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!

Spring Happenings

I loaded these pictures months ago, but never got around to writing about them. So...here are the pictures, with some brief descriptions.

Watchin' High School musical. Ava LOVES any musical that we will let her watch and Emily is a good sport about watching them too because she wants to do everything that her big sis does.



Lately Emily is adament that she choose her own wardrobe and style her own hair. She's pretty good at it, don'tcha think?





Around Eastertime, Emily and I chaperoned Ava's class field trip to a local chocolate factory. Here's Ava filling her very own chocolate bunny mold.








They also got to press their own chocolate coins.







We endured a very wet Spring. Not that it bothered the girls. They enjoyed playing in our swamp of a backyard and making mudpies and "stew". We are lucky that there are tons of little girls in this neighborhood. Ava has a "gang" of about 5 girlfriends that she plays with regularly. Sweet girls. They even let Emily tag along...most of the time.











Man, Spring seems like an eternity ago! It was 95 degrees here today.

First Hike of 2010!

When you read this blog and look at the pictures in the Spring thru Fall, it's obvious that our family loves to hike! On Sunday afternoon, the temps reached into the 40's and we were all getting a little stir crazy. Mike suggested that we take a family hike. We chose a waterfall trail that we're pretty familiar with. I would have loved to see this waterfall in the ice and snow. It's not easy to access, though. The trail to the falls is right around 2 hilly miles through the woods. It was a little tough going through the snow, although some of the trails had been broken by other hikers. We ended up opting for some easier terrain with the slippery footing and our young hikers. Still, it was a really nice walk and I have to say, I am very proud of Ava. She hung in there for a good 2 1/2 mile hike. I only had to carry her twice to give her feet a short rest. It felt so good to be back on the trails again. I cannot wait for the Spring thaw!

I wanted to note: Hiking in the winter is so much quieter than in the summer. Very few birds chirping. No bugs buzzing. No leaves rustling. It was strikingly silent out there...I mean besides the sound of our little family crashing through the woods and singing hiking songs. : )

Here are some pics and a couple short clips from the trail.

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A Visit to Leesburg

Earlier this month we got to spend some time back in Leesburg. All of the men on my side of the family headed down to Florida for the Daytona 500, leaving the women and children behind to fend for themselves. (No worries. We're accustomed to this "fending for ourselves" business). Since we all had the H1N1 virus over Christmas, I really didn't get to spend any time catching up with my family. I was excited to finally have the chance. It just so happens that on this trip, we drove directly into the storm that was dumping snow all across Indiana and Ohio. It didn't make for a fun drive, but boy did it make for some fun times for Ava and Emily to play in the snow with their cousins. My sister Karla's boys Riley and Hudson, sledded, dug tunnels, and climbed the snow pile exhaustively with Ava and Emily on our first afternoon back. I had to make them come in for a hot cocoa break! They were sporting some of the pinkest lil' cheeks I ever saw!

Unfortunately, this trip, it was my sister Angie's turn to be sick. The first day I watched my niece, Ella who was also getting over "a bug". And we saw Angie for a brief visit...but we wanted to avoid the stomach flu at all costs! The girls and I ended our trip by celebrating Valentine's Day with a sleep over at Aunt Karla's house. Fun times!

Here's some footage:

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A Couple of Video Clips from February

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