Summer=flip flops

This cracks me up. Notice two things: Catherine puts her flops on the wrong foot, and she can't quite get the toe placement right. But hey, she gets them on herself and that is a start.
Little Miss Priss, Lauren, is so proud to show off her newly painted toes. She is so worried the polish will come off in the pool or bath. We love our flip flops.

It's Officially Over

.....my quest for my Masters in Education. I graduated as of last Saturday! I am so thankful to be DONE and back to my former life. I have missed my girls and missed having time to clean my house, go to the grocery store, get my hair cut, clean out closets, etc. Wait. I don't think I spent much time cleaning or organizing prior to my internship (but don't tell John!) I really have missed simple daily pleasures like blogging and taking my children to the park.

So, what now? I guess I'll have this baby and go from there. A lot of people have asked if I plan to teach immediately and the answer is, not yet. I would like to do some tutoring on the side, so if anyone knows of anybody looking for a qualified tutor, please pass on my name!

Here is some randomness for your day. John's birthday was a couple of weeks ago and he wanted chicken noodle soup and sandwiches for his birthday dinner. Seriously. That is all he wanted. I offered to cook him whatever he wanted or we could have gone out. But, he wanted soup and sandwiches. Oh, and he doesn't like sweets, so I really got off easy. I didn't bake him a cake or even a pie. But, the strawberries are delish right now, so I got stuff for strawberry shortcake. More for the girls and I than John! Anyway....I digress. We were eating our soup and sandwiches and this is what John found in his soup:


Yes, that is a bolt nestled within the noodles of his Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup. A rather large bolt. Here's what I want to know: how exacly did this bolt make its way to our can of soup? Was it an integral part of the machine from which it came? Did this particular bolt cause the entire factory to halt production? Or, are there any other machinery parts floating around in cans of Campbell's soup? Did anyone realize a large bolt was missing from one of the machines at the Campbell's soup cannery? Just some random questions I have.

Our Little Ballerina

A few weeks ago Lauren's ballet school had a Christmas demonstration. The instructors are so sweet and patient with the young children. I was amazed at how much they had learned since they started in September. She's the one on the far right.



What was so amazing to me what this: each week I ask Lauren what see did in ballet that day. Usually, she says "we danced." I'll ask her to show me and she may put her hands above her head and twirl around, or do the little number below, but that's about all I get.


I'm not sure if she was ahead of or behind the rest of the class in the sequence of their dance in that picture.

Now, the lighting was bad for pictures since we were asked to abstain from flash photography. So most of our pictures were blurry. I mean, we wouldn't want to break anyone's concentration or worse, interfere with our little professional performance.


For the most part, they all held it pretty much together, as much as you would expect from any four year old. And, they were all precious. Each class danced to a song from The Nutcracker. Lauren's class was Marzipan, some were Gingerbread, others were the wind-up dolls. That class was especially cute. (Shout out to you, Susie!)

It was tons of fun to see all of our other little friends that are in the various classes. As you can see, Lauren and Ella Grace were really excited to see each other.

I mean really, really excited. Man, those girls LOVE each other. Aren't they sweet and cute?!!

Lauren's daddy and I were super proud of our little ballerina. And, of all of our friend's little girls. If they all performed this well for the Christmas demonstration, I can't wait to see what they'll do for the real-deal, full-out recital in May!

Couldn't Help Myself

I just had to post this picture:

As you can see, we have a couple of princesses in our household!

Little Bo Peep and her sheep

BAAAA!!! Catherine was in character the whole night and even kept the headpiece I made on her head most of the evening! Yes, you read correctly. Believe it or not, I am quite crafty at times. I made most of her costume using an old rabbit suit from a former Halloween costume. Just sewed some felt on the ends for hooves, hot glued some white pom-poms for sheep fleece, and made her headband with more pom-poms, some wire, and felt! Like Big Mama put it, I'm like a ghetto Martha Stewart. You can do anything with a glue gun.


I was really worried that Lauren would figure out how to use her staff to grab Catherine by the neck or start whacking people with it. Luckily, she just figured it was a useless accessory and carried it around with no incident.

Trick or treating gets better each year as the girls get older. It is a good thing they don't quite understand that they could go to every house in the neighborhood if they wanted. So, we just went to a few on our street with some good friends that live just a few houses down. As you can see, Catherine started in on her candy immediately. Knox is the cute little monkey you see, Stewart, our policeman (he did a great job patrolling the street and keeping the kiddos in line.) And, Caroline, our spunky diva. Trust me, her costume was fab, she just got a little chilly so needed her coat.Caroline and Catherine inspect their loot. Catherine wanted to eat each piece of candy she received right after it dropped in her bucket. "Save it for later" was completely lost and useless on her.

"Can we please stop posing for photos, and go get some more candy already?!"

Isn't dressing our children up so much fun?! I guess this is probably the last year I will dictate what they will wear for Halloween.

Now it's time to think about Thanksgiving and Christmas. Is anyone else freaking out a little that we're this close to Christmas?! I need to get out and get some shopping done, pronto!

Zoo Girls

The girls and I went to the Montgomery zoo with some precious friends on Monday. The city schools had a day off so that means our pre-schools were out as well. It was a beautiful day and we had so much fun with Susie, Isabel and Chaney.


This was an exhibit that was part of some weird Halloween scenes the zoo had set up for their annual "ZooBoo." I'm not sure what flowers or fake worm-snake-looking things have to do with Halloween, but the girls had fun playing in the exhibit. It reminded me of the sort of strange scene one would see in Alice in Wonderland or Wicked. (Am I supposed to italacize or put those titles in quotes? Teacher friends, that question is for you.)

If you think that looks weird you should have seen the scene they had set up with Cinderella, Snow White, and a transvestite knight! Or transvesknight, as Susie coined it (pretty clever, huh?) One of the little ones pulled the wigs off of the scary princesses. I tried to fix it, and we quickly moved on.


Here they all are at the maned wolf exhibit or maybe one of those fox things. All I remember is it was really musky and stinky and the large, fox looking thing was asleep. As you can (sort of) see, the girls were more interested in the turtles swimming in the moat.

Isabel pointing out the giraffe to everyone.

If you look real close, it looks like the giraffe is licking Isabel's head in this one.

The train ride is always one of the highlights. We ran into some more Auburn friends and got to share our train ride with them. Again, more weird and some freaky, scary scenes were set up along the train route. Luckily, the kiddos are probably still a little young to even know to be scared. Even more strange, the zoo had put trash bags over the heads of some of the mummies, monsters, etc. I'm more traumatized by those images than what we would have seen otherwise.

This was the best photo I could get on the train. Aren't they cute?!

The train ride was at the end of our trip, so nobody was especially cooperative with my photo attempts. We had a great time, but missed you and your boys, Nonet!!

New Trick

Look what the sitter taught Lauren to do today. John is so proud. I just hope she doesn't do that at pre-school the next time they serve oranges for snack. (Please ignore the mess in my kitchen, I promise I cleaned it before I blogged!)