I'll Take It Easy On You

Over Spring Break, I had a lot of one on one time with Emma. There were limited gymnastics practices because her coaches were on a cruise and Dave, Alyssa and Rebekah were busy with nightly rehearsals for the Easter musical, so that left just the two us. She was my sweet and constant shadow for the week.

When I went for a jog, so did she...eventually leaving me in her dust.

When I needed to grocery shop, I had an extra set of hands putting sweets in the cart.

When my van got a flat tire, we fixed it together {and when I say "we fixed it" I mean that we went to Tires Plus together to pay for them to fix it}.

When I was on a seemingly endless quest to find the right shade of pink leggings for Alyssa to wear with one of her choreography costumes, she was by my side comparing magenta to cherry blossom to cotton candy.

She read to me as I did my usually solo chores around the house, and she was more than happy to help me select a birthday cake for us to have on Easter when we would celebrate both hers, and my mom's birthdays.

Not that I had forgotten, but I was reminded of what wonderful company she is! Such a hard working helper, always laughing and full of joy, driven to please.

We were at the park and when she asked if we could play tag, she caught my hesitation to agree to be chased up, down and around the playground equipment. "Don't worry," she told me, "I'll take it easy on you." She is the kind of girl I would hope to have as a best friend if I were a little kid all over again.

And yes, she almost always dresses as if she is headed to the gym. This is just part of her charm. She wondered out loud the other morning why she had to wear jeans to school again because it had been two whole days since she had clean yoga pants in her drawer, which is a really looong time to not wear yoga pants :-).

Happy Birthday to Grandma and Emma on Easter!

Happy 11th birthday, Precious Kahiwalani, 

 We love you and are so proud of you!!

Alive

"The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said." Matthew 28:5-6

The greatest news in the history of the world was given to both Marys on that Sunday morning. Both here in Matthew's account and in Luke 24 it is recorded that the angel had to remind the women that Jesus had told them before his death that all this would happen. I don't know, maybe it's silly of me, but I am not only intrigued by their conversation with the angel, but it also brings me some relief that even they, who were closest to Jesus, didn't entirely understand what was going on. The miracle of what He did and accomplished for them and for us today, held an element of mystery that was too great and wonderful for them to completely understand. Redemption, rescue, grace, mercy and love beyond all comprehension...

We have so much to be thankful for!

Monday, Monday, Monday...

Have you ever felt this way about a Monday morning? I know I have :-)

5 more days of school and counting until Spring Break.

Happy Monday!!

You're Invited!!!

Every Easter and Christmas many members of our church work very hard to put together wonderful musicals. This Easter the musical is titled, The Story, and if you are local, I strongly recommend that you see it. Performance dates and times are listed below, so please find a time that you can join us. I know you will enjoy it very much and be encouraged!


All tickets are complimentary, to reserve your free tickets click here. Please feel free to email me with any questions. Happy Easter!!

Winter Becomes Us

Travel Wisconsin is a website that advertises interesting places and leisure activities that our state has to offer. Right now they have a Winter campaign going on, called Winter Becomes You. In various places around the city there are billboards advertising fun Winter sports. Here is an example of one of the billboards that I see everyday...

I'm not sure if many previous attempts have been made advertise Wisconsin's Winter weather as being an appealing experience, but I do know that they could not have chosen a more aptly titled campaign to describe the kind of Winter we're having this season.

I feel like we have had plenty of opportunity to become one with the cold this year. Every time I step out into a parking lot the cold seems to wrap it's arms around me and it doesn't let go, even after I have returned to my car and turned the heat on full blast. For the most part, the girls have enjoyed it and Rebekah is determined to go ice skating 100 times this year, so we'll see.

All of the photos below were taken in January, but as I sit here typing there is a great flurry of white flying by my window.





No, Emma! Don't eat it!!

Ugh, she ate it. I can't blame her, it's as close as she'll get to a Hawaiian shaved ice around here. But watch out for the yellow snow, Emma!



Nearly knee deep snow for the tiny one.

Snow fort fun.

Ice skating on a day when we were the only ones crazy enough to be out there.

No matter how cold it is, we can't leave Red Arrow without the girls wanting to play on the red arrow.

We went back with some friends the next day when it was only slightly warmer and the place was packed.

Trying ice fishing for the first time.

And a little bit of hockey too, another first.

Don't let that bright sunshine fool you, it was very cold on this afternoon. We were at an urban ecology center event and I overheard a man saying, "The colder it is, the happier I am." Well, he ought to have been good and happy that day because my fingers felt like they were about to freeze off as I took these pictures.






Rosy cheeks tells me it's time for some hot cocoa!

I may complain a little bit about the cold, but I can't imagine living somewhere where we wouldn't have at least a couple of good snows each Winter. It's fun to play in {if only for a short while} and there is nothing more peaceful than looking out to a quiet, white, fresh blanket of snow covering everything outside and knowing we can stay inside to bake cookies and watch movies. I guess it would be the places to go and things that need to be done in the snow that are the most challenging part.

I took some pictures of our snowy backyard that aren't actually that great of photos, but Alyssa was having fun putting sepia and soft focus filters on them. She said she wanted to make her own "snow post." I'll definitely share it if she gets the chance to finish it. Here's to hoping that Spring is hiding just around the corner...

Sometimes I put lots of pictures together and call it a blog post...

February already! How did that happen?

Even if no one else noticed our quiet start to 2014, I know all the grandparents would like see some new pictures up here. I can't exactly count these as "new," but here are a bunch of photos that I have meant to be more timely in posting...

This is Rebekah at the end of her Pee Wee Bible Quiz season. I remember when Alyssa was in Pee Wee and I would chase little toddler Rebekah around at the quiz meets trying to keep her quiet in the hallways while the quizzing was going on. It doesn't even seem possible that Rebekah has now completed three years of her own quizzing! I am so thankful for their teachers and all the time the girls have spent learning the Bible in their years of Bible Quiz, it's a wonderful program!

Super Hero dress up day at gymnastics. Can you guess who her favorite super hero is?

Winter weather in all of it's cold glory has pretty much been the story of our lives here since mid-December. We have not had a shortage of the white stuff this year.

At the annual Trim the Tree party at the Rep.

Family picture night at A Christmas Carol. All the great pictures Dave took this evening really deserve a post of their own. I hope to get to it soon. Alyssa is so completely in her element when she's performing at the Rep, she absolutely loves it.

A few pictures of our house under construction, these were all taken back in early December...

The area that used to be a small kitchenette and bathroom.

The framing for Alyssa's new room.

Future bathroom and the pipes in the floor underneath it.

Now that the upstairs is pretty well put together again, I hardly remember the days when this is what it looked like :-)

Dave working hard. He had just finished putting in a bunch of insulation, that's why he has the mask on. If you've never worked with fiberglass insulation before, it's pretty nasty stuff that you would not want to breathe in.


This is probably one of the last photos taken with that door in place. We closed up the exit since we rarely used it anyway.

About a week after the photos above were taken, and after a lot of hard work hanging drywall by my Uncle Ray and Uncle Ted this is what the same area looked like:

The top left is a sitting room area and there will be a desk that runs along the length of the back wall. The top right and bottom left are views of Alyssa's room, the middle is right at the top of the steps. The bottom right is the area I just mentioned above where there used to be a door. Uncle Ted and Uncle Ray also did an awesome job of painting this whole space seen above. I can't wait to share those photos next!

Christmas craft day, or basteltag, in Rebekah's classroom. She was so proud of this little skier she made. She gave it to Dave for Christmas telling him that it was him on some blue glitter skis.

Emma's classroom Christmas party was the same day and was less about crafts and more about filling the kids with a crazy amount of sweets and singing silly songs in front of the class.

The Kingdom Kid's Choir Christmas Musical, We Three Spies...

Rebekah loved all the songs and dance moves for this musical! She had a little cameo two-line speaking part as "Kid #1." So proud of this once very quiet little munchkin.

Emma played the role of Ms. King. Ms. King was a fun, sassy and excessively fancy character, that honestly was a bit of a stretch for Emma to pull off. To quote Ms. King, "I feel a song coming on..."

I was very happy and excited for her. Emma has tried out for a drama role in Kingdom Kid's Choir for every musical from 1st grade to 5th, and she has often ended up with a singing solo, but she had never been cast in drama before this play. In the end, she put her own little Emma twist on the character and I thought she did it perfectly.

Getting to ride across the stage on a bike that she is much too big for may very well have been her favorite part.

Post show, celebratory photos with friends.

For the first time ever, we didn't put up a Christmas tree this year. There just wasn't any space for one with all the remodeling. I think I took photos of the girls in front of any public Christmas tree we could find to make up for the lack of one in our home.



I hope you had a wonderful Christmas season and a sweet start to 2014! I hope to be back with a January photo re-cap later this week!

In the meantime, please allow Emma to recommend a fun site. Start with episode 1, if you like. Emma showed me this website last night {as things usually go, we may be the very last people to know about it, and it may not be anything new to you}. She had fun following the directions and seeing what would happen next and she thought her cousins might like it too :-)

Don't Close the Hatchet ~ A Story of Lots of Work and Progress

There has been a lot of work that has gone into the progress made at our house in the last couple of weeks and I am so excited about it!! Most of the work shown in the pictures below was done over a span of 3-4 days, and already more work has been completed since they were taken.

This is the view we have had going up our stairs since about November 16th. There is a trap door or hatch that we have covering the steps, not only to provide more working floor space up there, but also to keep as much dust and debris from the work up there out of the living room below. I am not sure what we would have done without this hatch! I am certain I could not have otherwise swept and vacuumed up enough to keep the downstairs clean, and we also needed to do what we could to keep heat in the lower level.

Emma calls the hatch, The Hatchet. She tends to leave a little trail of her belongings everywhere she goes, so it is quite common to hear her voice call out right before bed, as we are sealing up the hatch for the night, "Wait!! Don't close the hatchet! I left something down there." The something is usually Pinkie, her pink fleece blanket, or Eaou or Chi, two beloved stuffed animals. There is a heater in their room that keeps just that section of the upstairs warm.

This is what is making the girls bedroom livable at the moment. This zip door and plastic sheet that has partitioned off their room from the rest of the upstairs is surprisingly effect at keeping the heat in and the dust out! Being that it is simply heavy duty plastic and a zipper, not an actual wall or door, it has been quite a miracle that we have had use of the room every day of the project. I don't think we could fit anything else downstairs, so the girls not having to relocate their beds to the lower level has been wonderful.

This is the new flying gable on the front of the house.

The next couple of photos show the demo work involved tearing off the old roof and making an opening to expand the dormer:



Standing in our upstairs looking out at the sky above.

The moon one morning, also from upstairs in our house. It snowed the previous night. My dad had wrapped the house up as tight as he could the night before. Wrapping up a roof and the importance of doing it well, gives a whole new perspective on the idea of gift wrapping. I don't think I will ever complain when I can't get the wrapping paper on a present just right again!

A matching gable for the back of the house.

Beginning to frame out the new roof line and walls.

Exterior walls back in place.

New windows in the girls' room.

Gazing outside to the wintery night from her new window seat.

Loving {!!} the box that our new bathtub came in. My next post will show some more interior pictures of all the work being done. Our continued thanks to my Dad for everything, Mitch for all his plumbing expertise, and to Uncle Dan for the heating he installed. These are all very good and wonderful things to have and we are thankful for their work!

Christkindl Market Chicago

I recently chaperoned a field trip with Alyssa's German class to the Christkindl Market in Chicago. It's not as big as I remember it being when I went there as a kid, but such a fun place filled with all sorts of unique hand crafted gifts. It made me feel in the Christmas spirit to walk around there. Especially since we don't have many Christmas decorations of our own up this year, because of limited space with the construction, I really enjoyed seeing all the beautiful ornaments and other decorative things.

Chaperoning a middle school field trip is much like trying to keep a watchful eye on potentially naughty sheep from a distance that is far enough that those sheep can retain their cool factor, but not so far that they might actually make a run for it and join a new flock.

I realize that the fact that I just used the words "cool factor" to attempt to describe characteristics they would like attributed to them is probably why they don't want to hang out with me more. Alyssa doesn't mind me being around at all, in fact each time I walked away to take a few pictures I ran into her classmates who told me she was looking for me. They said it in a way that insinuated that even my absence was a burden to them. Ugh, so teenagery.

Verry pretty Lebkuchen hearts.

Amazing ornaments:



Delicious pretzels!!

These were larger than the faces of the kids who were eating them ~ HUGE!

Alyssa and one of her best besties.

These hand painted pewter art pieces were absolutely beautiful! I wanted the Noah's Ark one, then I saw how much it costs and I didn't want it as much anymore.

These nesting dolls were precious too, every single little delicate detail was attended to!

Alyssa bought one of these for her new room.

I opted for a souvenir mug full of what I think was hot apple cider.

Such a huge collection of steins!

The group of mostly good, sweet, potentially naughty sheep that Alyssa has gone to school with since kindergarten. It's been amazing to watch these kids grow up and it's at least a little sad that many of them will be going in various directions next year for high school...only about six more months together with their crazy and wonderful group!

Christmas Books

The day after Thanksgiving I usually take out all our Christmas stories and we try to read a couple of them each night between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is one of my favorite traditions, and we have come to love so many great Christmas books!


A wonderful new book we discovered last year is The Paper Bag Christmas. I bought it simply because it was on the sale shelf at the book store, and it is definitely going back into the line up of Christmas books to read this season and every season after for as long as my girls will listen to it ~ it's so good!

The books shown here are: Have You Seen Christmas?, A Gift From St. Nicholas, The Legend of the Candy Cane, The King's Christmas List, The Christmas List, A Special Place for Santa, The Three Gifts of Christmas, and The Christmas Bell. These are some of our favorites and I believe all are available on amazon.

Our girls are old enough now to read the story of Jesus' birth right from the Bible and understand, but when they were younger they loved reading the story from nativity books like these. The girls still enjoy the nativity adventure What God Wants for Christmas that is pictured in the middle.

I am sure the girls could remind me of several other good books that I have missed here, but if you are looking for any good Christmas read alouds that kids are sure to enjoy, we recommend any of these!!

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Ours was nice. Emma learned how to make origami turkeys at school on the day before Thanksgiving so she stayed busy crafting away so everyone could have one at their place setting. Rebekah made the cute turkey card.



Alyssa and Rebekah were happily playing dress up with items from my mom's closet. Recently Alyssa's favorite thing to wear is my mom's prom dress from when she was in high school. You can't see it all in this picture, but it looks pretty on her.

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.

1 Thessalonians 5:18 (King James Bible)

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Before Pictures

On November 15th, my dad began a pretty huge construction project at our house. Here are some "before" pictures.

The collage above shows the front, back and a side view of the house as it was before any work began. It is an older home built in the 40s. We needed a new roof very badly, and while they were doing all the work my dad suggested that we expand the dormers to give the girls more room upstairs. It is not a big house at all and they were very cramped up there. It's a cute house that we love a lot, in a neighborhood that we love a lot and we are excited and ready for a change that will help us make more functional use of the space we have.

As I took these pictures I was thinking that I should have taken some "before the before" pictures so you could see all the stacks of books overflowing the shelves and the toys and the girls' instruments that they had piled up in this space. All these photos were taken after about a week worth of work just clearing out and cleaning up.

This photo above is right at the top of the stairs before any work was done. The house is laid out a little odd in that at one point it was a duplex and this area right here is a very small kitchenette at the top of the stairs. I loved it when I was a coffee drinker, I had a little coffee bar set up on the counter here and the girls had a toy kitchen next to it. Now that the girls are getting older {and I no longer drink coffee} we could make much better use of the area than having a little kitchen that no one really uses.

This is the bathroom, which is the door right next to the kitchenette area in the photo above. Believe it or not, there's not much more to it than what can be seen in the picture. It is very much like stepping into a bathroom on an airplane with a shower stall off to one side.

The most exciting part of the project for Alyssa is that she is going to be getting her own room. This is a walk in closet right at the top of the stairs that my dad is converting to a new room for her. It is not going to be a large room, but she doesn't mind one bit! He is doing a wonderful job with it, the ceiling is getting vaulted to give the space a more roomy feel. It looks very cool.

One half of the girls' current room. This is after I had shoved all their existing furniture into the middle of the room. All three girls have slept on this side of the room for the last few years.

The other half of the room where desks, dressers and toys have been kept. These two rooms are quite big, but the three girls fill them up very quickly and easily and Alyssa will be happy to have a room that is all her own.

This is looking out of the existing bedroom to the area where Alyssa's new room will be. I do not think the wall will be open here anymore once all the work is done, it will be a new closet.

Already a lot of progress has been made since these photos were taken. We are very thankful to my Dad who has been working hard everyday and is doing so much of this work! My Uncle Dan and Uncle Ted have also been working on it along with Dave and some friends. Thank you to everyone who has had a part, they have all been busy working so hard!! I hope to post some progress photos later this week.

First Tooth Fabulous

Rebekah has been asking since sometime in kindergarten, when her other friends began losing teeth, when she might get a loose tooth of her own. Based upon both of her older sisters losing their first teeth on the late side, I knew she had quite a while to go before she'd be experiencing any of this kind of excitement. Finally, a few weeks ago, she pointed out one of her bottom front teeth telling me it felt weird. I asked her if it was wiggly and we determined that she officially had her first loose tooth. This rather quickly convinced her that she could hardly eat anything at all for risk of the tooth hurting, or heaven forbid, becoming any looser. Over two years of waiting to basically figure out that she'd prefer to keep her deciduous teeth after all.

After about two weeks of apprehensive wiggling and going through a phase where the tooth was so loose she practically spit it out each time she spoke...On November 20th, the tooth came out and...she didn't even know it fell out when it happened. Rebekah was eating a snack as we were driving in the car after school when she called out to me from the back, "Mom, there's something in this puffed rice that is not puffed rice." It didn't immediately occur to me what she was talking about, so I didn't say much. About a minute or so later, I realized what happened and we had to fish through her snack filled cup holder in the car to find where she spit it out. She ran around cheering for about five straight minutes afterwards repeating over and over again, "It came out. My tooth came out. And it did not even hurt me at all. My tooth is really not there anymore. It came out..."


I love little window smiles!

I used a fancy, swirly font to write a letter to Rebekah from the tooth fairy, in part because Emma lost two teeth during this same week and completely lost {as in the tooth never made it from school to home after falling out of her mouth} one of them and I thought it would be fun for the tooth fairy to give her a hard time about the really lost tooth. So anyway, my computer printed letters seemed to go by rather unnoticed by both of the girls and the bottom sentence of her schoolwork here tells exactly what Rebekah thought of it:

"The Letter the Tooth Fairy gave me last week came from the computer."

So while she was thrilled to loose her first tooth, I guess as far as the tooth fairy goes, she is not easily impressed.

Flying By Fall

Fall flew by so fast this year. I know we aren't quite to Winter yet, but Thanksgiving is getting so close and it has already snowed here so it feels like Autumn is gone. Here's a bunch of photos from October and November...



Picking out pumpkins at Stein's.

Yummy pumpkin pizza.

The two older girls and I ran in a 5K donut dash at my parent's house. Any race that serves donuts at the finish line is Emma's kind of fun for sure!!

Our gym hosted a meet near the end of October and we had different "team spirit dress up days" throughout the week. All the gymnasts loved it!! This photo was taken on beach day. I wish I would have done a better job taking pics throughout the week, the kids had some pretty crazy attire going on.

And the meet itself...it was Rebekah's first meet ever, she was competing just for the fun of it. She decided Thursday night that she would compete Saturday. She talked to me throughout her entire beam routine, {something a competitor is not supposed to do and something I have never really witnessed in a meet before.} She is so sweet. Our optionals treated this home meet as a practice competition. It went well.

Way too much Halloween candy, most of which is still in our living room.

We love to help rake :-)

And of course, playing in the leaves is just as much fun!!

We had a pretty decent snowfall on November 11th to let us know that Winter is on it's way. The girls can't wait.

This was the first day of tech rehearsal, when among other things Alyssa found out how they would style her hair for each performance of A Christmas Carol. She LOVES it!!

14

Alyssa turned 14 last Friday!!

I remember being in the hospital, holding her tiny 5 pound 8 ounce body swaddled tight like a little burrito and thinking she was just the most perfect thing I had ever seen. I marveled at the tiny wrinkles on her fingers and toes and studied her delicate little finger nails. She was born with these amazing and wise steely eyes that just seemed to stare back right through me, as if she was examining every detail of me, just like I was of her. Now I know that with her imperfect newborn vision, she was trying to focus on something ~ anything, but at the time, being a young first-time mom, I was sure she had my number from the day she was born.

If you would have told me back then about the kind of fourteen year old young lady she would be someday, I could not have even imagined the girl we have today. It would have been just too much to dream up.

In the last few weeks alone, she has asked to drive Dave's car, gotten her first cell phone and filled out high school applications... pretty significant milestones that I can't even believe are upon us.

Alyssa has a gentle, careful, independent and creative nature. She's kind and attentive to anyone younger than she is, and respectful to anyone older. There's about a million different things I could say about her, mostly all to say that we are so thankful for Alyssa and the delightful young person she is. She has admittedly made our first year of parenting a teenager rather easy.

{at Disney World's Magic Kingdom in August, right after getting a kiss on the cheek from Marie.}

{at her MPact Girls "Friends" graduation in June. Alyssa still has a terrible dislike of fire of any kind, a little bit of the symbolism of this part of the ceremony is lost on her as she tries not to panic about the small flame she is holding.}

{At the Rainforest Café}

{Walking in Epcot's France with Rebekah. I always appreciate how watchful Alyssa is of her younger sisters!}

Happy 14th Birthday, Alyssa! 

 We love you very much!!

My Three Cleopatras

Earlier in the month we went to the public museum for their trick or treat night...


Learning sign language during an animal presentation.


In the Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit there are a lot of old buildings and homes decorated for the time period and culture that they represent. The girls love running through there and playing make believe games as they speak in many foreign accents. Many of the windows have at least somewhat realistic looking figures inside {the woman peeking back out the window at them}...Rebekah only gets so close, I think they scare her a little.

In Japan.

Fancy posing Cleopatras.


This room with all the pretty shells is one of the girls favorite places in the museum. The lighting is kind of strange in there and I haven't figured out what setting to put my camera on to get good photos. I had to add a lot of fill light here, and Rebekah's still wouldn't come out quite right.

Emma in Cleopatra's Dance of the Butterfly.


Happy Halloween