In an effort to reduce boredom and be somewhat educational, I cut out a bunch of lines and curves so that the girls could put them together to make letters. Brooke was all over this activity. She immediately made lots of letters and then moved on to her name, then mine. Audrey decided that the strips looked like good nest making materials and made a nest for some of her guys. (And while that is super creative, she is actually the one who could use a little practice on her letters…in a fun, non-threatening way of course!) By the time that Brooke started on Audrey’s name, Audrey decided that she would participate. So Audrey did the U - Y in her name.
The next day, without any prompting at all, the girls (led by Brooke) decided to do the whole alphabet. They did a great job. I only had to help on a few of the tricky letters – like J, and S, and G. You can’t see it, but we ran out of some of the straight lines and the girls cut some out for me by following some lines I drew. It was their first cutting that actually resulted in a pretty straight line. Though Audrey only humored me and cut two lines the way I instructed and then went back to her preferred method (which totally does not work well at all!!)
The girls are really in a phase of loving their stuffed animals – whom they refer to as their guys, babies, or pets. I guess it just depends on their mood or activity. They are adorable playing with them and it totally makes me happy as I was a stuffed animal girl. I love to see how their guys bring out the nurturing side of them. They are so sweet…unless one of their guys is getting into trouble. Then you better watch out. For any infraction, the animals receive all the punishments: spanking, time out, and they give them the Talk.
On the negative, they always want to bring guys into places with them. In theory, I think this is an awful idea. In practice, it is frequently easier to just let them take an animal with them and hope that we make it home with them (the best is when they just take them into the car only with them…sometimes I can convince them that the guys want to stay in the car and take naps! ) Thus far we have not lost any guys while out and about. There was a close call with piggy in the TJ Maxx, but he was located in a box of shoes. Wheww…
Here are some cute pictures of them with their guys:
Cute pictures of the girls with their main guys.
We keep the animals that are not being played with in these boxes on a shelf in the girls' room. Here the girls are pretending to be one of their guys in their boxes.
This one is hard to see...Audrey is clutching her Little Pet Shop kitty that she was playing with at the pool while Brooke was doing swim lessons.
D and I celebrated our 13th anniversary on 8-8-11. To celebrate we went to dinner Saturday night. Here are some pics from our night out!
Outside the restaurant after dinner
A picture of D so that we could see the name of the restaurant (and the fun new shirt that I bought for him). It was delicious!! It is on the Washingtonian’s top restaurant list and certainly deserves to be there. Plus it is in a “cool” section of DC – which is a break from our normal, not-totally-cool life.
Recently we had a little reunion of sorts with the girls’ favorites from their preschool class this past year: Abby, Delaney, and of course Mason (also included were Abby’s brother Nathan and Mason’s older brother Aiden) Overall, I think that the girls had lots of fun with their friends.
A couple of weekends ago, we finally were able to get the entire Hadden family and Envall family together. It was blazing outside (yes, even by TX standards) so the pool seemed to be a great idea. We played in the (finally warm) water and had a picnic lunch. Here are some shots from the day:
