First Day of School

Marielle started kindergarten today.  She took a quarter for milk, an empty backpack, and lots of butterflies swirling in her tummy.  When I woke her up, I whispered, "You can rest for a few minutes while you wake up."  But almost as soon as her eyes were open she said, "Oh boy.  First day of school" and shot out of bed to take her shower.  She was bursting with excitement all morning, and as her mom, I couldn't have been more proud watching her walk into her classroom.  She is such a great kid and I'll miss her while she's gone everyday, but I know she's ready to fly.

Ryan wouldn't have missed this drop off for anything.  Isn't it great dads are like that now?

These cuties got to tag-a-long too.

Guess whose the tallest in her class???

Can't you just feel the excitement in the air?  It's like being in line for the Ariel ride at Disneyland!

Bye sweet girl!

Bonnet Banter

The girls convinced me to make them matching bonnets after they saw just how hip bonnets can be at the pioneer day picnic.  Surprisingly, the bonnets came out with minimal cost and stress since I used material from the swap shop and followed a step by step tutorial on YouTube.  I made them Sunday night and the next morning at breakfast the conversation went like this:

 Ryan:  Did you girls say thank you to mommy for your new bonnets?
Girls:  THANK YOU!!
Jenna:  My bonnet not BLUE, my bonnet pink!
Ryan:  Did you know God made a blue bonnet?
Jenna:  For HIM??!!

Breaking News

Rex celebrated pioneer day this year by breaking his arm.  He broke it at our stake picnic when he stood and lunged out of his stroller.  (Oh, that's what those safety buckles are for.)  We realized it was broken a few days later on July 24th to be precise, and so unknowingly continued Shula's tradition that broken arms should not be treated the same day.  Rex now has empathy for the pioneer toddlers who fell out of wagons or handcarts, but had no Dr's offices at which to gets X-rays or casts. 

Here he is sportin' his cast and looking pretty darn cute.  

 

I love this last one. I was coaching him to lift his arm so I could get a better pic of his cast--and he did, just the wrong arm. 

Make Way

As would be expected growing up in house with two older sisters, Rex is surrounded by girl toys.  He hasn't shown any aversion to pink and usually plays just fine with whatever toy happens to be in his path.  However, we are slowly accumulating more "gender appropriate" toys and he does seem to like the trucks, the blocks, the tiny replicas of man-eating animals and so on.
The other day I was helping clean up the kids room and saw this:

I couldn't decide if it was more Jurassic Park or that lame sitcom Dinosaur.  (You remember right? Not the Momma!)


Either way,  I got a chuckle of Rex trying to find a nice backdrop for his dinosaur to play/attack.
It seems the other appropriate use of the doll house is a climbing wall.  Climb on little man, climb on.

Sometimes Your Kids Surprise You

We had a fun trip at a lake in NM to celebrate Grannie's 80th birthday.  With so many descendants who love her and also came to celebrate, it was inevitable that one of those descendants would bring the stomach flu and then pass it around to all the other relatives.  Marielle got it on day four and we decided to rent a movie to pass the time in the hotel room.  We got Mr. Popper's Penguins because a friend of mine had recommended it and I wanted to enjoy the movie too.  About 1/2 way through the movie, Marielle asked if we could turn it off.  "I think this movie is for older kids."  I'm thinking, you'd rather stare at the ceiling while nauseated than watch this movie? Okey, dokey, we turned it off and finished it that night after the kids were asleep.

Fast forward two days later to another hotel room on our way home from the trip.  The Man from Snowy River was playing on one of the cable channels.  Marielle was enthralled. She nearly cried when we told her she couldn't finish watching because we needed to get on the road.  We promised to rent it from the library when we got home.  Not sure what she saw in the movie: accents that make it difficult to understand dialogue? unsettling images of wild horses' eyes zoomed in for effect? girls in long dresses?  Who knows, but she loved it.  Take that Mr. Popper's Penguins and all your fancy cgi.

The other surprise came from Rex.  For weeks, possibly months, I've been mentally gearing myself up for his rejection of all things nursery. I don't want the ordeal of crying as we drop him off each week, so I thought we wouldn't push nursery.  After all, this is Rex, our most intense child and we keep things his style as much as possible. We'd just take it slow, go now and then to have fun with the toys.  But today was day one and he stayed the whole time and never once cried once for mom or dad.  Go figure.  I'm happy, but surprised that the kids I thought I knew so well, proved me wrong.