Old Post: Maddie's Half Birthday

Post found in drafts, never posted.
05/29/08
Maddie is 6 months old today. She is such a sweet little girl with lots of personality. She is starting to like her rice cereal!

Maddie's Half-Birthday

Don't you just love all her luggage?

Maddie is 3 1/2 today!  Yikes.  Time is flying and I wish it would slow down a bit.  Tomorrow she will get to go on a half-birthday date with her Dad.  She's expecting ice cream (she and Allie got to hump-back on Collin's half-birthday date with me a couple Saturdays ago, which means, we gotta do a do-over for that one.  I didn't get my one-on-one with my boy).  We love  this girl, she is always talking up a storm here at the house.  Sometimes a bit much.  Her latest thing is packing up stuff and transporting it all over the house.  Her favorite place to stop? My bedroom.  I had to finally ask her to move it because the pile was growing everyday.  Bags and bags of random stuff plus her clothes just in case she got to go to her Grandma's house.

She has an awesome sense of self-esteem!  She likes to brush her hair and tell me she's cute, pretty, or yesterday, she said she was "jor-gis" (gorgeous, only she got the sounds mixed up).  She loves to get in my make up, Allie's clothes, accessories, nail stuff, and shoes. Makes messes and loves to carry food around.  Eats brown sugar straight out of the bag. And eats butter like it's peanut butter. Loves white chocolate chips!

I love how she's just stealing a kiss back there, while I am trying to get his photo for the day.

She is so loving and kind.  Showers her little brother with kisses and hugs every day.  Can't stand it when he cries, so she jumps in the crib with him.  Even though she has her own bed now, she still loves to camp out in her brother/sister's rooms.  Mostly Allie, whom she calls "Sissy", because Sissy always reads her stories before bed.  She gets sad when her older brother and sister don't want her to follow them around when they have play dates at the house.  She comes to me in tears telling me all about it, and asks me "can you put him/her in timeout?".

 Maddie back in February.  I had completely forgotten these photos!

In Collin's little fire boots.

But the rest of the time is she is the happiest little girl I can think of.  She goes around the house skipping, playing, watching TV, and always hums a tune - the other day I heard her humming "Praise to the Man".  Someday she is going to make a great pianist too, I think, because she loves to "play" on the piano songs from Collin's music class and even though the notes are not right, she has the rhythm down.  She wants to learn to read, so that is her big task this summer - to learn how to read!  So we are on it, and hope that at the end of the summer she will know how.  Oh, when Allie was her age, I was so eager for that oldest one of mine to learn and grow. I am not sure quite that I want our Maddie Moo to grow so quickly! 6 more months and she will be 4! Love this girl!!

Day 158

After church today...

Gorgeous?

Maddie was getting ready to go to dinner and was brushing her hair.  Out of the blue she said, "hey, I'm geour-ges" (sounds like jor-ges).  She obviously meant gorgeous.  Funny girl!

Day 157

 Anytime the laptop is close, he scoots himself over and starts feeling all those keys.

 This is what happens when you have sisters.  Allie came downstairs and showed me what he would look like if he was a baby girl.

Poor guy doesn't know he looks like a girl!

Day 156

Last day of school for the kids and a morning of fun checking out the floors for Zane.

Day 155

Zane's visit on the last day of preschool.  My preschool kids were so happy to have him and kept making him laugh and wanted to take turns holding him.

Student Council!

Allie decided to run for office at her school -- announced her candidacy on Monday last week, had to come up with posters the day after and then gave her speech at their middle school assembly on Tuesday. This was right up my alley since I did student council during my middle and high school years, so I was pretty excited about it. She was so nervous about her speech, but was able to get through it okay.  Whew! Later that day, the winners were announced and she MADE IT!!!!

 Annie, one of Allie's "campaign managers"

As part of the 15-member Student Council for middle school next year, she will be busy -- starting this summer when she will get to go to a 2-day Leadership Camp, lots of extra meetings, then also attend the Student Government elective class this next year.  The class is reserved for those who are members of the Student Council.  They are expected to attend 70% of after school events, such as sports, concerts, activities, and participate on committees to plan and take down these events.

But what I love most is that they will get to also study and learn from leadership books like "Robert's Rules of Order", the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens (ALA is a Covey Lighthouse School), and Lincoln on Leadership. So good for a 6th grader next year! And no, I cannot believe she will be in 6th grade next year. Crazy.

Allie and her friend Audri

Casting her ballot

Today she came home with her middle school electives form, and knew right away which ones to take.  She has 4 electives that she gets to take in addition to her core Math, Language Arts, Science, History and Geography classes.  Her picks are:

1. Student Government (mandatory because of her office),
2. Speech and Debate (very interesting choice),
3. Journalism (no surprise, has excellent writing skills and she is good at digital scrapbooking), and
4. Theatre (no surprise here, but she signed herself up for all the school productions throughout the year).

If she could pick a 5th, she would choose: U.S. Constitution Studies - which I was rooting for because the class explores Bastiat's The Law, selections from The Federalist Papers, and dissect and interpret Articles, clauses, and subclauses of the US Constitution. But...theatre is WAY more fun.  Can you tell she has quite a bit of Kevin in her?!

So, this being Allie's post of activities for the week -- she has also been busy learning a new song called "Though the Kaleidoscope" by Steven Cravis.  She asked me to download the sheet music on Sunday night and she hasn't let up on that piece since we got it.  Of course we were out of printer ink so she went and painstakingly copied off the first 2 pages of the music on to blank music sheets until we got ink on Monday night (which I should take pictures of for memories).

Here she is playing the first 4 pages with an added ending that she made up to finish it so that she could play it in music class tomorrow.  But tomorrow she will have to explain to Bob, her piano teacher why she hasn't been practicing her assigned songs. Oops.  She first heard this song played by Archie's girl Emily when she came to visit last April.

Allie says she knows she messed up on some of the notes and the timing is off, just in case Emily is watching.

Day 154

It wasn't that long ago his arms weren't tall enough to reach these toys above him.

Day 153 Bottoms up, then slide!

Zane has learned to get to toys he wants to play with by getting up on fours then sliding his arms out.  Repeat. he is our earliest scooter/crawler at 5 months.  Allie was 5 1/2 months when she figured it out.

Preschool 2010-2011

Hard to believe but another year has gone by, and tomorrow is preschool graduation! At the end of the school year I take portraits of the preschoolers so I can remember what they looked like at the end of their preschool years before they leave to go off to kindergarten.  I love to give them as gifts to their parents.  

The official preschool portraits - Class 2010-2011

Bryce - graduate

Maddie - 1st year

Cole - graduate, attended preschool 2 years

Ella - graduate, attended for 2 years

Gracie - graduate

Isa - 1st year

Isaac - graduate

Taeg - 1st Year

Tate - 1st year

Ty  - graduate

Day 152

Zane right after he woke up this morning.  Collin loves it when Zane has these pajamas on.  Us too!

5/22 Quiet

As I write this, the only thing I hear is the bathroom fan and the clicking of the computer keys as I type.  It is sweet bliss.  Baby is asleep and Kevin took the other three to watch Seminary graduation.  Yeah, the kitchen downstairs is still messy, but I am enjoying my time alone.  But just as I am starting to really enjoy the quiet, I heard the garage door, and two more minutes and it won't be quiet anymore.  Shoot!

Day 151 - 5 Months old!!

Woah!  Zane is five months old today.  Little guy loves to roll around, beginning to scoot and be on fours.  He is so cuddly and soft when he's sleepy but when he is wide awake, he is one busy boy and wants to touch and feel everything with his hands.  We love this little baby and the sweet little spirit that he is.

He is much, much too busy to even look at me!

Day 150

 Love the foam top?

Day 149

Day 148

Sadly the only photo I got of him today! And sadly, he's not happy either!

Old Post: A lesson on Being home on time

Old post from 5/18/2010.

This afternoon, Allie and her friend had a play date, and I asked her to make sure to be home by 4:30 the latest.  She has tennis lessons at 5, and usually she needs to be ready to go at 4:45 so she could be there on time.  At 4 p.m. they came back home, but sneaked back out to sell cookies.  No worries.  I don't worry about those two together. They're good.  But for sure I thought she would be back by 4:30.  Like she does always.

Not today.  4:30 rolled around and she wasn't home.  I was starting to worry that she wouldn't be home on time for tennis.4:45 came and sure enough her ride shows up and still no Allie! So I explain that Allie isn't home in time to go to tennis, so she can just go without her, and Allie can be grounded for two weeks.  It just came out of my mouth just like that.  I am sure at this point she was thinking, "what? two weeks for this?"  She asked if she should wait for a few minutes.  I said no.   She was supposed to be home 20 minutes ago, and she still isn't, so to just go.  Then, I added, maybe she didn't want to go to tennis, and she's purposefully late.  She adds, well, you're the mom, you know her the best. I agreed.

Just as she started getting ready to pull out of our driveway, I decided to look way far and lo and behold there is Allie and her friend strolling with a wagon behind them.  I motion for them to come hurry.  I don't think they could hear me, but they could see me.  As they got about 7 houses away, I yelled, "Hurry, Allie!"   It is now 4:50 p.m. and she really needs to hurry.  So I yell that her ride is here.  She finally hears me, and comes running back to the house.  She still has to go grab her tennis shoes.  She comes out and she doesn't know where her racquet is.  Luckily I know where it is and tell her it is in the mop closet.  So she goes back in the house and gets it.  She is off to tennis, finally.

She got home from tennis and we started talking about what happened.  I found out she was having too much fun that she completely forgot about tennis.  No plans to ditch at all.  A quick talk about why she should be home on time next time followed. Then we laughed about the fact that she almost got grounded for two weeks.  But, surprisingly, she said, "Maybe not two weeks, but I can be grounded for one day!"

She and her friend made over $5 selling the cookies, I heard.  No wonder she forgot about tennis.

Impromptu Costumes...

...that turned out pretty "awesome":  Late Wednesday night last week, Collin and Allie came home with a flyer that said Friday was their last special dress day -- and they would get to wear just about any costume as long as it was a character from their Knowledge-A-Thon bank of questions (think Art Masterpieces artists, historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, etc).  Collin promptly informed me he wanted to dress up as a Spanish Conquistador. But it being Thursday the next day with preschool from 9 to 3, I didn't have time to run to the store to find a conquistador hat and had no way of making one up! He was pretty bummed about that.  Allie thankfully was simple enough - she wanted to be a scientist.  She found some goggles in the dress up box, and told me she just needed her dad's white shirt for a lab coat.

I finally convinced Collin he could be Paul Revere.  Of course the outfit called for a tri-cornered hat, which we didn't have.  So very late that night (certainly way past my bedtime), I found instructions online and made the hat out of felt and paper.  I didn't know what to think of the finished hat, but was pretty proud of myself as soon as I saw Collin's face light up when he tried it on for the first time.  It wasn't the best hat, you know, but he was happy and so grateful he had a costume.  I love that boy!

 Paul Revere: white Sunday shirt, soccer knee socks, rolled up corduroy trousers, satchel, vest (really a fireman jacket inside out), and tri-cornered hat. Only thing missing is his long brown hair!

Going to Grandma's House

Maddie has been obsessed with going to her Grandma's house, literally, every day.  She asks to call her at 7 in the morning, then again at lunch, then again in the afternoon.  She's even learned how to work my cell phone so she can call her grandma's cell phone or home phone.  She has so much fun with her Grandma and loves it over at her house -- she gets 100% attention, gets to run errands with her, gets to feed the dog, etc.  This one day she was so set on sleeping over at her Grandma's that when she woke up, she packed up her things so she could go.  And the girl did a pretty nice job of gathering the things she needed for the sleepover.  She had two pairs of pajamas, a change of clothes, underwear, toothbrush and toothpaste, and a bag with little toys in it.  So funny!

Day 147

 Zane was in his car seat for the most part of the day.  Good sport!