Mary Birthday

Mary has had several birthday celebrations this year, two with family and this week's little play date with a friend from school. This concludes all birthday activities till next year :) They ate noodles, played, painted bird houses, painted other things, rolled the snickerdoodles in cinnamon sugar, licked, licked and played in the snow for a tiny bit... and they can't wait till they can do it all again! Thankful for a sweet friend for Mary at school this year.

For Carolyn

Tonight we were treated to a dance show put on by the fabulous Powell sisters :) Side note: we did watch White Christmas this year and they LOVED Betty and Judy! I think they thought Judy was a real life Barbie and boy, could that Betty sing.
Today we spent a solid 3 hours up to our elbows in graham crackers and icing making gingerbread houses. I had wanted to do this all Christmas break and thankfully our break got extended from the very winter weather! Finally all that Halloween candy was put to good use :)

Where We're at Now (Corrie Edition)

Corrie is off to a good start this year. In school, she is excelling in reading (already known!) and is learning multiplication and division in math. She has a quick and agile mind. Brian took a picture of her for Stocksy (online stock photography thingy). It is really a combination of her head against the sky with the branches of a tree coming out of the back of hair. Artsy :) Well, someone showed him a brochure they used this photo of corrie for... it was an informational meeting on understanding child anxiety.
I don't think she has a lot of anxiety but I do often wonder what is going on inside her brain!
They talked about a famous chalk artist in Sunday school one morning and she really enjoyed it :)
Finally, both girls ran in a kids 1K last weekend with some friends. They had fun and each got a medal. But I think they enjoyed playing and exploring and imagining after the race at the park even more :)

Where We're at Now (Mary edition)

Mary and I enjoy the days she doesn't have school... counting down the days till she does have school and waiting till we can get Corrie. She has a super sweet friend at school named Ava :)
And she was a stuffy bunny for Halloween this year. Seems she has been encountering new germs and they keep her sniffling and coughing sometimes. Nothing too serious. Yesterday caused alarm when she learned that she couldn't hum thru her nose!
Also, she would like to be a queen when she grows up because she could "sit on a throne and the king could do all the work!"

Summer Season.
'Twas a short one... but a good one too. I just realized that this summer nobody yelled at flies. My how much older they are getting! Still love being outside. Loved the baby goats at the zoo. Loved our first grade teacher Mrs. Cahill. Loved the movies! Loved the places we went to too... more on that in a bit. :)

Birthday-ness success!!!

This is parts one and two of the birthday. (And today was part three with pink eye and colds, blerg.) Celebrated up in Granger with mint chocolate chip cake (yeah, it tastes like what you're thinking!) and her doll. Grandma used scraps of fabric from things she had made the girls to make matching outfits for her doll. sweet!
And then we had a Golden Mystery Surprise party with some of her school friends. Favorite parts of the party were cheese balls, bubbles, clues- they were unscrambling the letters R-I-D-E to figure out the big surprise at the end and came up with "dire". :) Lots of fun, lots of girls and lots of love for this girl.

One week from today and school's out! Hooray!!

Where we are, where we been...

These are photos I took of the girls each week in March at our neighbors backyard. We love this time of year... watching things come up, making soup out of all the plants... but I am reminded in the midst of all this life that there is a death. They are connected, joined together. Maybe a better way to say that is Life comes after death. 

I saw a quote on a friend's wall and it made me think of all this beauty. "You have neat tight expectations of what life ought to give you, but you won't get it. That isn't what life does. Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition." 

The deer are back :) just when we thought they were gone, three big ones, eating tulips in our yard.