 calendar for our local YMCA. Do you recognize anyone?



Soren and Reese had a long weekend of togetherness. That always starts out great, but eventually they start bickering. Tuesday night I made them each go find something to do alone because they were having a hard time getting along. Reese loves to write and has started to sound out words. She wrote Soren this note and slid it under her door.


Reese pronounces love as "lub", so she wrote: Soren I lub u from Reese.

Love it.

I promise this is NOT a repeat blog!

Another swim meet. 3 more personal bests for Soren. Wow. No pictures :( I had to be a timer.

Today she swam the 100 free in 1:18.99 (2 seconds faster than her previous best); 50 back in 39.97 (1 second faster) and the 100 IM in 1:27 (this was her first time to swim this event). She got second place in the free and first place in both the back and IM.

Grandma Charlotte came down for the weekend which means the girls are having a very spoiled weekend; that is always fun.

We booked our accommodations for Ironman Cozumel 2009. We are staying the week of Thanksgiving; I am excited to take the girls to a "real" beach. We are working hard to convince everyone to come celebrate the holiday with us - the more the merrier!

Celebrating Soren's 10th Birthday...again

With a birthday that comes over the Christmas holidays you get jipped when it comes to having friends around, so we waited until today to have a party for Soren. She chose to do a mall scavenger hunt and it went really well, especially considering the fact that I did not put any work into it. We found some scavenger hunt lists online, printed them out and took off with 6 giggly girls. Nana and I took the kids to the mall with their list and told them to see how many things they could check off in one hour. A great success as far as birthdays go. Happy Birthday, again, Soren!

loaded up and ready to go

Some of the things we had to do:

doing the wave

wearing sunglasses

one of the tasks was to buy a piece of gum. what we ended up with was a bag of 6 colossal gum balls which made for lovely colored mouths for the rest of the trip!

rather than having another birthday cake, Soren and her friends each chose something from the cookie place in the mall. We decided to take our choices with us and eat some dinner before enjoying the sweets

straws were quite the entertainment at dinner

just in case we had not ingested enough sugar (colossal gum balls, cookies, endless sprite...) the waitress brought out a chocolate shake in honor of Soren's birthday

more straw fun