Anna back to school (Finally!)

My last back to school post of 2013, at long last, Anna!  She started school on Monday of last week.  She was thrilled.  She's in the blue room this year.  Big highlights will include learning to write her name (at the moment she goes with AANN, she's got all the ingredients!), taking turns, music with Jingle Jeff, lots of art projects and Science School on Mondays at the Lawrence Hall.  Being in pre-school is pretty good. 

 

In the blue room, they divide into teams for the year and the teams get to name themselves.  Anna is on the Tiger team.  The other team went with Butterfly.  Anna came home the first day quite upset - she wanted to be a butterfly.  We talked about it a lot.  She was bummed.  Then the next morning I was getting ready for work and she ran into the bathroom, "Mom, I'm a TIGER, Rarghrghhhh! (with hand motions) I gonna get clean for my team!!!!" and she whipped off her clothes and jumped into the shower.  She was equally enthusiastic at school.  Dave pointed out that Anna's statue of limitations on lack of enthusiasm is quite short.

Sarah Jane had a hard time sharing the spot light.

 The boys enjoyed the photo shoot more but at this point the whole back to school thing had definitely lost it's novelty factor.

 

We have a lot of lunches to make...



Birthday Party - 6 and 4!

Last weekend we had a blowout birthday party for the girls.  It was not intended to be a blowout birthday, rather I meant to have a small quiet get together with 2-3 friends each for the girls.  I am very bad at invite list management however and we ended up with 21 kids, three invitations sent for three separate days and as usual, total chaos.  I DID manage to secure a face painter though.  Lifesaver!  Dave and I manned the beer and wine stations (respectively) and she handled the rest.  Clearly we have our priorities in order.

 



I decided that I would ONE TIME in my life make something inspired by Pintrest.  So after a full afternoon spent perusing a mind blowing array of birthday party crafts, I settled on individual jelly bean bags filled with pink and green jelly beans and "Calm Jars" which are plastic jars, filled with colored water and glitter.  If you get mad or sad you shake it up, stare at it and by the time the glitter settles you feel better (and it really works!)  One shopping trip to Amazon later I had all my supplies and week's worth of evening projects.   Glad I did it.  Glad I checked it off the list...

 





 

 

I also had some fun with the cake.  I went with watermelon theme and despite some glitches on creating properly watermelonish green frosting, it came out pretty well.  The "seeds" on top are chocolate chips.  I also learned that the expression "the icing on the cake" is totally misleading.  The icing on the cake is not the "last touch" or "the little thing that makes it lovely" it is 95% of the work...

 

Sarah Jane did some careful counting to make sure I'd gotten the candles right. 

 

 

They are good sisters and took turns blowing the candles out.

 

 

Neither pictures, nor words, can properly describe the level of chaos involved in 21 kids waiting for cake.

 

Despite the chaos, everyone was happy.  Success!

Eli and Roby start school!

Eli and Roby started school last week!  Big deal; for them, for me, for everyone!!  They are going to Teacher Bari's Mon, Wed and Fri and will still be at home with Elizabeth on Tues and Thurs. 

The first day went swimmingly.  They jumped in and never looked back.  Not going to lie, I felt a little superfluous.  Roby seems to have adjusted entirely.  Eli seems happy about it but gets very tired and has had a lot more accidents (which so far he has been very philosophical about.)  Yesterday we had an accident free day so hopefully we're headed to a good place.  Teacher Bari and Teacher Alison are big fans. So are we!