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!!

Haircuts

 

The girls have needed a haircut for a while, especially so Gwen and Grace could get their bangs trimmed.  With their spring pictures, class pictures, and apparently some special kindergarten graduation pictures happening this week, I took them first thing Saturday morning to get haircuts.  I didn't take any before pictures, because I wasn't expecting anything too dramatic, so you'll have to compare to past blog posts, but here's a couple after photos.

 

Gracie didn't do much with her hair other than get her bangs cut again, and get her hair trimmed.  She seems to like the length that her hair is at now.

 

Right after her haircut...her hair is still wet!!

 

All curled and ready for picture day-what a sweet girl!!

 

Georgia told me for a few days before taking them to get haircuts that she had to have bangs this time just like Aunt Mimi (my sister Melissa).  She even told the hair stylist that she had to have bangs like Aunt Mimi's before I could say a word about her hair. 

 

It looks super cute on her, but she looks so much more grown up-sadness!

 

What a cutie!!

 

Gwen really changed it up this time.  She has been reading a lot of Magic School Bus books lately (along with Magic Tree House, Captain Underpants...well, every book she can get her hands on that is).  She told me that she wanted her hair cut like Wanda's from The  Magic School Bus.  Rob and I were really hesitant to let her get it cut that short, so we told her she could get it to her chin.  Well......her hairstylist didn't take into account Gwen's very curly hair and it ended up just like Wanda's (I wish she would have listened to me about Gwen's bangs though...I think she cut them too short).

 

It's so short now!!

 I really wasn't sure for a day or two afterwards whether I liked her new haircut or not.  It is super cute though, especially when it's tightly curled, like we did for pictures.  She loves it, and I guess that's all that matters.  She just looks so grown up-my peanut is growing up so fast!!

 

I am excited to see how the girls spring photos turn out, and I am excited to take some of Georgia and Genesis too.  I can't wait to see what the next major hairstyle for the girls will be!!

Laughing With Genesis

 

I love how these two play together!!

 



A Happy Easter

 

Now that I've got my blog working again...

 

We had a really nice Easter this year.  My sister in law Amanda sent us some really cool ideas to do for Easter, but in the end we just ran out of time to do them between all their homework and trying to get our house cleaned up for Easter.  We did spend the week talking to the girls about why we truly celebrate Easter, but we also prepared them for E. Aster Bunnymund's visit (Gwen is reading the Rise of the Guardians series...this is the Easter Bunny's name in the books).  Gwen and Grace really seemed to understand why we really celebrate Easter, especially Gwen, who has a very sweet testimony of the Savior and His sacrifices for us, and was pleased to share that in her talk that she gave in Primary on Easter Sunday.

 

The girls spent a good deal of Saturday though riding bikes up and down our street with three boys who live in our neighborhood.  Two of them are in Gracie's kindergarten class, and the other is one of the boys older brother.  We walk home from school 3 or 4 times a week with the older brother and Gracie's classmate, and they have become good friends.  They had a lot of fun together, and I was really pleased to see that everyone, including the boys, were making sure that they included Georgia as well.

 

After playing outside for a while we came in, had dinner and baths, then decorated eggs.  Rob and I were so excited to see how Genesis would react to dying eggs, and just to celebrate her first Easter with her.

 

Genni loved looking at and touching the eggs.  She loved them so much that she started shrieking in displeasure when I helped her put them into the mugs to dye them.

Gwen had fun dying eggs...

...as did Gracie and Georgia.  The girls all had tons of fun putting an egg in and leaving it while we watched Scooby Doo cartoons and I put curlers in their hair.

 

The girls were so excited the next morning and had so much fun looking for their Easter baskets, which Bunnymund hid, as well as all the eggs he had hid that we had dyed the night before.  Their baskets had the normal goodies of chocolate bunnies, plastic eggs filled with MandM's and jellybeans, and peeps, but also had some beef jerky, pistachios, stickers, a notebook and pen, and a bouncy ball.  The girls were thrilled (and snuck as much candy as possible before mom and dad noticed).

 

 

 

Since Genesis can't have chocolate yet, or any type of candy for that matter, Bunnymund brought her some things that she'll be starting to eat in the next few months like Gerber's puffs, yogurt melts, fruit bars, and even a new outfit and toy.  She immediately gravitated to the new toy and began chewing and sucking on it.

Gracie's curls didn't come out like I had planned.  Her hair had just gotten too long for the curlers we had.  We still tried the ones we had though and figured we'd see how it turned out the next morning.  It didn't.  I had seen a post on one of the craft blogs I follow a week or two before Easter with instructions on how to do a 5 strand puffy braid, so I decided to try it on Gracie.  Once I got the hang of doing it, it was pretty simple and easy.  I think it would have turned out a bit better if her hair wasn't so crazy due to being semi-curly when I did it.  Next time I hope to do it while her hair is wet so it turns out smoother and I can get a better picture of it.

 

 We waited until after church to take pictures, because we just didn't have time before with Rob and I trying to get things ready for dinner, get ourselves ready for church, and get the kids ready.  Genni was a bit grumpy after church, and didn't want to sit up on her own, so we had to prop her up and get her sisters involved to get her to smile and once she started smiling she turned back into our happy baby and let us get a bunch of cute pictures of her.  The girls all did really well and let us take some nice photos of them.

 We decided to try and take some photos of the girls out on the swing set, but once we realized that none of them could hold on to their seat and hold Genni at the same time we scrapped that idea and took a couple of the three older girls, then went inside to take pictures of all 4 of them together.

 

We had fun getting the sillies out, and then took some nice photos.

 My 4 beautiful girls!!

I am so blessed that I have a wonderful husband who loves me and helps me so much, 4 healthy and happy girls, and a very loving Heavenly Father and Savior.  I am so grateful for all I have!!

7 Months Old!!

 

Here's some photos of Genesis from when she turned 7 months old a few weeks ago.

 

Having some play time on the floor.

 

Not a very good picture, but I love this girls curly hair!!

It was raining, so I put on our sling and stuck her in it and zipped up an extra large jacket around the two of us, and that way she was nice and warm and I could hold my umbrella over the two of us.

Big smiles!!

 

I love seeing her learn new things (she's so close to crawling!!) and problem solve.  She is growing and changing so much!!  What a sweet blessing she is!!

St. Patricks Day

 

We didn't do a whole lot for St. Patrick's Day.  The girls really wanted to make a leprechaun trap, but we just didn't have enough time over the weekend to make one, and they were pretty disappointed about that, but Robbie made them green eggs for breakfast that morning, they had green milk to drink later that day, and we talked a bit about it, but no big celebration-and it was great!  We just had fun wearing green, and eating green things.

 

The girls did do a bunch of stuff at school the next day to celebrate (they didn't do anything the week before because it was their spring break that week), and Gwen and Grace wore shirts that I made for them with iron on transfer paper and some T-shirts we had left over from birthday parties, which they were quite pleased with.  It was a nice, fun, relaxing holiday in between two fairly big holidays, and I think we'll keep it that way.