Emma Wants a Hippopotamus for Christmas

Emma had her first ever dance recital on December 18 and did a fantastic job (despite the distraction having a fellow dancer right behind her! Either she or Emma was in the wrong spot, and I'm still not sure who, but it was certainly entertaining).

Anna's "Under the Sea" party

2 days after Anna's 6th birthday she had a very fun "Under The Sea" birthday party after school. She had been looking forward to it SO MUCH! She didn't get a party last year, but had had a "bubble party" when she turned 4 (where we invited the whole Sunbeam class - we were the teachers, you see - and 12 little kids had a great time). Anyway, so this was a big deal, and I think it turned out AWESOME!

Jarod & I spent the day getting ready and I was so glad it was Jarod's flex day so that he could be home to apply his creativity to my internet research! Look at that cute Octopus he made!

 

Our guests included 3 friends from Kindergarten (including Aaron & Ridge who have been Anna's posse from the first day of school!) , 4 cousins (we were especially pleased that Travis & Kristin were still in town from Thanksgiving time, so Ethan could come), and finally Dallin who was Anna's preschool buddy for the year before Kindergarten started (and this was the first non-family birthday party that he had ever been invited to, so he was super-excited!).

In the picture below we have Aaron, Anna, Ridge, cousin Kailin, Dallin, cousin Kyla, cousin Ethan & cousin Maelie (schoolfriend Alyssia arrived later).

We played "hot potato" with a conchshell, looked for shells in the sand box, freeze danced to "Under the Sea", played tide pool toss with plush sea toys, dove under the sea (a blue sheet) to rescue marine life, had a sea turtle pinata and pinned the tentacle on the octopus.

  

Here's Anna with her 4 favorite boys in the whole world!

Even though she is "one of the boys" she still swings the baseball bat like a girl, lol! But Ridge is ALL BOY!

The favorite game by far was a tag game (Red Rover) where the "little fishies" had to run from one side of the yard to the other without getting "eaten" by the "sharks". They loved it - especially because Jakob was the original shark!

 We finished up with a fishy birthday cake and presents. It was very important to Anna that there were party hats and blowers (luckily I didn't foget!)

A tradition I've seen at other parties, which I LOVE, is to have the gift giver sit next to the birthday child while they open their present. It makes for good photo opportunities, plus makes the giver feel special too.

  

Random stuff from the last few months: Part 2

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the whole entire Rogers family (plus honored guests, including Omi) visited the Shamrock Dairy Farm.

 This is about as good of an extended family picture we can get these days. Maybe some day in the future everyone will want their picture taken, and then we'll get the "perfect" one, lol!

 

While Brielle was visiting, we had another birthday cake for the cute newly 3-year olds (Brie is 3 days older than Emma).

Random stuff from the last few months: Part 1

Anna lost her first tooth. It was during Fall Break. We were in Tucson with Omi and Grandad.

We spent the day in Old Tucson Studios.

Jakob received a Student Citizen of the Month award and had a piano recital.

We had a Family Tree, Hippy Chick and Unicorn for Halloween.

Anna was Hero of the Week in Kindergarten which meant she had the class sock monkey "PeeJay" to take care of all week. As you can see, he was given pride of place, even at bedtime!

Emma had a birthday and turned 3 years old.

 Jarod took Jakob on a couple of moonlight hikes.



Jakob learned to build campfires at Webeloes and then turned it into a "How-to" report at school. Omi helped him make a puppet of Reepicheep for a book report. He also dressed up for Colonial Days at school, even though nobody else did. We are sure proud of our 5th-grader!

Emma joined Anna for her Kindergarten Thanksgiving Feast.



Evidence that Summer is over...

On Tuesday October 5th we had quite a dramatic weather day, to mark the official end of the summer weather (we hope).
At 1:30pm, this is what we found in the backyard:

At the end there the camerawork suffers because I was suddenly getting pelted and made a hasty retreat back into the house!

Then, I wondered how our trees might be doing. 2 of our 3 trees keeled over during a monsoon when they were still quite young, but we were able to hoist them back upright. Our 3rd tree lost a major limb in a storm a year or two ago and actually currently has a broken branch - so we always kind of grit our teeth during a storm and, like Han Solo in the Millenium Falcon, hope that they "hold together". This is what it looked like out the front window:

Crazy that just across the street is the parking lot for the Elementary school and you can't even see it!

When I saw how much rain was pouring off the roof, I took a look outside to see how big the puddle was, and momentarily worried about what would happen if the water breeched the doorstep!! This is after only about 10 mins of rain! Anyway, in the end it was over pretty quick, and being Arizona 'n' all, the sun was soon shining away again!

Later in the evening the kids decided to go play outside in our new "pond" while they waited for dad to come home. Naturally Jakob is wearing his pajamas because he got wet and muddy riding his bike home from Cub Scouts earlier.

That was when we realised our troubled tree had broken several more branches and some of them were resting on our neighbors boat. So when dad did get home, for the next 2 hours Jarod, our neighbor and a chainsaw cut the whole tree down. It looks kind of different, but pretty soon our Mesquite will fill in that gap WITHOUT needing to interfere with our roof! It's a win-win.

Just for nostagia's sake, here is the tree when it was first planted in 2004 (the one in the back. It's a Palo Brea, for anyone wondering such things, and they are very, very prickly).

And finally, after they got bored of playing (actually, big tree branches were disrupting their bridge building efforts in the pond) the kids resorted to spontaneous yardwork. I love this video!

Back To School

The long-awaited day has finally arrived!
Anna has been looking forward to starting Kindergarten probably since she turned 5 (seven months ago) and Jakob has been looking forward to going back to school ever since he turned 10 (two weeks ago) and today was the big day at last!
After getting ready, we surprised Anna with her very own Schultüte, just like Jakob received five years ago on his first day of school. You can learn more about this German Tradition here and here.

As you can see, Anna was so ready to go, no worries about cutting apron strings there! And Jakob didn't even wait for us at the crosswalk because in his mind if he's not 20 mins early then he's late and stressed out!

Now what remains to be seen is how Emma and I adjust to these new arrangements! We went to meet the teacher last night and Anna wanted to hold Emma's hand the whole way, while Emma explained to us she was "going to school with Anna". So then this morning as Anna was getting ready, Emma said "But you went to school already!"... I'm sure it won't take long to figure out our new schedule.

And finally, I have loved this song for more than 25 years and today is the day when it seems most appropriate to be humming it, in a reflective kind of way.

Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile...

...I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl.

Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture
And save it from the funny tricks of time
Slipping through my fingers...