Almost a Beehive

Crazy...but we have a beehive, almost! ... in 3 1/2 months!  Allie is turning into a beautiful young lady before my very eyes - and I cannot believe it.  In January, we went to New Beginnings - she was super excited to learn more about the Young Women program (that's for girls ages 12-18 in our Church, the best program for teenage girls, if you ask me!).

Allie and her BFF Alexa, who is a Beehive.  Allie can't wait to be in YW.

The theme was Choose to Shine - "Arise and Shine Forth" and they did a beautiful job of using the Sunflower as a symbol for the YW following the Savior, and shining.  They introduced the new girls this year - and told a little about how they shine.  Allie shines in many things, and I don't mean to brag about her - sometimes it is good to write about the good things they are involved in though - it makes them feel very special. Allie is friendly and makes friends with everyone - she is talented, super creative, and loves to learn, and is a big help at home - she loves to bake and make sweet things.  What girl doesn't, right?  I realized that she is a super busy gal too - when I wrote about the things she was involved in: Student Council, Cheerleading, Piano, Guitar, and Dance, not to mention her unofficial creativity in Photoshop Elements and illustrating/design (she did a whole bunch of Relief Society Meeting posters for me last year even).
The thing is - she also put herself in all of those things (minus piano, since I put her in that a few years ago).  She enjoys all of it - and gone are the days when she fought me like mad for "signing her up" for things she didn't want to be in.  So I guess they go through a phase like that and if you stick it out patiently with them, the time will come when they will want to be involved in things.
I had a friend who told me her girl would be in everything if she let her, and I thought to myself - how I can get Allie to be that way - at the time mine didn't want to be in anything and fought to be out of things!  It passes, I now know.  With a little plodding in the right direction, and experiences at middle school, Allie just came to me one day and said, "Mom here is a list of the things I want to be good at."  It was a LONG list.  She thanked me (yes, thanked!) for making her practice the piano so she can be good at it.  I know, right?
So Allie, on her own, turned into the girl that wants to do everything - and now she cannot wait to take up classes on this or that, earn lots of money (ha ha, she is all about FAST money), and constantly planning things like where she is going to high school and what she's gonna do in college.  She begged to take guitar lessons - she loves to play Taylor Swift songs - and then one day she came up to me and asked if she could please sign up for dance classes, so of course she could.

Allie and her friend Audri

Cheerleaders!  She is so sad the season is over.  Their team lost their playoff game. 

They did a dance routine at halftime.  Sadly I didn't have the right lens for the big group shot.

Allie and I the day of the playoff game - my friend and I took our girls to lunch after. They were bummed the season was over!  Last weekend, one of the cheerleader friends hosted a sleepover party - and for Allie and her friend Alexa it was a late night.  Kevin and I waited up for her to come home - and we realized this was the start of a new chapter for us - I never thought the day would come this fast when he and I would be waiting up for our girl to come home from a party.  She was of course, still all giggly from the all-girl party when she walked in the door.  I am sure the giggles go away too?!

She is getting to be very responsible.  She babysat her siblings while Kevin and I went to the temple last month, and she had it all planned.  She had put everyone to bed before we got home.  It was sweet, and she earned money to go towards Time to Blossom in the summer. I took these photos of the day she officially babysat for us:

The movies she planned to show

The setup outside the movie room

Funny showtimes

But this one tops the cake:

This was her checklist.  Oh Allie loves lists. to do lists. She makes them all the time. The writing in Blue is Collin's.  He was her assistant and made sure every thing was done.  Guess who "destroyer boy" is?

New Reader!

Miss Maddie is pleased as punch that she is now reading simple c-v-c words.  She had been dying to use our pink boxes at preschool for the longest time - sometimes she would get a box out only to put it away because she was having a hard time trying to sound out the words.  But last week, she got them out, asked if I could NOT please help her, because she could do it herself.  So I watched from the table while I gave another his reading lesson.  

She did the first box, slowly sounded out each letter, then blended them together!  I was so excited! and so was she!  She worked on a second box, then a third - she got tired in the middle of that one, but all in all she read 15 words, and matched them to the right object.  She couldn't wait to tell Allie and Collin when they got home from school, and showed her new feat to Kevin when he got home from work.  The next preschool day, she did the same, just super into her new-found skill.

The thing with Maddie, is that I haven't really worked with her all that much.  True, she has been in preschool the last two years, but oh she is so stubborn and wants to do everything with NO help from me.  A few weeks ago, she passed off the first 26 Spalding phonograms (there are 71 total), earning herself a "Phonogram Expert" award and candy bar in preschool (we have a challenge in preschool to recite all of them without any help from me).   That one I didn't really do more than just have her recite the phonograms with the preschoolers 2x a week.  Sometimes she gets bored and she doesn't want to participate.  But she obviously was taking it all in, and just listening quietly did its job! She is really good at it.  She is also at the right window for writing - she writes like crazy and has recently taken to writing letters and numbers all the time.  

I love this stage. The magic age of 4 - the age they burst in knowledge and application in reading and writing!  It's a whole new world, and I can't wait til she can get to reading sentences.    I think this age is my favorite - next to newborn goodness, of course.  So cool! And Miss Maddie, of course, you did it all yourself, (with a tiny bit of help from mom)!

Zane in January

So I am super behind on posting, but I have got to get these up here - lil guy is getting bigger and taller every day, and so here are January photos of Zaney - I cannot believe February is almost gone again, and I have so much to blog about, but so little time.  I know I need to because when I don't blog right away, I usually forget all the little things I want to remember forever.  At least I have photos!  

I miss taking photos of lil man every day!

 More breakfast photos

 Another messy face shot - I love that he loves to eat breakfast, his biggest meal of the day!

The big messy pile of books is still in our theatre room, waiting to be housed in that wall of bookcases. 

Zane is very good at climbing and scaling anything at home.  Scary at times for me.  He cannot be left alone.

Zane likes to put things back where he thinks things go.  He saw a pile of shoes by the backdoor and a trashcan that didn't have feet to go back up to Allie's room - pretty soon he had all the shoes in the trash can. Then he got them back out, and repeated the whole exercise.

There are his two top teeth.  This was the best I could do: