80s Party

Welcome back to the 80s!!!! Last weekend we had a going away party for our awesome neighbor Davin, who just deployed to Afghanistan for at least a year. He chose the theme...an 80s dress up party! Quite a cast of characters showed up...

Michael Knight (from Knight Rider) and Hanz (of Hanz and Franz of SNL - We're here to PUMP YOU UP!)

The Ghostbusters

Bret Michaels (lead singer of 80s band Poison), and his groupie

Andy and Claire from the Breakfast Club

Maverick and Charlie from Top Gun

The guy from Better Off Dead.

Hanz and Franz from SNL - We're here to PUMP YOU UP!

Hanz and Franz showing off their muscles!

80s ladies!

There really is no caption for this one. : )

Getting geared up for Karaoke!

Even Rajeev was sucked in by the 80s ladies.

Awesome party...thanks Paula and Mary for hosting. Thanks for Davin being depolyed so we had a reason to do it! Thank you for serving our country...stay safe. The Cove will watch over Katie and the girls!

Birthday Girl!

Happy 7th Birthday Maggie!

We had to celebrate a couple days early due to Daddy going on a business trip, but she didn't care. Grandma and Grandpa were even in town to celebrate with her.

Lots of presents. Maya even contained herself and let Maggie open all of them.

Chapter books.

New game.

Easy Bake oven.

New gym bag!

Her actual birthday (today) consisted of school and gymnastics. I brought cupcakes to gymnastics tonight so the girls all ate those to celebrate. I can't believe she's already seven. Time flies. Happy Birthday Mags!

Maya's first day of school...finally!

Well, it wasn't when we expected, but Maya finally made it to her first day of school. She was sick on the official first day, but we made it today, barely. I was remembering back to Maggie's first day of 4 year old preschool with Mrs. Ringrose. She seemed so much bigger, and as I remember it, it went quite differently.
Maggie's first day - spiffy new school clothes
Maya's first day - hand me downs
Maggie's first day - showered body, curled hair
Maya's first day - chalky from yesterday's gymnastics, yesterdays slept on hair
Maggie's first day - arrived 10 min early to take pictures
Maya's first day - arrived with not a moment to spare, last kid in the class, a hurried picture at the classroom door.
Maggie's first day - drove right to the school
Maya's first day - took the round about way because I apparently was headed to the grocery store, not school.

But, we made it, she's happy, and I'm finally free! Good thing we don't have a third kid or they might not make it to school at all!

First of First

The first day of first grade...its a wonderful thing. Good thing school started or we were gonna have to kick her to the curb. Year round school isn't such a bad idea. : )

Hyped up and ready to go.

The Tri-fecta. (Kyra, Meghan N., Mags)

Addison Alcove bus stop this year. Quite a crew with four new kindergartners this year!

Ahhhhh....the bus is FINALLY here! See ya'll later!

Maya watching the bus go...wishing she was on it. Preschool doesn't start for 2 weeks yet. Bummer.

Sunflowers

This year in our little garden, I was out voted and it turned into a flower garden instead of a vegie garden. We planted wild flowers and sunflowers...giant sunflowers. We grew these from seeds and the package wasn't joking...these babies are HUGE!

This was like 2 weeks ago. They're almost as tall as the first floor of the house and at the bottom, the stems are 2+ inches in diameter.

The blossoms got so big that they bent over and actually broke the stem, so I cut them off. I tried scissors, but it took one of the kitchen knives to cut those suckers off.

As you can see, they are bigger than our heads!

Maggie's Statue of Liberty pose. : )

These sunflowers were cool, but I think next year we'll be back to zucchini and cucumbers.

Hip Hip Hooray...

...Maya made her very first bridge kick over today!

A's and oil pastels

Summer is coming to an end...only 2 weeks till school starts. Time to get back into the swing of learning. We've been doing "homework" sporadically throughout the summer, but we've tried to kick it into high gear in the last week or so. Maya is definitely in need of some extra help. Poor thing, she just can't keep up with her smarty pants big sister. Her writing is terrible, which I'm sure is totally normal for a 4 year old, but we've been trying to work on it some. Last week we started with good ol' letter A. We started with some printing, and then I got out the shaving cream and let her try some that way.

Pretty good with the capital letter...the lowercase took a bit more practice, but she finally got it.

I've been trying to get her to write her name with lowercase A's, so this is an important one for her, but a hard one too, she likes to put the line on the left side instead of the right. Oh well...practice makes perfect!

She is not a traditional pen and pencil learner like Maggie, so I'm having to be a bit more creative. I think the shaving cream was a success though! Later in the week we learned how to write the letter "T". This one we did by painting. Much more fun than writing with a pencil don'tcha think?!

We've also been slacking a little on the art projects, but last week when I was watching the neighbor kids, I pulled out some paper and the oil pastels and they created masterpieces! I got this idea from one of the blogs I read but can't remember which one (sorry!). I had the girls start with a circle and color in a rainbow of circles around the original one. A total "no fail" project.

They all turned out great. I might even frame some of them and put them downstairs in the basement for some color and give the walls a "modern art" kind of look. Now to come up with something for this week.... ; )