Cadence is 9!

YOU GUYS.  I have a 9 year old.  It is great that she is becoming more independent everyday.  It is also hard that she is becoming more independent everyday.  Cadence is so full of thoughts and ideas and questions.  Here's her answers to the annual birthday questionnaire.  (And last year's, just for fun.)

Favorite color: Turquoise

Favorite book: Dolphin Tale and Warriors: Into the Wild

Favorite food: pizza

Favorite dessert: ice cream

Favorite song: "I have a lot!  Okay...Safe and You got me and Roar and Fireflies and Can't Stop the Feeling...okay...that's all."

Favorite subject at school: Reading

Favorite place to go: "The porch so I can play with Pumpkin and the aquarium and the beach house."

Favorite toy: All of them

Favorite Show: How to Train Your Dragon and Ever After High

Favorite Movie: Dolphin Tale


Favorite Bible Story: Esther - "she's cool."

Favorite Restaurant: Chik-fil-a

What do you want to be when you grow up?: A dolphin trainer or a vet

What is the best thing about being Cadence?: "Oh!  Um, this is a hard question.  There's so many good things about being me, but none of them are like the best thing.  Okay, that I live here.  And I have a pet cat.  And a zipline."

Happy Halloween!

This year, Cadence was Felicity, the discontinued American girl doll.  (Basically, a colonial girl).  I made her whole costume, which I came to regret a little bit, because while it turned out great - it took a lot of my precious free time this month.

Piper was a unicorn.  This was a super easy costume.  I made a felt horn and attached it to a headband, then made a mane and tail with ribbon and yarn attached to felt.

Cadence is 7! An interview

Favorite color: "All the colors except orange."
Favorite book: Fancy Nancy or Magic Treehouse
Favorite food: I don't know
Favorite dessert: I don't know
Favorite song: Let it go and Tomorrow
Favorite subject at school: math and listening to reading
Favorite place to go: "I think the dining hall because I can see my friends."
Favorite toy: all of them
What do you want to be when you grow up?: "I'm going to keep that a secret...I have a lot of ideas."
How many teeth have you lost?: "Let me count...6!"

What we are loving now {august 2015}

Here's what we were loving this August:

1. Duplos. Piper became straight up obsessed with these this month. She has always been a builder, now she loves making homes for all her little animals.

2. Stacy's Pita Chips - Simply Naked. Listen, August is hard. Everyone goes back to school; there are a slew of meetings; we all get used to new routines.  I Big-puffy-heart LOVE pita chips. Like, I can't buy the big bags anymore because I will eat the whole thing in 2 days. So I got the 24 pack of individual bags. And their crunchy saltiness carried me through.

3. Gilmore Girls. This is my favorite show of all time. And, because August is so exhausting, I hit good old GG hard this month. It's familiar, fast-paced, funny, full of feeling. 

4. Nancy Clancy, Super Sleuth.  Cadence has been a long-time fan of the Fancy Nancy books.  It's become a full-on franchise with picture books, beginning readers and chapter books.  She's not ready to read these chapter books on her own, so we usually read one chapter each night.

First Day of First Grade!

what we're loving now {July 2015}

So, I'm still writing this blog after all these years because I like going back and seeing bits of our life I've documented. Here's what we're loving this July:

San Francisco - Matt and I went to SF for 6 days.  We ate a lot of great food, and walked around a lot looking at architecture and the water.

Octonauts - Cadence and Piper are loving watching this Disney Jr. show together on Netflix.

The Annie 2014 film and soundtrack - The girls and I saw this at the free kids film festival our local theater does every summer.  I like the original Annie, but I like this one better - Ms. Hannigan has a change of heart at the end of the movie that I appreciated, and the music is really fun.  C was asking for the soundtrack for her upcoming birthday, but then we discovered it was available on Amazon Prime music.  The girls go around singing "Tomorrow" and "Hard Knock Life" with slightly erroneous lyrics.

uSwim - Cadence has been at the not-gonna-drown swimming level for the past two summers, and we really wanted to solidify her skills this summer.  Unfortunately, the swimming lesson options around here are limited, expensive, and inconvenient.  So, I did some research and found uSwim, free online video lessons from Australia.  Matt and Cadence review the video, print out the lesson checklist and then go practice at the lake.  She has improved by leaps and bounds.

First 5 app - I love my YouVersion Bible app and have used it heavily for the last few years.  However, when I heard about First5, I decided to try it out for my morning scripture.  The app provides a Bible passage and short reading each day, but what I really like is the alarm feature so that my morning alarm is set in this app. When I silence the alarm, it goes directly to the devotional.  I am automatically waking up to scripture, reflection, and prayer instead of noticing the emails that arrived overnight or checking my calendar.

Baked Cream Cheese Chicken Taquitos recipe - I've made this twice in the last two weeks.  It's REALLY GOOD.

Snow classy

When it snowed (for real, like 6+ inches) a couple of weeks ago, we may have been slightly unprepared.

One of us had snow boots.  Some of us may have been wearing rain boots with holes in them.

I meant to buy a sled, but didn't, so we used a trash can lid.  

And someone who is 3 and a half may have had to wear the 24 month snow suit.  And gotten a lot of snow in her boots.  

*please remind me to get us better outfitted for winter next year.

some time to breathe...

Oh my goodness, was this month more than I expected!  So many parties and events, even though I tried to downsize.  We are in a good place now, though.  Work is done for me until Jan. 5, so is school for Cadence.  Matt finished his master's program.  The last party was attended on Saturday night.  

It feels really good.  We are staying home this year during the whole break, mainly because Matt has to work for some of it.  We are hosting guests, but it's really good for us this year to not be rushing to pack and drive.  Especially because Piper has a UTI (that involved visiting the Urgent Care at Wal-mart yesterday afternoon) and Cadence has a runny nose.

In the middle of all our events last week, we found some time to play in the yard Friday afternoon.  Cadence and Piper built a birdhouse.

Clearly, we dressed ourselves for this occasion. That's a pink polka dot and brown jacket, a black headband, a red and green cherry dress, green pants, and pink plaid shoes.  I feel like Piper is going to be a fashion risk-taker.  

No word yet on whether the birds have moved in.

"Making these cookies should be called a celebration of noses...

Because they smell sooooo good!"

Halloween and All Saints Day 2014

We jammed a bunch of Halloween activities into a couple days this year.  First, on Wednesday, we finally carved pumpkins.  We used the pumpkins we inadvertantly grew in July.  One had a hole in the bottom, but that was fine, since we used a drill to do our jack-o-lantern designs this year anyway.

I had to do some sewing on Wednesday night to prepare Cadie's Tinkerbell costume (the dress was done for the birthday party back in August, but we needed a little cape like the jacket Tink wears in The Secret of the Wings).  I also had to sew her Deborah costume for All Saints Day at school, which they celebrated Friday.

sewing for Deborah

Trick-or-treating was Thursday night.  All the little campus kids get together and go to faculty homes and dorms.  If you ask them, the best part is riding on the big kid school buses to get everywhere.  Here's some of the crew waiting to head out.

that building with the columns in the background?  my library

one of friends' families was two penguins and Antarctica!

I made that Belle dress too!  Our buddy E borrowed it!

The girls were happy with their costumes.  Cadence knew for months that she would be Tinkerbell, but Piper kept changing her mind before settling on a "puma cat."  She learned about pumas on Go, Diego, Go! and has been telling people facts about them.  

Finally, here's Cadence in her Deborah costume, ready to go to school on Friday.

Happy Halloween...

From Tinkerbell and a "puma cat"!

(We actually did our trick-or-treating yesterday.  More pics to come tomorrow.)

Happy Independence Day!

Cadence is 5 now

 Last month, Cadence turned 5.  It's so hard to believe.  She's so big.  And so interesting and fun.  Her whole life, she's asked really great questions, and that's only gotten better as she's gotten older.  Today's question: how do you make cottage cheese?

The last few months have brought a big change for her - she's going to school everyday, from 8:30 to 3:00.  Which has been an adjustment.  She says she loves school, but it has sometimes been hard for her to dive in and do the work that is challenging.  Like her mother, Cadence tends to avoid anything that could possibly result in less than perfection, let alone failure.  That said, Matt and I have noticed a significant increase in her desire to learn and try new things and to be independent.  And she comes home singing cool songs (although she includes "Australasia" instead of "Australia" in the one about the continents).

And of course, she's got an imagination that won't quit.  See?  Some kind of princess pirate thing was going on here.  We're really into art projects around here lately.  Just yesterday we made playdough monsters and beaded jewelry.  I love that she's old enough for me to give her supplies and see what she comes up with.

Without further ado, her answers to the usual questions:

Favorite color: pink

Favorite foods: peanut butter and jelly sandwich

Favorite song: "Danasay"  I am totally unsure of the spelling of that one. It's a song from Ghana that she learned at school.  She sings it all. the. time.

Favorite toys: princess dolls

Favorite activities: art projects, dance parties in the living room, and coming up with elaborate schemes for parties, costumes, or games

Favorite show: Backyardigans

Favorite movie: Jungle Book

Favorite book: She couldn't give me an answer for this one.  It's so hard to choose favorite books.  We do love the Jesus Storybook Bible read it all the time, so we can go with that.

Dance concert!

Cadence has completed her first year of an extracurricular activity, since she finished up her year of Creative Movement class (an introduction to ballet and basic dance technique).  I didn't know what to do when 4:30 rolled around on Monday afternoon and we weren't headed to the dance studio.  She loved it, especially being a part of the huge dance concert that included all the "big kids".

Ready to dance!  She's practicing one of the steps

She had to work hard to remember all her steps and even then she didn't get all of them on stage.  But we were very proud that she didn't get flustered or upset when she missed something, she just listened to the music and looked at her classmates and got back on track.  And kept smiling!

Before the concert with some buddies in the studio/dressing room

She had 3 of her grandparents here for this, so that was pretty exciting too.  Plus, since the show was in the theater at daddy's school and included the aforementioned "big kids" from daddy's school, many of our friends and daddy's co-workers have been affirming her performance. It was adorable.  I think the girls in her class almost could have just stood on the stage with their cute costumes on and still would have gotten applause.

Cadence and Dassa

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She was really tired when it was all over.  Two concerts and a dress rehearsal is a grueling schedule for a 4 year old!  I can only imagine in a few years when she wants to do ballet, and tap, and cirque.  And play t-ball too.  Yikes. (We won't really let her do all those activities.  Two, maybe.)

This Saturday is her end-of-the-year program at preschool.  Once that's done, summer can really begin!