TWO!!

Happy, happy, happy birthday to my beautiful baby (or maybe not so baby) girl!

Willa Rose Petersen, two years old today:

And for old times sake, my little baby, two years ago today:

She truly is the sweetest little thing. My cup runneth over.

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.

 

Back to School...kitchen edition

How do you get ready to start the school year?  Around here, we buy lots of school supplies.  We always buy lots for our own classrooms, but this year we *got*to*get*supplies*for*C&E, too! This was one of THE MOST EXCITING days of the whole summer (for them) -- getting supplies for Kindergarten!!!

Around here we also spend some time getting our school-year food situation in order.  Finding time to cook healthy meals during the school week is always a challenge.  We typically spend  a good chunk of our Sundays prepping meals for the week: chopping vegetables, cooking or mixing up or measuring out anything that can be done ahead of time.  We kicked that pre-prepping up a knotch this year and decided to fill our freezer, anything to help us save precious time during the school year.

We have never really been able to do the whole "freezer-meal" thing.  We tend to treat the meals as though they are golden - only to be used on truly worthy occasions.  Which means they never get used and we find them in the bottom of the deep freeze two years later.

Instead, over the past week or two we have frozen:

22 breakfast burritos
15 breakfast sandwiches
4 dozen Pumpkin-quinoa-chocolate chip muffins

This is the first year that we'll actually be feeding C&E breakfast before they head out for the day, so we decided that if we didn't just want to do cereal everyday, we'd need to have something ready to go.

9 bags of ground beef/ground turkey with chopped onions and green bell pepper
6 bags of shredded chicken
8 bags of pulled pork
6 bags of pureed cauliflower (we use this instead of milk/cream in sauce recipes)
4 bags of pumpkin-cheese sauce

*we freeze these in the quantity that we'd use for a meal, which is usually less than a pound, for example, two pounds of ground beef would get us about three bags.

We haven't really loaded the freezer like this before, so I'm wondering how long this will get us?  When will we need to take the time and re-stock?  Think we can make it to Thanksgiving?  That's what I'm hoping for.

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.

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.)