I *finally* have pictures of all four kids together now! I had a big mental block somehow thinking that it was too hard...but yesterday I just told them all what to get dressed in and we ran outside and did it. They're not perfect, but at least I have something! :)
This was at the end of their 3.5 minute attention span!! "Huh?! What camera?"
Abby started kindergarten last week...and loves it, of course! We adored the teacher Gavin had for kindergarten, so we decided to send Abby just for this year since the teacher is still there. She goes two days a week (Monday/Wednesday), and occasionally on Fridays as well. She was very confident right from the first day - the night before she said to me "mom, you're just going to drop me there, right? Like not stay?" :) I did end up staying for a few minutes, but she was quite happy to play with her little friends and didn't even notice me leaving. It's great to see her so confident.
Gavin and Abby often have days where they fight like cats and dogs, so it's so nice to have moments like today where we can see how much they do love each other.
We had been at a friend's house visiting this morning, and on the way home Abby started wailing that she didn't know where her straw cup was. I asked her if she had put it back in the diaper bag when she was finished, but she couldn't remember and was way too upset to try and think where it could be. (It was definitely time for a nap...) I assured Abby that our friends would bring it to church on Sunday, but she was heartbroken that she wouldn't have her favorite cup to drink out of at quiet time.
When we arrived back at home, Gavin took Abby with him downstairs, and every few minutes one of them would appear upstairs rummaging for various supplies. I try to give them pretty free reign when they've come up with a project, as long as I don't see anything dangerous heading to their rooms with them. ;) A little while later they came back upstairs with this:
Gavin had taken a pink plastic cup, cut out a cardboard circle from a cereal box, made a hole in the lid and then taped it onto the cup so Abby could have a pink straw cup for her quiet time.
Those are the moments when I think they really will turn out okay. :)
We're reading Understood Betsy for Gavin's school right now, and after reading how butter was made in the olden days, we decided to try it for ourselves!
It was actually much easier than I had anticipated (I thought we might be shaking our little jars for hours...) and it turned out great! The kids loved watching the cream change from liquid, to whipped cream, and then suddenly separating into buttermilk and butter! We all enjoyed some of the fresh butter on some fresh bread this afternoon! Yummy!
The pictures of the kids that are up on our wall right now are from last fall - they turned out really well and I wanted to do it again this fall. Well, apparently fall is now, so last night I took the girls out (just to the ditch at the end of our road - trying to take them all out to the park by myself last year was a bit of a disaster!) and did their pictures. I didn't have time to do Gavin, but hopefully he will be quick and easy and I can get his done this week sometime.
I'm sure I have tons of pictures and stories to tell, but all I have right now is a random piece of information. Rach was in for immunizations the other day, and I got Abby weighed as well (I wasn't convinced she still outweighed Rachel...) Here are our kids' percentages on the growth charts right now:
Rachel - 90th percentile for both height and weight
Abby - 50th percentile for both height and weight
Gavin - 50th percentile for height and not quite 25th for weight
I think Rach will still thin out a bit...Gav was in the 75th+ percentile for weight when he was that age (and he was only 25th percentile for height, so it wasn't as proportional!). Abby's always been right around the 50th for both, although she was a very chubby baby (remember all her arm rolls??). We will see!!
Abby is a little monkey at the park! She tries things that cautious Gavin might have attempted only last summer. She doesn't need any encouragement to try something - I just turn around and she's doing it!
Abby loves to have her picture taken, no matter what she's doing. ('Take a picture of me putting on my socks, Mom!' 'Mom! Get a picture of me looking at this paper!')
Man, oh man, getting more than one little kid to cooperate for pictures is practically impossible!! :)
On Mother's Day morning, I got the kids all dressed and only realized afterwards that they were all in shades of blue and white. Clearly a sign that I was supposed to take pictures!! ;)
Rachel wanted nothing to do with her brother and sister, prefering to run down the road instead, chasing after the neighbor's cat. It was also all of about +3 degrees outside, so everyone was complaining how cold they were! Sigh.
Maybe in 20 years I'll forget what a hassle it was to try to get decent pictures of these cuties!!
I sent Gavin & Abby to their room the other day becasue they could not stop harrassing each other, and told them to just sit on their beds and not talk to, look at, or poke at each other until I came to get them. Must have been a good idea, because this is what I found them all doing when I came to check a little while later...
Last week on the day I worked in town, instead of the babysitter coming here, the kids went to her house. Apparently she was unloading the dishwasher when Abby asked her what she was doing:
A friend sent this to me when I said something on Facebook the other day about how Abby was carrying around her toy phone stuffed down the back of her pants. I can only hope she never does this!!
We're not a big Halloween family around here - my first thought of what costumes the kids would wear was maybe October 30?? Fortunately we have a few costumes around (this is the third year Gavin's been Superman, but he gets so excited every time...and it finally fits him!) and everyone had something to wear. Rachel's a monkey, but didn't want to keep her hood on for the picture. :) She was as excited as Gavin was - she dragged the costume around for most of the day making little monkey noises and trying to say monkey, something like "mah-KA!"
Abby was a little bit unsure about the whole Halloween thing - she loves to dress up, but everyone doing it at the same time and running around outside seemed a little weird to her. She changed her mind several times during the day about whether she'd rather be the bunny or the caterpillar, and right before we went out she was set on not wearing anything, but we convinced her. :)
We just went to a few houses around our neighborhood this year - we usually go drive out to the country and visit a couple of friends, but Greg was at a youth conference this year and I wasn't feeling adventurous enough to go by myself.
Well...today they seem to be reenacting the entire Olympic games in our living room. Gavin has a schedule of all the events, and he and Abby are taking turns participating (complete with uniform changes for each sport). We've had men's boxing (apparently women don't box?), men's and women's fencing, and we've just finished men's swimming. "I have some sort of sad news," Gavin reports. "I tried my hardest, but I finished in sixth place. It was a personal best, though." Stay tuned for women's swimming - Abby's getting dressed as we speak.
Some excerpts from the Men's Fencing competition (that's Abby cheering him on in the background)
Gavin getting ready for boxing (note the garden..ahem, boxing gloves!)
We just finished two weeks of swimming lessons for Gavin and Abby today. We were blessed with an amazing two weeks of weather - I don't think there was one day that it was too cold to wear shorts and a tank top! Quite an amazing thing, as many years there's groups of moms watching lessons huddling together with their coffees for warmth! ;)
Gavin did an amazing job this year! Even last summer he would still get really panicky about anything that was too new - going off the slide or the diving board. But this time he did so well, I was just amazed. Here's a video (just off of my phone; with three kids to keep an eye on, I didn't get any good pictures this year) of Gavin jumping off the diving board - this was a few days ago, but today he did it several times where he jumped off and then swam to the side all by himself! They got their report cards today and he passed the level on his first try! Way to go Gavin!
This was the first year Abby has done swimming lessons on her own (I did parent and tot with her last summer). And...she started off with a great demonstration of 'like brother, like sister' and screamed her way through the first couple of lessons. If a drop of water happened to touch her face, she'd scream. When they put lifejackets on to practice floating, she clung with all four limbs to the teacher's neck (not kidding!) and screamed. We had a little talk with her after the first few days and promised her a baby ice cream cone at the store if she could go through her whole lesson without screaming at her teacher. (Yeah, I know...but we had to do something!) :)
Fortunately the bribery worked and after one more day with just a little bit of screaming, she did really well after that. I wish I could have gotten it on video, but it was the cutest thing: she would be involved in the lesson, then would suddenly turn around to look at me, grin a huge toothy smile up at me and yell out "Mommy! I am doing a great job not screaming at my teacher!" She entertained the watching parents, that's forsure. :)
Abby didn't pass her level, but she made a huge improvement in the two weeks, which was wonderful. At today's lesson she even put her face underwater a couple of times (at least one was by accident, but she was pretty calm about it), and practiced her front and back floats with the rest of the class. Granted, she was up on the second step, so the water's only about a foot deep...and she hangs onto the next step up so it's not actually floating...but she was so proud of herself, she would call the teacher and say "teacher, look at me! I am DOing it!" The fact that Gavin, the original screamer himself, is now a 'strong swimmer' according to his report card, gives me such hope for Abby! Hopefully it will work out to do some lessons in the fall for them so they don't forget everything they've learned.
Here's a short video of Abby at her lessons. That's the rest of her class there in the background, probably learning the finer points of back crawl ;) and then there's Abby, hopping happily on the stairs. She was the littlest in her class (you have to be three years old, and she was three and a week when the lessons started) and she couldn't even stand where the rest of the kids were if she wanted to since she was so short.
Here's all the kids in her class lined up waiting to get the go-ahead from their teacher to get in the water. Isn't she cute???
Mischa came over to play this morning and it turned out the girls were dressed almost exactly alike! So of course, what's a mommy/aunt to do but try to take some pictures?!? :) They are sooo uncooperative for pictures these days, but I got a few cute ones (even if it does look kind of like an outtake reel!). (Click to see all the pictures)
This was at the end of their 3.5 minute attention span!! "Huh?! What camera?"
This was at the end of their 3.5 minute attention span!! "Huh?! What camera?"
