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Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Late Night Fun

I have to admit to being a bit of an astronomy buff. I find just about anything to do with the night sky totally fascinating. I quite often will get up and watch meteor showers and the like at all hours. This being said, I absolutely did not drag my 11 year old out of bed at 2am so that she could see part of the total lunar eclipse last night. She was a very good sport. She put on her robe, jacket and boots, walked out on to our deck, looked up for about a minute and said "Cool, I'm tired, I'm going back to bed."
I on the other hand was totally impressed and stayed up to watch a good portion of the eclipse but finally dragged my tired self to bed just after 3am...morning came waaaaay too early!! But it was totally worth it. We will not be able to easily see another total eclipse on the East Coast until 2014!
(On a funny note, Taylor, Teresa and I watched the new Twilight movie Eclipse last night...and made the decision to watch it before I even found out about the lunar eclipse!)






Friday, December 17, 2010

The Girls Christmas Program

Tuesday night was the Christmas program at Jaquelyn & Rebecca's school. We go every year but for the most part it's fairly boring (don't tell the girls I said that). This year I was actually looking forward to it though. Rebecca's teacher told me ahead of time that she had a solo so I couldn't wait to see her. Usually the solo parts at this age are a line or two so I was VERY surprised when I realized she had practically the whole song!! Even though it is a bit long (almost 3 minutes) I just had to include the video. I know I am totally biased but I think Rebecca did such a great job!!!



Jaquelyn was in the band playing at the beginning and performed with her class too. She would have performed again with the band in another concert (for the older kids) last night but it was postponed due to icky weather. We'll have to wait until January to see that one.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Let's Shake Things Up

I realize that I have been very negligent about blogging lately. Maybe if I change things around a bit with a new design, I will be motivated into blogging more often. We'll see!

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Swimming

Jaquelyn is swimming with the local YMCA this year. We were looking for something to keep her busy and active through the winter. It is a bit expensive but she is getting a lot of exercise with practice 3 times a week and occasional swim meets. She is by no means fast since this is her first year participating but she is enjoying it quite a bit. It is going to be a bit of a juggle for the next few months with swimming and basketball practice but I'm sure she will love it when she gets used to having both of them.
These pictures are from a meet she was in a few weeks ago. She swam freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke.




Tuesday, November 16, 2010

More Halloween Fun

My Dad visits each year for Halloween. The kids really look forward to it and we all enjoy it soooo much! We usually hold off carving pumpkins until he is here and this year was no different. As usual, we get so busy while he is here that we end up squeezing it in on Halloween day (like always)...but better late than never!








Monday, November 8, 2010

Halloween Fun

We had lots of fun last week for Halloween. For the whole month really. Jaquelyn had four different opportunities to dress up and choose to wear a different costume each time! Rebecca wasn't quite as diverse, she only wore two because she really liked her costume. Luckily, I am a pack rat of the GOOD kind. Each year, I put the girl's costumes into a big bin with other Halloween paraphernalia. Then in following years, there are lots of costumes to choose from with out having to traipse to the store and fork over $40 for something they will usually only wear once.
This month we attended the Harvest Festival at the YMCA and Jaquelyn chose to be a gypsy (this was Taylor's several years ago) and Rebecca was Little Red Riding Hood (my grandmother made this cape for me many years ago).




















We hosted the Girl Scout fun night for Jaquelyn's troop this month and decided to throw a Halloween Party for the girls. It was loads of fun! This time, Jaquelyn was a bride (my dress from Junior prom) and Rebecca wore her snow princess dress (that had been Jaquelyn's costume in 2nd grade)
















On Halloween day, our church held a "trunk or treat" fun time in the afternoon. Jaquelyn brought out Super girl for this occasion (also one of Taylor's cosutmes from the past). Rebecca still stuck with her snow princess.














For the actual trick or treating event, Jaquelyn was Luna Lovegood. You have to be a Harry Potter fan to know who this is. Luna is a witch who goes to Hogwarts with the other kids but she isn't quite as big as the other characters. Rebecca wore the same dress but decided she wanted to dress it up a bit with some wings and a wand and dubbed herself a "snow fairy princess". I was a horrible parent and completely forgot to take pictures of my children in their costumes. Luckily, I snapped one before we went door to door with our neighbors. It's not great but better than nothing.



Monday, October 25, 2010

A Day At The Park

Two weeks ago (I am soooo far behind with blogging but it's my blog and sometimes I get a bit lazy, so there :-P) was Columbus day and Dan and the younger two girls had the day off. Luckily, it was a gorgeous day so we decided to head to the park and have some fun. It wasn't too busy since only the private schools in town had the day off, not public. Dan and the girls had lots of fun playing tag. I played with them some of the time but then we were joined by several kids from their school so I decided taking pictures was more my speed.








Friday, October 8, 2010

We Support Breast Cancer!

The girls school had "pink hair day" today. They were sooooo excited that they got to participate! Now I just have to deal with their pink hair until it falls out...I'm hoping for less than the three months it says they average.

Monday, September 27, 2010

It's Soccer Season!

So...we are not much of a soccer family around here. Softball, swimming, basketball, tennis, etc but for some reason, my kids have never had "soccer fever". This year however, a paper came home with Rebecca talking about the Y's fall soccer teams. It was all she could talk about. So, next thing you know, I'm a soccer mom. I guess we'll see if it goes anywhere from here.






























Sooooooo melodramatic!! One little nudge and she's all over the ground!


Monday, September 20, 2010

It Was Time

I know I have been a horrid blogger of late but I totally have a good excuse. If your significant other had been away for 6 months and finally came home, would you waste spend YOUR time blogging? Didn't think so.
So anyhow, he is out and about today so I thought I could squeeze a post in. There's really not too much new in these here parts. We have been thoroughly enjoying having hubby/daddy home with us again. Our sweet children put together a "date night" for mommy and daddy last night. The oldest came home for the weekend and cooked for us. Homemade Alfredo sauce with cut up chicken, fettuccine, green & yellow squash, broccoli, homemade rolls and salad. All very yummy! Jaquelyn set the table very nicely, complete with flickering candles and her playing the flute for us while we were eating (mood music I guess). All very sweet and we enjoyed it very much.
I suppose by now you have realized that we sent our oldest child off to college this month. In the process, she of course needed a vehicle of some sort. Well rather than take our chances with an unknown used car, that would be questionable at best considering the amount of money she had to spend, we decided to let her have our old Dodge minivan. She wasn't totally thrilled but since she only had to pay for repairs & such, she finally figured out she had no other choice was getting a great deal. So we had the mechanic check it over, fix the problems and put two new tires on it. Then I had her change the brakes & rotors and it was hers for $630. Pretty good deal if you ask me.






























Well this of course meant we only had one van and that would sooooo not work for us. Dan works about 1 1/2 hours from here and there is no bus service for the girls (private) school, so two cars are an absolute necessity. So....we had to break down and buy a vehicle. We did some research online and checked different dealerships and such out. We found several minivans but Dan was kind of hoping for not-a-minivan. We wanted something with good gas mileage but had to seat at least 6. Very hard to find these days if minivans are not preferred. (although I totally fell in love with two great Grand Caravans with stow & go seating!! I guess I'll have to keep that on my list for Santa) We finally found a vehicle that fit our needs at Carmax. We are the proud new owners of a 2006 Mazda 5. It is deep blue, seats 7, gets 22 city (can you say wow!)and 27 highway and the coolest part....it's a STICK SHIFT! So fun! We haven't owned a stick shift since Jaquelyn was born. The funniest part was when Dan took Taylor out driving. She took forever to realize it wasn't an automatic! I of course had to take pictures. She did not do terrible her first lesson but she didn't do too well either.



Sunday, September 12, 2010

New Design & Exciting News

Well I guess it was time to update my blog! I actually really liked the colors and the whole thing but LeeLou blogs changed all their settings. Since I haven't been keeping up with my blog lately, I didn't know and my pretty colors appear to be lost forever. So I grabbed this one quickly, just to keep all the error messages from being all over my blog. We'll see if I keep it or sometime when it's not 15 minutes til game time I will have some time to fix it!


In other news, we are finally complete again. My husband is home for good and we could not be happier! He has been home this past week and we have been enjoying the time with him!!
(Can you tell which team we are rooting for?)


Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Taylor's First Day Of College

Well today was the biggest day of them all. My sweet angel had her first day of school. She is officially a college student. I wasn't able to be there but my friend Pam & her husband (whom Taylor is staying with while she is in school) were kind enough to get up at o'dark thirty and take some pictures of her for me. Doesn't she look so cute in her chef's uniform!! I can't believe my little girl is all grown up! Time sure flies.