Last Days...

Well, the girls have officially started their summer vacations!!!

Here is a picture from each girl's first day of school:

Wow, I hadn't looked at these since September and now I can't believe how much OLDER the girls look!

Ashlen's preschool completed the year with a picnic at the park. The kiddos sang a few songs for the parents and it was super cute! Can you spot my cutie???

Trick question because neither can I!!! What about now:They did a song about rainbows...here is a picture of Ashlen with her colorful ribbons:And here she is with her future husband (this, of course, is according to her...I thought Isabel was our boy-crazy child, but I was WRONG!):Yes, they are holding hands. I know. What can I say? I am just glad she set her sights high because he is definitely a sweet little boy.

Isabel had an ice cream party for her last day in the classroom. They also did a couple of songs and then a graduation-type ceremony. Isabel's part in this song was something along the lines of 'Did you ever see a bear, combing his hair...down by the bay...where the watermelons grow...':
Here she is getting her 'diploma':

And here she is with her teacher...she had the BEST kindergarten experience this year...we were so thrilled with the class!And here are the girls enjoying their ice cream treats:For the last day of school, they did a school-wide Laugh Olympics. Basically, they had different activity stations all around the school and the classes went to each station to do something fun. For some reason, Jason associated 'Laugh Olympics' with clowns (Since when are there clowns at the olympics? I must watch the wrong channel). Due to the fact that he is a little senstive about 'the clown' image (for obvious reasons), he was scared to volunteer to help out on this day because he was sure they would ask him to dress up like a clown. After multiple assurances from myself and Isabel's teacher, he agreed to help out and got to do the parachute station in the gym. Here is Isabel in the gym playing with beach balls:

Overall, it was a great school year! We are all looking forward to a fun summer...coming up, we have a big garage sale, the dance recital, a beach vacation, lots of little trips, and of course park district activities such as swimming lessons, tennis, teddy bears, dance camp, and tumbling. Sounds like a crazy amount, I know...but I limit their activities during the school year to one night a week, so summer is a good time to try lots of things!

As for me, I have had a very stressful couple of weeks, but on Monday, I will follow tradition and blast my annual 'school is out and my summer has begun' song all day long...here is a snip of lyrics...anyone able to 'name that song'???: "When the weather's fine, we go fishing or go swimming in the sea. We're always happy, long's we're living in this sound philosophy" I think the song is in a comercial this year, so it is probably an easy one!!!

Ahoyty Matey!!!

No matter how often I corrected her, Ashlen kept saying 'Ahoyty Matey' instead of 'Ahoy Matey'...she had 'Pirate Day' at school last Thursday. It was the big send off for her last day of preschool for this year (she will be back for 4-year-old preschool next year). She was SO excited for Pirate Day...even though I don't think she really knew what it was all about. I got home from shopping for 'pirate loot' after she had gone to bed the night before, so the costume was a surprise for her in the morning. I woke up at 5:30am with that inflatable parrot in my face...it scared the feathers out of me. Ashlen yelled 'I got a pirate bird for pirate day!!!'. Not the best start to my day, but it did make me chuckle...even at that ridiculous time of day! Isabel's friend Elly let Ashlen borrow the pirate dress...originally I had borrowed a 'Pirates of the Carribean' costume from Elly's older brother, but when I took it out of the bag, Ashlen started screaming and crying...it was a costume based on the 'pirates back from the dead in the moonlight scene' and it had bones sticking out of the ripped pirate clothes. It was actually a very nice costume, but she deemed it too scary to look at, say nothing about WEAR! So, the dress and accessories were a pleasant surprise for her in the morning.

Here she is ready for a sword fight:

This is her 'Mean Pirate' face:

And, if I had to guess, I would say that this is supposed to be a sassy pirate:

Ashlen's best friend Keaton goes to the same Preschool. Here they are together before school:

No, I do not feed my child growth hormones...she is just big for her age and Keaton is small for her age...they make quite the pair:

Once at school, they got pirate tattoos and had a treasure hunt with real maps and a real treasure (plastic gold coins and jewels). She and Isabel have been pretending to be pirates ever since! It is pretty cute!

Her end-of-the-year School Picnic was supposed to be last Friday, but the thunder, lightning, and torrential downpours were sort of hard to ignore, so it was re-scheduled for Monday afternoon. I will try to get some pictures to put up. Isabel loves school, but she is getting pretty jealous of all of the cool 'end of school' stuff that Ashlen is doing, but her fun week is the last week of May!

The Girls Are Mommies!!! (Part I)

This is a picture of Isabel from last May:


Last spring, a bird decided that our playset was the perfect place to build a nest. Isabel watched that nest 'like a hawk' until finally the eggs began to arrive, one by one. Then, she watched closely as the eggs hatched and as those tiny, creepy-looking birds grew into larger creepy-looking birds (okay, I am biased...I don't like birds and I think they are all creepy-looking). She was as much a mama to those birds as their feathered mama. Her mothering instinct came to life; she yelled at any neighbor child that came too close to the nest (just like me, she is usually terrible with confrontation and conflict, so this was a big deal for her) and she dug worms out of the dirt and left them in a dish on the playset for the hungry mama (again, very out of character...she is not a fan of being dirty and those who knew her as a small girl know that she was TERRIFIED of bugs...and if you are wondering, no the mama never actually ate any of those worms). Not sure if it is true, but as a kid I was told that if a mama bird smelled 'human' on her nest, she wouldn't take care of her babies, so I never let her touch the nest until the birds were almost full grown (about to the point you see in the picture above). But, she would keep an eye on the nest at all times so that as soon as the mama would fly off for food, she would climb right up there to just stare for as long as I would allow. The birds grew well until the night of her dance recital (first week of June) when they all flew away. Thank goodness for the excitement of the dance recital because she was absolutely heartbroken that the birds left her. She sobbed herself to sleep that night in a way that gave me the maternal urge to dig out the baby blankets to swaddle and rock her.

Needless to say, she was really hoping that Mama Bird would come back to our playset this year. A bird started to build a nest in the wreath on our front door and I actually told Jason to leave it there just in case another nest didn't show up in our backyard this year (this took a lot of persuasion because Jason works 3rd shift and uses our front door to come home for breaks at night...we had a nest on the front door once before and he wound up with a bird flapping frantically in his face on more than one occasion...he likes birds about as much as I do) But, a nest started to form in the playset next to ours, so we were in luck! We got the nest out of our wreath before any eggs showed up and Isabel had a nest to climb up to and check on.

This year, Ashlen is excited too. They both love to check the nest (still no touching allowed) on a regular basis. Ash is not quite a climber, so she requires assistance from Isabel to get a peek:A few days ago, the first egg arrived and the girls were thrilled! After a few days, we ended up with this:We have three eggs, and hopefully in a few days we will have three baby birds! I will let you know when we have babies in Part II. But for now, you have to agree with me that these things are CREEPY!!!!