My Exercise Buddy

 

Love my little trainer!!

My Cute Genesis

I found this video of Genni on my phone the other day...I think she's about 9 or 10 months old in it.  She's such a funny girl!!  So glad she's part of our family!!

 

9 Months Old

 

Just some photos of Genesis when she turned 9 months old (3 months ago...I am really behind on updates).

 

Rockin' an awesome hat that all my sisters have worn.

Ready to go pick up my sisters from school.

Sunglasses?  Mmmm...I don't think so.

Just felt like being all dressed up.

Gwen's Award Assembly

I am always so proud of my kids when they receive an achievement award at the end of the school year.  In our elementary school here, they don't give out awards to the kindergarten kids, so the focus was all on Gwen.

 

She did excellent this year, and was pretty disappointed to find out that she didn't receive a reading award this year (mainly because she was constantly reading chapter books instead of easy books, and unfortunately the chapter books count for the same amount of points as the easy books, so she didn't receive as many points-boo), but she received straight A's all year, so she received an award for that.

 

And I couldn't be prouder of her for all her hard work and all the problems she bravely worked through this year.  I sure love her zest for learning scientific facts and reading all sorts of books, and her love of telling jokes.  Can't wait to see what this new school year brings!!

 

WAY TO GO GWEN!!!  DADDY AND I SURE LOVE YOU!!!!

 

Gwen is in the red, next to her principal.

Gwen (in the red) coming into the assembly.

 

The video is kind of shaky, and you can't really hear them talking (all thanks to my sweet little wee one), but I thought family members would still like to see it!!

Nice Photos Of My Girls

 

Every year at school (so far), the girls have gotten fall and spring pictures done.  We always buy the fall photos, but say that we will wait to see how the spring photos turn out and then decide if we will buy them.  I love having nice photos of my girls, so we always get them hahaha. 

 

When the photos came back this spring we decided to take some of Georgia and Genesis as well, and send them to our parents and grandparents (which ended up taking me forever to do...I sent them out today-whoops).  So now that I finally have them all sent, here are how the photos turned out.

 

The Congdon Girls (our G Squad)-Spring of 2013

 

Gracie

Gwen

Georgia

Genesis

Such sweet girls we have!!

8 Months Old

Just a few pictures of Genni from when she turned 8 months old a couple months ago.

 

Playing with toys

A new outfit

Goofy time with Gracie

 

Love this dress...all the girls have worn it now!!

Super Butterfly Girl

 

We were looking through some boxes in the garage a few months ago, trying to find something, and while Rob and I were busy trying to find this one odd object in a mess of boxes, the girls got into one of the boxes that we stored past party decorations in.  Specifically, the Princess and the Frog birthday party box.  And what was lying right on top that the girls thought they could sneak off with without anyone noticing?

 

Mardi Gras masks of course!!

We bought them for kids to wear at the party-which was also the last time we bought masks for a party, because we have found that kids just don't seem to like wearing masks.  So when we discovered that each of the girls had taken off with a mask, we decided that it wasn't a big deal to let them keep the masks out and destroy them over time. 

 

And then Georgia decided to turn her mask into something awesome.  She became...

 

Super Butterfly Girl!!

 

Protecting her family from the evil spiders and flies that plague our home!!

 

I love this silly girl!!

Gracie's Nursery Rhyme Performance

There's a lot of things we like about the elementary school here in Texas.  The teachers are pretty awesome.  It's a smaller school with less students per teacher.  The curriculum is pretty good.  It's also only two blocks away from our house so we have the awesome opportunity to walk/ride bikes back and forth to school every day.

 

Another awesome thing that they do is teach the kindergarten kids just about every single nursery rhyme there is throughout the first 3/4 of the year, and then put on a performance first for the rest of the school kids and then for the parents. They get to recite one nursery rhyme and dress up like their nursery rhyme too.

 

Grace brought home a paper in early March about it, giving us a month for her to pick which nursery rhyme she would perform, and to either make or buy a costume.  It took Grace about a week to make up her mind which one she wanted to do, but she eventually decided on Little Bo Peep.  I got all excited, thinking that I would make her an awesome costume that no one else would have.

 

And then I looked for a pattern...and the only one I found was $10, as was just about every other dress pattern that would work for her costume.  Then I added in how much it would cost for fabric-even if that fabric was some clothes I found at Goodwill and ripped apart, like I usually do for Halloween costumes.  It all added up to be about the same as purchasing a costume, and because I had other things going on at the time, I decided to just purchase her costume instead.

 

Grace loved her costume though (it's Little Bo Peep from Toy Story...she wants to wear it for Halloween this year too!!) and it turns out she was the only one wearing this costume.

She was supposed to wear the costume to school on the day of the performance they were doing for all the other grades, and she was super excited because that meant she got to not only wear the costume twice, but perform twice as well.  She was so happy when I picked her up from school that day.  She said she had tons of fun at the performance that day and couldn't wait to do it again that night for us.

 

Mother Goose opened the performance for us, explaining how the program was going to work.



When the kids decided what nursery rhyme they were going to perform, we had to send in a form that stated which one they were going to do.  They then grouped the kids together that were performing the same nursery rhyme, and that group of kids all performed at once (except there were a few nursery rhymes that were so popular with the kindergarten kids that they had to do two rounds of it because there were just too many kids to do it once).

 

This was the only kindergartener who did the Itsy Bitsy Spider.  His costume was pretty awesome though.

A couple of cute little boys dressed up as mice to do Hickory Dickory Dock.

We have friends from our ward here in Texas that live two streets away from us, and they have a daughter in kindergarten too.  She dressed up like an egg and did Humpty Dumpty (she's the one in the middle).

Towards the end there were a few kids who did Twinkle Twinkle Little Star-and one of them was dressed up in a star costume, and the other boy performing with him had starts all over his shirt and top hat, and even had star shaped glasses on that lit up!!  I loved it!!



There were a lot more nursery rhymes that were performed...probably between 15-20 more.  Grace did an awesome job with hers, and then at the end, after all the nursery rhymes had been performed, they got all the kindergarten kids together and they sang some songs for us (LOVED the Goldilocks rap-it was so cute!!).  Rob did a great job filming Grace performing (and you can hear Genesis in the background...listen for the loud "AH"'s).  I couldn't have been prouder of Gracie for her bravery to get on stage and perform, and that she remembered all the words to her nursery rhyme and the songs.  She did such an awesome job!!