Piper is 6!

Really, it's a shame she has no personality. Geewhiz.

Piper is 6.  Wow!  Time flies when you are having fun, I suppose. She just started at a new school this week, the school where Matt and I work. All summer, she was not happy about it, but now she seems pretty cool with things.  Piper is great at sharing, expressing herself verbally (seriously, SOO expressive), and being super imaginative.  She loves animals and making unusual fashion choices.  Here is her birthday interview.  And her past interviews : Five, Four, Three, Two.

Favorite food: Fried Okra

Favorite dessert: "That is hard.  Ice cream."

Favorite animal: Cheetah

Favorite show: Lion Guard

Favorite Movie: Lion King

Favorite book: Animals Around the World

Favorite song: Roar 

What do you want to be when you grow up? Giggling - "I don't know!"

Where do you want to live when you grow up?  "In R-----, still.  I need somebody to move out so I can live here.  Unless there's any empty houses...I could live next door to you when I grow up." #boardingschoolkid4ever

Favorite thing to play: Be whatever you want

Favorite Color: Purple

What is the best thing about being Piper? "That I'm in kindergarten."

She is also very excited about her new backpack and matching lunchbox and dance bag.

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.

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.

Piper is 4!

As per tradition, we bring you: Piper's birthday interview.

Favorite food: Fried Okra

Favorite animal: "Pumas, cheetahs, snow leopards, regular leopards, tigers, lions..."

Favorite book: "I don't want to tell you.  I like all the books I read."

Favorite work at school: Cylinder blocks

Favorite play at home: building with Duplos, playing with pampered palace pets

Favorite TV show: "Dinosaur Train...and Octonauts, Daniel Tiger...and My Little Pony!"  So basically, any show you've watched in the last month.  Got it.  

Oh, this kid.  She's a nut.  She's so giggly and sweet.  And sometimes very stubborn.  She is curious and has a lot of interesting ideas.  I'm so excited to go through this 4th year with her. 4 is a great age, and Piper is going to do it so well.  

First Day of K4!

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.

I still make things...

Piper is styling a new scarf I knit. All other outfit choices...well, let's just say I had nothing to do with those.

New Bulletin: One of My Children Agrees To Talk To and Be Photographed with Santa!

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.

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.)

Piper is 3!

Last week, our littlest girl turned 3. She requested a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting (I did a variation on our favorite friday cake and simple buttercream).  Piper is so...herself.  One of our friends was watching her at the girls' birthday party this weekend and commented on how she just doesn't care what everyone else is doing.  She was going to do her own thing and have fun.  On the other hand, she usually lets her big sister have her way and is happy to hand over a toy or a snack.  I have her here next to me to answer some birthday questions.

Favorite color: pink (this is new)

Favorite food: chicken and fries, like at Chick-fil-a

Favorite book: Little People Zoo Book

Favorite show: Dinosaur Train

Favorite Toy: Applejack pony

Favorite song: Dinosaur train song

Favorite activity: drawing and "playing with my toys when I'm a big girl"

Favorite movie: Frozen "I'm not scared of Marshmallow. I'm not scared of that guy...Marshmallow turns out to be a good guy."

"That's me with a sticker on my face."

She got some special things for her birthday.  Cadence gave her this green toys flower building set and you can see the $3 she got from her buddy GrandDado.  She also got a suitcase from Nana and Dadder (which she had really been wanting) and a really cool Princess Anna costume, made by Dassa.  In addition to a few little things from Matt and me, we took her to Walmart and let her pick out a present.  We weren't sure what to expect, since she'd been saying she wanted everything from "all the headbands" to "another yellow snake."  She examined a lot of things in the princess/dolly aisle, under the supervision of Cadence, of course.  But as soon as she saw Applejack pony, a stuffed version of this My Little Pony, she didn't even want to look at anything else.  

Happy Independence Day!