Our Week in Pictures July 5th-11th

We experienced a heat wave here in Northeastern Ohio, so we spent the majority of our week finding fun ways to keep cool!

Ava spent her mornings this week at Safety Town, learning about traffic, bicycle, and bus safety. She also visited the police and fire stations and learned about "stranger danger" too. I guarantee that she has taken stranger danger to heart because bedtime has been pretty rough since THAT session(she's scared that a stranger is coming into our house now). At least she did learn the whole "wrist-whip" technique if someone grabs her and she's finally more cautious about talking to random people in stores and on the street.

Also, on Tuesday morning, Ava's best friend Anna's great-grandma passed away. This meant that Ava had a constant playmate for most of the week while Anna's mommy was preparing for the funeral and incoming family. You'll notice Anna (the sweet lil' blonde) in all of the following pictures.

On Wednesday, Ava, Emily, our neighbor Maddy, and Ava's friend Anna decided to brave the heat and play in our shaded backyard. When they begged me to hook up the sprinkler, I obliged. Because of all of the shade, grass does not grow in certain places in our backyard, which means....when you add enough water you can create a whole lotta MUD! I was cleaning the kitchen because my sister Karla and friend Laura were coming for a visit the following day. I could hear the girls playing through the open screen door. I glanced up every few seconds to do a head count and make sure all of the girls were accounted for. However, I wasn't really paying attention to their chosen activity. What I saw was them running through the sprinklers, splashing in the puddles, and playing on the swingset. It turns out, I didn't "see" everything. They were painting themselves and the swingset with mud and creating a "mudslide". Lovely.








I sure had a lot of fun washing down my daughters and our guests before returning everyone to their mommies at the end of the day.

On Thursday, I had a nice visit with my sister and friend Laura when they arrived for an overnight visit. Friday morning, we all attended Ava's Safety Town graduation. This is definitely a cool program intended for all of the children in our community who will enter kindergarten in the fall. Ava has learned so much this week! It's much of the "stuff" that I've been telling her all along, but when other people present it, she seems to listen better. Hey, whatever it takes. This was also the day of Anna's grandmother's funeral. Anna decided to graduate with her class and meet up with the funeral party at the luncheon, so I took pictures and video of Both girls graduating so that I could share it with Anna's parents. Just for reference, they are shaking the hands of the mayor, police chief, fire chief, D.A.R.E officer, and their teachers at the ceremony. Here it is:

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Finally, the weekend arrived! After a rainy Friday afternoon relaxing in the house, the girls weren't in their usual heat-exhausted state at bedtime. I finally had to resort to bribery to get them to be quiet and stay in bed. I promised that if they went to sleep that we could make pancakes together in the morning. Ava and Emily absolutely love to make (and eat) pancakes and they took the bribe. Here are some pics of how we began our Saturday.

In these pictures Ava is (logically) still in her pj's while Emily has opted for a swimsuit. It seems that our toddler's self-imposed dress code for the summer consists of dressy dresses or swimsuits. You will find her in either one at any given time of day. Functional shorts and tees are strictly forbidden with this child right now and she absolutely WILL NOT leave her room in the morning until she is properly attired in one or the other...regardless of how much I try to reason, beg, plead, or bribe.









With the breakfast dishes cleaned up, I texted my friend and neighbor Chris to see if she wanted to get our daughters together for a playdate. Ava and Emily are right between her two girls age-wise. She was watching our backyard neighbor's daughter (another one of Ava's playmates), Sophie. After a quick call to my friend Staycie (Anna's mom) we agreed that she would drop Anna off before our outing so that she could join in the fun too. This is how Chris and I happened to descend into the woods for three hours of hiking, wading, and warding off mosquitos with 6 little girls. Quite an adventure. Just call me troop leader Krista! Consequently this is Ava's "gang" of girlfriends so she was in 7th Heaven! I was recently made privy to the pass phrase for their little club. Are you ready for this? It's "Girls rule, boys drool." Don'tcha just love it?! Give them a few years and I'm sure they'll change their tune. (I vote for 15 years!)

Here are some pictures from our time in the Metroparks today:








I like to call this one "Coppertone Baby". You can click on it to make it larger and see for yourself. It cracks me up...no pun intended, of course.









Tomorrow after church we will set up for vacation bible school. Next week will be busy! I'm the VBS "kitchen lady" and I'm in charge of feeding 150 kids plus volunteers. Should be fun!

I hope that all of you had a fun week!

The Messiest Kid Alive!

I believe that Emily is deserving of this title. She was such an easy baby. And despite "the terrible two's", for the most part she has maintained her sweet lil' disposition. There's just one thing....she's a complete mess! A tiny tornado, even. Mike and I have nicknamed her "pig pen". I've never met such a messy kid! Once, twice, sometimes three times a day I am scrubbing floors, walls, and Emily herself in an effort to clean up after this kid. You may remember "The Hot Sauce Disaster" from back in February. That was just a sign of things to come. She draws on the walls, she draws on herself, she rolls in the mud, dumps full cups of milk over her head, empties the pantry and it's contents onto the floor...and that's just scratching the surface. A couple of weeks ago, she arose at 4:30 in the morning and used a WHOLE TUBE of lipstick on herself, my comforter, and worst of all, the carpet in our bedroom. After some extensive online research, I learned that lipstick, with all of it's pigments and wax is the worst thing to remove from carpet. Lucky me. After scrubbing for 2 hours while she looked on, I noticed that she had disappeared from my side and gotten very quiet. Not good. I looked in her room....no Emily. I called down the stairs...silence. I searched the downstairs, calling her name...nothing. I started to panic. There was no way out of the house. The doors were locked. Where was she?! And then I heard a giggle from under the dining room table...where Emily sat with a whole bag of blueberries that she scored from the freezer while I was distracted with the lipstick mess. She had rubbed the blueberries all over her body, drawing tribal-looking designs around her face and down her nose in addition to rubbing them onto the table legs and carpeting. AHHHHHHH!

This brings us to the pictures I took yesterday. After a late night of 4th of July festivities and a day at the pool, Emily passed out on the playroom floor. This is completely out of character for her. Despite all of my attempts, she gave up her afternoon nap weeks ago. She won't even sleep in the car when we take long roadtrips. She's a ball of energy! She fell asleep as I was making dinner. I wanted her to go to bed on time that night, so I woke her up. She was NOT a happy camper. So I decided to turn her and Ava loose in the backyard while I finished making dinner. Bless her heart, she found a cup that was left out from the cookout. She used it to scoop up mulch and give her self a mulch shower, dumping cupfull after cupfull over her head!

Here she is, so tired...and so dirty!





But look at her sweet baby face! I couldn't love this kid more...even if she is the dirtiest kid on the block.




3 shampoos and rinses and she still had mulch clinging to her precious little skull when I combed her baby-fine sunbleached hair this morning.

Today, after she created yet another big mess in our playroom, a friend stopped by. "Why are you making such big messes, Emily?" my friend inquired. She smiled her giant, bright Emily smile and answered, "I YIKE to be DIRTY. Yes I do!" Great.

Ava: The Big Kid

Now that we know that Em is the "Messiest Kid Alive", it's only fair that I update about Ava too. I snapped this picture of her yesterday while I was brushing the mulch off of Emily to prepare her for the journey across the house and upstairs to the bath.

Recently, a friend who has known Ava from birth passed through town. Ava was excited to show off her newly decorated room. My friend looked around Ava's room, decorated with posters from Mary Poppins on Broadway, Barbie paraphernalia, a bulletin board decorated with pictures of her cousins and friends, and her freshly made bed (Ava's new housekeeping skill) with her iCarly bear in it's place of honor on the pillow, then looked and me and said, "Wow. She's like a 'kid' now. Not a baby...but a kid."

Yeah. I know. And it's a little bittersweet.

Ava is growing up SO fast. I can hardly believe that she'll be starting kindergarten next month! She's having a busy summer. That seems to be how she's the happiest....busy! (She really is a mini-me). She kicked off the summer with her dance recital, then she was off visiting my family in Indiana for a week, playing with cousins, and attending a "Princess" dance camp and vacation bible school. We picked her up so that she could enjoy a few days at the lake with Mike's family and then it was home in time for the Fourth of July with her little girlfriends. This week she's doing "Safety Town", a tradition in Ohio for children entering kindergarten, where they learn about bus safety, fire safety, stranger danger, etc. Next week, she's super-psyched to do VBS with all of her church friends here, and then it's cheer camp with all of her neighborhood girlfriends for 3 days. She adores our neighbor and sometime babysitter, a soon-to-be high school senior who will be one of her counselors at camp. Are you tired yet? After cheer camp, she heads back to Indiana for a week with Grandma Pammy and Papa Nick (Mike's parents) and a week of adventures with cousin Nicholas. Whew! After that, we'll have two weeks to "chill" and then I'll be walking her right through those elementary school doors. *sniff*

Part of me misses "Baby Avy" and part of me can't wait to see what she'll do next. On any given day she's already an artist, a cook (Gee, I wonder where she gets that from?), a scholar (she loves to read...chapter books now!), a philosopher...or is it an anthropologist("So if the dinosaurs were here before the cave men, were the cave men Adam and Eve's kids?"), a minister (she converted the tree in front of our house into a "church" and leads her girlfriends in prayer regularly), a drama queen, a singer, a princess, a tom boy (she can climb trees like a monkey and makes a mean mudpie), a fashionista (she's in the dresses ONLY phase right now), a teacher ("Emily, you write an "E" like this!"), a skilled negotiator and debater, a social butterfly, a budding swimmer, and much more!

Still, at the end of the day she curls up to me in her bed during storytime and begs me to snuggle "just a little bit longer" when I close the book. I know that this won't always be her request. She's a big kid now, after all.

Happy 4th of July!

We had a wonderful 4th of July weekend or as Ava put it, "The best 4th of July EVER!" We began the 4th by participating our neighborhood's children's parade. All of the participants met at our neighborhood clubhouse in the morning and used provided materials to decorate their bikes, scooters, and wagons. Then they formed a procession around the block and returned to the clubhouse for treats and gift bags. In the evening we hosted a cookout with 4 other families. Mike blew up the bounce house in the yard, hauled out the Barbie Jeep and the John Deere tractor and the 10 kiddos in attendance (Ava's "gang") played hard and downed lots of popsicles and root beer floats. We adults enjoyed the food and company and supervised to the best of our abilities. : ) When dark finally came, we took a field trip to the elementary school parking lot next door where we were able to watch the fireworks put on by our town and a couple of neighboring communities. To wrap up the night, the kids danced around a neighbor's driveway with sparklers. We finally forced them home where they passed out around midnight! The next day was spent poolside, were they became sufficiently water-logged and snacked on "junk" to their heart's content. No wonder Ava thought it was the "best 4th of July ever!"

Here are some pics from the parade.











Hope you all had a happy holiday!