Sunday, April 26, 2009

Early Summer?

Last week I wrote about the signs of spring, and it seems we have leaped right to summer as we reached temperatures of 90 degrees on Saturday!

It seems like the weekend went by in a blur. I took Friday off to get some bids on various house projects we're considering- adding a fourth wall to our loft/guest room, interior painting and adding plantation shutters downstairs. If we proceed, it will make for a busy May!

We got a small taste of it on Saturday as the roofers showed up two days early to install our new roof (necessitated by the September wind storm). I wasn't planning on us being home for the roofing project and quickly began to wonder whether Lily could maintain her barking at the roofers for the whole day (in actuallity, it was just the better part of an hour). Since we had a lot planned for Saturday, we quickly had to figure out where we could exit the house without bumping ladders or having shingles dropped on us and learned to deal with the pounding-- I opted to do a lot of errands!

One of the things that kept us out of the house on Saturday was Katie's first soccer game. You can see Jamie coaching in the photo above. He cites the small airport nearby as one of the team's weaknesses, as every plane that flies over becomes an instant distraction, along with the dandelions, butterflies, etc.!
Saturday night Jamie and I attended a blacktie fundraiser, and I went to my friend Ricia's house where we "did our hair" (actually we recruited her friends with more hair styling skills to do our hair), but it was another great reason to be out of the house! We had a great time, but I was struggling through a case of "brown bottle flu" Sunday morning.


Katie's Sunday School class had their parent program after the mass, which we enjoyed. I included some video of the performance below. You can see that Katie was really getting into it!

After church, we packed a picnic lunch and went to a nearby park to see the spring flowers. It was absolutely gorgeous and the girls enjoyed running around in the sunshine. We saw some cool turtles and especially loved the baby one that we saw (photo below)! Katie was very pleased to have her picture taken and willingly posed. Caroline was more hit and miss. I got some big cheesey smiles and a few refusals to look at me (one of which is included below).


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Monday, April 20, 2009

Signs of Spring

We received the proofs from the girls' school photos this week. They turned out cute with nice smiles, but apparently the hair stylist was out! I would like to reach into these photos and tuck Caroline's hair behind her ears!




We had some nice weather this week and Saturday had us in the mood to start summer. We began the process of unloading the porch furniture from the playhouse. The girls enjoyed their snack out there, and we conducted the annual measuring on the growth chart.
The girls helped me wash up the grill. You'll notice that Caroline possesses at least one of the qualities of a good work man (think plumber).


Sunday we went to Indianapolis for Emma's baptism. We arrived a little too early and unfortunately had to entertain Caroline during the mass prior to the official baptism. Jamie and I are Emma's godparents, which left Grandma and Poppy (along with Billy's parents and sister) to manage our girls.


The highlight of the ceremony was when Mom was bringing Caroline back from one of her many trips to the potty, and as she was trying to quietly close the door, Caroline made a break for it and came running down one of the aisles heading straight for the alter. From our vantage point we saw the streak of blue and realized that Grandma had no chance to catch her (although she made a great effort). Caroline ran right on by the priest who was in the middle of blessing one of the other babies and ran right across the alter. Mom had no choice but to follow her. Billy and I were shaking with laughter.


Emma was very well-behaved! She fell asleep just before the water portion so he had an abrupt wake-up call, but settled right back down.


Meanwhile the girls in the row behind us were a little more restless. Thank goodness Billy's sister Liz mesmerized the girls by letting them go through her purse!




Afterwards we went back to Jen and Billy's for lunch and the girls got to play. Caroline and Hannah are much more interested in each other and even held hands while Billy was reading them a nap-time story. Caroline woke up asking for "My Hannah" and Katie and Hannah continue to bond over the fact that they are "oldests."

Emma just tries not to get stepped on!

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Sunday, April 12, 2009

Happy Easter!

The week started out with a big victory for Caroline who won my office NCAA basketball pool and collected $172. She had no idea what to do with the money and dropped most of it on the floor (good thing we snuck it off to her college account). We realized later as she was asking about swimming that she thought the celebration was about another sort of pool! I should note that most of her picks were contributed by Jamie, although she correctly selected North Carolina to win, based on its resemblance to her name.

Katie's big news this week was that she was accepted into the all-day kindergarten program at the Catholic school we've selected. She was very proud that her screening test came back with nothing to work on and called our kindergarten expert (Grandma) to share the news. Poppy asked her how she got so smart and she responded "It's just me."






As we talked more and more about Easter the girls were delighted to receive surprise Easter packages from Jamma and Bates. Katie got right to work on the puzzles and one morning before school she very seriously tried to help Caroline learn the name of the Disney princesses. She was terrific with her and when Caroline would mis-promounce one, she'd say "Don't worry. You'll get it."



One evening after the girls were bathed and PJ'd Jamie snuck them under our covers so that they could surprise me. You can see they were very pleased with themselves! All was well until Lily decided to join the fun . . . she's not the best at gauging where people's limbs are.


Saturday's big activity was dying our Easter eggs. Unfortunately, I had the girls excited to do it and then we needed to wait for Jamie to have a post-lawn mowing shower. It was really hard to stall (you can only practice the colors on the box so many times . . .) and then once the dyes were mixed up, it was even harder to keep their hands out of them.




Caroline was all about purple and dyed her first 5 eggs that color. Although, later she started grabbing her completed eggs and dumping them into other colors, so she ended up with some variation. Katie very carefully made sure that she had a full rainbow of eggs.














The down side of the activity was that we really struggled to get the dye off of Caroline's hands. One was purple and the other was black (if you're wondering about how we got black, when we were done, we poured all of the dye into one pot- which turned black- and Caroline got her hand in it). After doing some online research, the prevailing advice was Lava soap, so we picked some up as we were out doing errands. I will add my testimonial that Lava soap worked the best out of the options we tried.

Of course after we finished scrubbing up Caroline so that she was in Easter Sunday form, Katie returned from playing next door where Miranda had painted her "nails." I use the word nails loosely because it looked more like she had painted from the knuckle up, and unfortunatley it looked awful- as if she had stuck her hand in a blender. More scrubbing ensued, with the addition of nail polish remover to the Lava soap.















Easter began with the girls having hard bolied eggs for breakfast. Katie was up bright and early and all dressed in her church clothes.

We saved the Easter egg hunt until after church. This year we had a scavenger hunt with clues leading from one egg to the next, with the baskets hidden at the end.
The girls found their first eggs in their car seats on the way to church. I read them the clue and after several minutes of hard thinking Katie asked "How did the bunny write this clue?" And, to increase the level of difficulty the clues were typed, so the rabbit would need to be computer savvy as well as be able to speak/write! I told her that he probably had helpers like Santa. She said, "Oh, so they might be people?" I found this whole exchange rather comical since I always pictured the Easter bunny to be like the one at the mall. Since they have never visited this sort of bunny, she obviously pictures a small animal.













There were two eggs at each location, but only one had the clue. Katie very quickly figured this out and I noticed she would race to the location and then discretely open both eggs and then say "here's yours, Caroline" pointing to the one without the note. This reminded me of one of Jamma's favorite stories to tell about Jamie. He and his brother David had identical goldfish and one day Jamie discovered one of them floating on the surface of the water. He yelled "Dave, your goldfish died!"

Caroline didn't care one way or the other. She kept getting distracted by things we found along the way. The second clue took them to the playhouse and mentioned a place where they could play chalk. She immediately began asking to do chalk. Later the eggs were in the dollhouse and that ended Caroline's involvement in the hunt.







As we neared the last clue and it was time to find the baskets, we called Caroline upstairs. Once she laid eyes on the basket she reached out and grabbed the peeps on top and had two in her mouth before we could protest!





The girls were also excited about their new hula hoops and sidewalk chalk. The played in the back, while I got brunch ready.







Then got to the long-awaited chalk.




It was a nice sunny day, but never got very warm. After Caroline got done pretending she was the Easter bunny, she decided she was cold. She popped inside and returned in the outfit of four seasons, which included capri pants, rain boots, a winter hat and a fallish jacket.





On our way up to the bath, she stopped for a nap on the steps!
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