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.

First Ponytail

It wasn't easy...but I managed to get it done!

Also, please ignore the dirty face.  It's summer, and summer is for getting dirty.  (Or...being lazy and not thoroughly washing your child's face after lunch, and then forgetting and snapping a photo of their first-ever ponytail, and then not being able to get another decent shot after realizing (and then cleaning) the dirty face.)

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).

St. Joe's, Michigan

Back in December, Ian and I decided that we needed a vacation.  A real, family vacation.  We certainly would have been happy with a little couple's getaway, but this was something that we wanted to try.  Last summer we went for a little under a week to Omaha for my brother and sister-in-law's wedding, and things went smoothly - although we had lots of family around, of course, to help keep all the kiddos entertained.

We wanted something that was under a day's drive away, so we decided on the Great Lakes area, and chose a lake town in south western Michigan: St. Joseph's.  It's connected to the slightly larger town of Benton Harbor, which will be the one to probably appear on most maps that don't go into detail.  Some of our neighbors had highly recommended this spot as a little family vacation area, and Ian's sister (and family) lived there for awhile, too.

Given that we have traveled so little with kids, and Willa still being so young, we made it a short trip - we left on Sunday and got home on Thursday.  Our first day there, we woke to this view out our window:

Day Two looked the same.  Day Three was foggy and cold - you couldn't see the buildings across the street.  But...we'd all read Arthur's Family Vacation, so we knew that even it rained you could still find a way to have fun. 

At the end of Day One, Cora said "This was the best day ever!  We went to two children's museums, rode the carousel, had popcorn and ice cream for lunch, went swimming, had pizza in an old train station for dinner and got to see a lighthouse!"  Whew!  It was a busy day!

Day Two was cold and rainy in the morning, so we stayed in and swam at the hotel pool most of the morning.  After Willa's afternoon nap, the sun kinda-sorta came out...well...it stopped raining at least.  It was in the low 70s and we figured that it would be too cold to swim/get in the water, but we headed to the beach anyway.  While we were there, the sun came out more, it was beautiful weather (for about an hour and half before the fog rolled in), the water was nice....but we didn't bring our suits.  To heck with that - we went in anyway!  (All but Ian who had a hard time having any fun because all he could think was the mess that the sand would make in the car...what a fun-hater!)

Day Three was foggy, and about 58 degrees!, but we headed to the sand dunes about a  half-hour south along the lake.  Cora and Evaline were troopers as they scaled a few dunes so steep they had to crawl on all fours.  Willa was in a hiking back-pack on Ian's back....and she didn't care for it one bit.  So she screamed for the 45 minutes we were there.  We headed back to town to have a picnic lunch and run through the huge splash pad.  The weather did get the best of us for that however.  We all needed jackets for the picnic as the wind was pouring in off the lake.  We opted for a few turns on the carousel in exchange for the splash pad, and then headed back to the hotel for more swimming.  

So despite the crappy weather, we had a lovely first family vacation.  And I believe that this view of the backseat on the way home is all the proof we need:

TGIF

Oh, just watching some Princess Bride and getting make-overs.  How do you spend your Friday nights?