Christmas time in the city

This is lengthy.  You don't really have to read it.  But at least check out the video at the bottom.  SUPER cute, even if I am the mom :-)

Oy.  This fall semester has been a doozie.  Not bad in any kind of way, just busy.  Christmas break started yesterday (officially....it really started at 3:00 on Friday) and I feel like this just might be the first time that I've sat down in about four months.

C&E are loving first grade at their new school (Pierce this year, since the move).  Great teacher, making good friends and plowing through the first grade standards and curriculum.  They decided to do gymnastics this year, instead of dance.  They are doing well with it.  The both started in "Beginners" but about mid-term Cora tested out and joined the "Intermediate" group.

Willa is in preschool two days a week and with my parents the other three.  She's still our sweetie and little goofball.  She's such a ham and knows when she has an audience -- as evidenced in the video below. :)

Our Christmas break got off to a bit of a rocky start, but has since taken a turn for the uneventful - which is nice.  Cora and Evaline had their class party on Friday after school. I had signed up to help, but was a bit late because I'd picked up Willa beforehand and she had to go potty on the drive.  We're in the early - but successful - stages of potty-training, a stage where you don't mess around.  Cora and Evaline had their first Pierce birthday party - they went to Capri College and had their hair and nails done - quite fancy, they were just tickled.  

Saturday night we started our fourth annual "Twinkle Light Express" where the girls find tickets under their pillow as they are getting ready for bed, we load into the car with cocoa and treats, and drive around to look at Christmas lights.

They all look so good in this picture, don't they?  Happy?  Healthy?  It was all an illusion.  Moments after this photo was taken the back seat was covered in vomit.  There's no way to handle that gently.  Sorry, I had to just put it out there.  Willa was suddenly so very sick.  I was up with her until around 4 am.  Ian took the ugly jobs - I was with Willa while he was cleaning up everything else.  Oy.  What a night.

We missed our Wiley Family Christmas on Sunday because of it.  She was still feeling pretty rotten on Sunday afternoon...and we were sitting on pins and needles waiting for the next one to drop.  We didn't go to the party because we were so worried that we were carriers of some dreadful stomach bug and would get everyone sick.  No one else got it though, and it was too bad that we missed it - the girls were so disappointed.

Monday night my brother Dave was still in town, so we had dinner at my parents.  The girls had prepared songs for the Wiley Christmas, so they got to perform there.   Willa even had a poem prepared.

And now...we are all waiting for Christmas.  Waiting and sitting on the couch watching Season One of the Gilmore Girls, playing 2048 on my phone (thanks, Dave), and reading whatever is in my hand.  This has all the makings of a fabulous break.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

 

Dance Recital

The moment they'd been waiting all year for: dancing **on stage** in their recital.  What fun!  For all of us involved.  It was a blast getting to watch the girls up there on stage enjoying themselves, and it was, of course, oodles of fun for C&E - and Willa, who was overjoyed and full of pride to see her sisters up on a REAL stage.

---One small story, before we get to the pictures.  The recital was held at Jefferson, and they have the auditorium (where the recital was held) and the Little Theater (exactly what it sounds like...and this was the staging area for the girls).  On dress rehearsal night one of the teachers came searching the crowd for "Evaline's mom."  I went with her to find

Evaline - as only she can - had gotten her foot stuck between the seat and the back of the chair.  These are old, wooden theater seats (original to the school...late 1950s) that fold up (as theater seats do).  She somehow had her foot slide down when the seat was up, then the seat closed on her leg and we could not get it back down again.  It was REALLY stuck!  Luckily the young man (a Jeff student - I hadn't had him but Ian had a couple years ago) who was helping with the sound was able to locate a wrench and took the seat apart to free her.  There is never a dull moment with these girls. :-)  Unfortunately, she was far too shook up (and a little hurt - just some light bruising on her ankle, no big deal) to let me take her picture.

Cahoots

We’ve known from the very beginning that Cora and Evaline were a team. 

We knew this when they were one and half and we had one girl playing in the kitchen, one in the living room; a gibberish yell from the kitchen was followed by a gibberish reply from the living room followed by grabbing a particular toy and running into the kitchen to join the other.

We knew this the week before their second birthday when we moved them out of their cribs (Evaline was a bit of a climber) and they got into a dirty diaper and smeared poo all over each other – then horrified at the nastiness (they knew what they’d done) they tried to wipe it off…on the bed…and the carpet….and the wall…and the door.

We knew this when they were three and every night was a slumber party and we had to institute the “sleep rules” (no singing, no dancing, no playing), and subsequent reward (four skittles – or “Daddy Treats” as we call them in our house) as a reward in the morning for a job well done.

And...we knew this when they got themselves into the Glitter-Putty Incident.  Apparently I need to provide them with more lectures in presidential history: what really gets you into trouble isn’t the crime…it’s the cover-up.

Here’s the story:

Back in, like, October they received some slightly sticky, slightly gloopy, glitter-putty stuff as a party-favor at a friend’s birthday.  It promptly, like most small items in my house, disappeared - only to resurface several months later. In the course of play (which happened in the basement where the girls were and Ian and I were not and the details of which are still a bit hazy), the putty ended up all over Cora’s shirt and Evaline’s hair. 

I’m not sure how much deliberation went on, and how this particular disaster-recovery plan was decided on (I would have loved to have been a fly on that wall), they had Cora sneak upstairs and change her shirt (and throw the other one away in the bathroom trash).  Evaline later told Ian that the shirt had a hole in it so they had to throw it away.  I hadn’t heard this story, so when I found it in the trash later I pulled it out and the story came out.  I was able to salvage most of the shirt after a good 15 minutes of scraping and washing.

The hair wasn’t so easy, they couldn’t figure out how to get it out without cutting it.  So they did they only thing they could think of…and now Evaline has a chunk of hair – about a half-inch square – in the middle of her forehead that is about an inch long.  I found this when I was drying her hair after the shower.  Fortunately (in this, and only this, circumstance) Evaline has a horrendous cowlick that is right where this lock of hair is, so it doesn’t show much…for now anyway.  Give it a few weeks and the cowlick will make it stand straight up, I’m sure.

What were they thinking? 

On the bright side, they get along well?

Oh girls.

 I’m assuming that by getting all of these shenanigans out of their system now they will then be perfect angels in high school, right?  RIGHT?

My little dancin' queens

I'm slow to post, but better late than never...

Last weekend the girls had "Progression Night" for their dance class.  They are in the intro-level ballet class at a studio nearby, and the full-blown recital is in June (as it happens, the same day that I already bought the girls and I tickets for the Color-Run 5k...so it will be a whirl-wind day, I'm guessing...but I digress).   But they donned their leotards and a snazzy headband and performed in the Auditorium at the new Downtown library.  

Each student was allotted three tickets...which ends up being a perk of having twins, since we were therefore able to take all the grandparents with us.

I think all three girls had a fabulous time - Willa included.  She loved calling out to her sisters (whether or not they were actually the ones on the stage) and was completely captivated by the little-girl-dancers on stage.  

Without further ado...for your viewing pleasure:

(ok, a little further ado...Evaline almost never takes her eyes off her feet, Ian asked her about it later and she said that she has to watch her feet the whole time because that's the only way she can be sure they are doing the right thing)

Another first is in the books!

The first day of Kindergarten!  Wow.  Not to be cliche...but it is hard to believe that we are already a school-going family.  And for the next 16 or so years we will have kiddos officially in school.  Like Cora said this evening, "Mom, I can't hardly believe that I'm actually a big kid now!"

It was a good day.  Pictures in the morning - all indoors because there were some evil-looking, but ultimately harmless, storm clouds brewing outside.  Willa insisted on posing right alongside her sisters (but no pics of here for now...today is her sisters' day to shine).  The girls were so anxious and ready for school to start, they were chomping at the bit, just waiting for the clock to turn to 6:26 so we could get out the door.  (Ian and I like to start our day early, so that we can leave right at 3:30).

I dropped them off at the school's before-care, and honestly, they couldn't wait for me to get out of there.  They patiently allowed me to take their picture hanging up their backpacks, and again as I left them in the gym, but then wanted me out the door so that could do their own thing.  Part of me is sad that they don't "need" me...but a bigger part is so very proud of them for being independent and grown up.

And they had a wonderful day.  We met Mrs. Bierman last Thursday at open house, and the girls have been very carefully practicing her name ever since (Mrs. Beer Man...like, Daddy drinks a beer and he's a man).  At the open house Evaline told her teacher that she (Evaline) had a very long name and it was hard to spell...but Evaline would teach her and with practice she'd get the hang of it.  :-)

They ate lunch in the cafeteria: Cora chose pizza (even though we'd asked them not to this morning), and Evaline chose a sun-butter and jelly sandwich.  They both picked the chocolate milk.  So we had a conversation this evening about the lunch choices that they were making.  (Chocolate milk is limited to twice a week, in case you were wondering.  Never one to wait, Cora is having it again tomorrow, but Eva thinks it would be better to wait until Friday so can start and end her week with it.)

Ian and I both snuck away from work this afternoon (everyone had a half-day, and we were out before the elementary schools) to pick the girls up.  We ran into Mrs. Bierman and she said that they did great - that they had fun, and were a nice mix of stick-together and independent, which was good to hear.

All in all - I'd say that it was a great start to the year!

Please ignore the state of my living room in the following photos.  I promise, it isn't really as bad it looks.

 

Where did this summer go??

We are pretty much back at it.  Not quite the normal, back-to-school-year routine, because we don't technically start  official days back until the following week, but last week was spent at an (inspiring) conference, and I'm spending most of this week in meetings and training (more to come on this)...so, basically this is it.

I think that this has quite officially been the shortest summer ever.  We didn't get out of school until June 13 because of snow days and a late Thanksgiving (our district is on trimesters - at least until next year - and first trimester always ends at Thanksgiving, so our start date is always 13 weeks before Thanksgiving).  With vacation, June was a blur - it seems it was over before it even started.  July was incredibly busy.  This was the "Summer of the Twins" - on Monday and Friday afternoons they had swimming lessons, Tuesday evenings were dance, and Friday mornings were gymnastics. The days with no classes usually ended up with play dates.

In between all of those regularly scheduled activities, our summer went a little something like this:

Out at Grandma Helen's farm, Cora got to hold a kitty.

Willa loves her big-girl hat!

The highlight of Evaline's recent trip to the farm: getting to go up in a real, actual attic!

Not a fan of the prickly grass, this girl preferred to stick to the patio.

Sprinkler time and a homemade "water slide"!

A little bit of twin love!

We switched around Willa's car seat last week - she's loving it!  A twenty minute car ride full of "Mommy? Mommy? Hi!  Daddy? Daddy? Hi!  Mommy? Mommy? Hi! Daddy? Daddy? Hi!"

Willa's first sweet corn  - fresh from the corner stand.

A little sister is really just a living doll, made for dress-up.

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Dance class: showing off the leaps.

Check out this action shot!

Holy HUGE cucumber.

Donuts!!

Outdoor, interactive children's theater, complete with props (a sea of left socks).

The girls with Leo the Lion (can you spot my dad in this picture??!!)

Lovin' the blue room in the children's museum

Makin' music!

Swim lessons!

Who needs paper?

Sunday Funnies

Typical dinner conversation in the Petersen house:

(Context: Ian had gone out to his grandmother's farm to help do some yard work, and potentially begin cleaning out some of the old buildings. The girls didn't go, but wanted to know why Ian had to clean out the buildings.  We said that they needed to be cleaned out because at some point Helen would be moving off the farm and its something that will take a long time and is best to do little by little.)


Cora: What?!  Why would she move off the farm??!!

Ian: A farm is a lot of work to take care of and right now it's just Grandma Helen out there and she can't do all of it by herself.

Evaline: Then, maybe she should get a new husband. What so he could help do work. [note: that isn't a typo; that is how she talks]

Ian: Yeah, I don't think that's a realistic option.

Evaline: We can find her a man then.  He doesn't have to be her husband.  When is her birthday?

Ian: January.

Evaline: Ok, then.  We have until January.  You guys [pointing at me and Ian] start looking for a man to help Grandma Helen.

Ian: That's very sweet, but we aren't getting Grandma Helen a man for her birthday.

Cora: Can we at least get her a Justin Bieber t-shirt?! [special emphasis added by Cora's actual dialogue, not me]

Caveat that Ian insists on including: they learned absolutely nothing about Justin Bieber in our house. Nothing. The blame entirely should be placed on daycare kids.

Evaline

This is just an odds-and-ends post on Evaline.  It's rather disjointed, so please forgive the flow.  There was just too much that I wanted to say to really have it well-organized. Stay tuned for a similar one on Cora.

At a little over 5-1/2, this girl is a nut.  She cracks me up, and in so many ways seems well beyond her years. In other ways, of course, she is exactly her age.

Last fall she tried out soccer - but ended up hating it.  She was supposed to do it again this spring, but she hated it so much it wasn't worth another go-around at this point.  She thought the sport was mean.  She told me that it wasn't fair, that no one was sharing, and when she had the ball everyone tried to take it away and so the girls were mean.  I tried to explain that that is the sport - but I get where she's coming from: in every other aspect of her life we tell her how important it is to be nice and to share...and then boom! Soccer is the complete opposite.

This summer she is doing both dance and gymnastics.  Let me begin by saying that I'm pretty sure that I've never seen anyone with less coordination, and who is  less physically aware, than Evaline.  She is so very, very awkward, bless her heart.   She enjoys both, but right now says that she wants to stick with dance (she knows that she will only get to continue on with one into the school year - I'm not trying to make her pigeon-hole herself at age 5...I'm just not paying for both), but only because she is SUPER psyched that dance has the possibility of being on stage and performing in front of an audience.

A couple weeks a go we went to the theater in Amana to see "How I Became a Pirate."  The best part for her was the outdoor stage after the performance.  She could have spent all day here, making up songs and dances, and performing them for us all.

This girl LOVES an audience, and has since she was itty bitty and got up on her chair to sing carols at the Wiley Family Christmas when she found out people were watching her.  It's a shame that there aren't any acting camps around here for kids younger than eight.  For the past few days, she's planning a performance for sometime next week - I guess she and Cora will be performing Cinderella and Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty (but that one is supposed to be a musical?).  She's got the costumes all figured out, and has been working on the script (even though she can't read or write) this morning.  She wanted to do some rehearsals yesterday and came inside to complain "UGH! Cora is SO frustrating!  I just can't control her!"

When she gets into something, she's like girl obsessed, and throws her whole self into it.  Right now she's rotating through some pretty intense interests: writing a play/movie (see above), archaeology (constantly searching our yard for fossils and making predictions as to where/when they originated), pioneer lifestyles (thank you Laura Ingalls Wilder), and Legos.

One last little Evaline story...We had sort of thought (hoped) that she'd outgrown her tendency to get hurt in odd ways.  But...in mid-May I got a call from her preschool right at the end of my school day.  We're talking 2 minutes from last bell...so I didn't answer.  I figured that maybe she had a fever?  That can wait a few minutes.  Then I got a call from Ian (he had answered).  Apparently Evaline had hit her chin and her mouth was bleeding, they couldn't get it to stop.  I totally thought this was an exaggeration, but left to go get her anyway.  I couldn't have been more wrong.

I get there and Evaline is standing near the door waiting for me with paper towels held up to her mouth.  She sees me, opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue. Which was partially severed.  No seriously.  The girl had fallen off a stool and hit her chin on a bookshelf.  She bit completely through her tongue from the right side to the middle.  We're talking a dangling chunk of tongue, just flapping around.  As startling as this was, it was proud parenting moment: I didn't freak out.  I just got down on her level and said "Honey, we're gonna go see the doctor."  And then I even managed to not get in an accident as I sped to ER. Four hours later, she had 9 stitches in her tongue to sew it back together, and one in her cheek, too. The most amazing thing?  She never cried.  I mean, she probably did when it first happened, but it was over once I got there.  She was pretty awesome, and the nurses in the ER gave her a Barbie for being so good - which she thought was the most wonderful thing in the world.  She kept saying "I can't believe they gave me a Barbie, just because I'm a nice girl!"

And now, a little under two months later - you can't even tell that anything happened.  Good as new.

Graduation

I'm a little late on this one, but wanted it up here none-the-less.

One June 11th, our little munchkins graduated from pre-school and are SO VERY excited to move it on up to the big Kindergarten.    They are already making plans and anticipating what it will be like.  To the point where I hope they aren't let down.  Evaline was a tad dismayed to find at Kindergarten Round-up (in early May) that the students sat at tables - she was expecting to have her own desk.  I also have a hunch that she's expecting to learn how to read on Day One.  This could get interesting.

I'm going to back up a bit with my pictures to document this momentous occasion, to fully encapsulate the whole moment.

Here we are at Kindergarten Round-up:

We decided to have the girls attend Van Buren next year.  Cedar Rapids is a little weird in how its districts are drawn.  The majority of the city is in the Cedar Rapids School District (where Ian and I both teach, at Jefferson High).  A little bit of the Northeast side of town is skimmed off and attends the Linn-Mar District (where I taught my first two years).  And a bit of the Southwest side of town is part of the College Community "Prairie" District.  We live about 4 minutes away from Jefferson, and about 1.5 minutes (in a car - roughly 6 minutes if you're walking) from Van Buren Elementary...but we actually live in the Prairie district.  We can stand in our front yard and see VB.  We like the idea of a neighborhood school.  We like the idea of getting home from work, then walking over to the school to pick up the girls and walking home in the fall and spring.  We also like the idea of the girls being on the same break schedule as us.  So we're going to VB. And the girls are WAY excited.  Just look at those cheesy grins!

And here is graduation:

The graduation program included several song performances.  C&E rocked it out - I'm pretty sure they were the loudest ones with the most dramatic hand movements.

Cora had one heck of a time with that hat - it must have fallen off 5 or 6 times!

One happy family!

The very last day of preschool - with the framed diplomas!

and without.

For comparisons sake - here is the FIRST DAY of preschool, back in late August:

 It's quite hard to read, but in the frames on the FIRST DAY it says what the girls want to be when they grow up. Evaline's reads: "A mommy who also has a job which is a doctor" and Cora's: "A Mommy with Babies."  At graduation, when they received their diplomas, they also said what they want to be when they grow up.  Cora said "Movie Star," and Evaline said "Teacher."  But later Evaline told me that "[she] was disappointed that [she] had to just pick one thing to say at graduation, because [she's] only five and really, that's just too young to decide on one thing.  Right now [she's] really thinking about being a teacher, an archaeologist, or a shop keeper."

Teaching high school, Ian and I get invited to a lot of graduation parties.  I think its an Iowa thing - I don't remember anyone really having grad parties in New Mexico.  Or maybe I was just that much a loser that I didn't ever get invited to any. Either way, its a big thing here, and teachers are usually invited.  Our Memorial Day weekend is usually spent with a big list of parties and a lot of close scheduling to make sure that we can make it to as many as possible.  The girls know this, so when they first started talking about their own graduation, their first question was: So when's our party going to be.  I can't turn down a good party, so I made the trip to the dollar store...five bucks later we had party hats, a banner, plates and napkins. I didn't snap a shot of their cupcakes - but the are pretty close to the ones below, except the cakes were pink (strawberry) with purple icing.

Ok - not related to the girls' graduation, but it's still graduation. And this is more for my own record, so if you aren't interested in cake stuff you can stop here :-)  Our super good friends, the Neilly's, oldest daughter graduated (from high school) this year and they let me make her cakes!  I didn't get any shots from the actual party...but I've a couple of the cakes.  The sheet cake is lemon cake on the left and strawberry on the right, with a frosting that is a cross between buttercream and whipped cream. The cupcakes are vanilla with vanilla frosting (not as boring as it sounds).