Honor Roll

Today, Emily received a little certificate for being on the honor roll. It was kind of fun to see her get awarded for her hard work. But as usual, I'm kind of conflicted about the whole thing. We used to get those at the end of the year after a whole year of hard work. Getting them every trimester seems a bit much, don't you think? Seems too easy to get and belittles the whole thing when you get three of them a year. 

I understand that they want to give encouragement and goals to the kids along the way but when you get them all the time, it's like, well, I don't feel like working that hard right now, I'll get one next time. There must be a better way to encourage them.

I hope that they don't do kindergarten graduations...I might have a serious problem with it.

Bathroom Restoration

Our old house only had one bathroom. Which was fine when it was just Christian and myself. But as the kids started their potty training, I quickly found out that it was going to be a problem to have only one bathroom. Larger families have grown up with only one bathroom without too much of a problem but I seriously don't know how they did it. So when we were house shopping, I really wanted to find a house with at least another half bath or enough room to add one. I knew that things would just get more difficult when the girls got older. 

Our new house has 1 and 3/4 baths so I was pretty happy about that. But we lost the use of the main bathroom when the plumbers had to demolish some of it to put in the new pipes. We were at a loss about how to restore our bathroom. I would like to (one day in the far distant future) totally redo the bathroom...get a new tub and sink (as I believe the previous owners either threw some kind of acid in them when they were moving  or used a VERY harsh chemical to "clean" it when they moved out and pretty much ruined them...but that's another story) and re-tile the entire bathroom so that there is a lot more coverage. It was obvious that there had been some water damage from the shower before and in order to prevent that from eventually happening again, we would probably have to tile all the way to the ceiling and have the tile come out a ways from the tub itself. 

Anyway, there was no way we were going to be able to afford remodeling the bathroom at that point, especially since we just spent thousands (that we didn't have) on re-piping the entire house. So we decided to just put a patch on the damage even though the tile would not match (the only tile we could find at our local home improvement stores were white tile or off-white tile and our tile is white with light grey specks) but at least we would have a usable bathroom. So, the next step was to um...figure out how to tile?!  This was obviously still going to take some time.

But our hero, Keith Ballantyne, came to our rescue. Christian cleaned off all the old tile along the damaged wall and in a few hours, Keith had all the gaping holes and exposed pipes re-covered. We had to let it dry and he came back and in a few more hours, had the tile all set. And check it out, you can barely see a difference unless you really looked. He found a tile that isn't exactly the same but similar enough that it isn't a glaring difference. Plus, he extended the tile on that side of the wall to cover behind the toilet as well! It is so awesome!

We are so grateful to be one giant step closer into getting our house back in order and putting this difficult experience behind us. 

End of Birthday Celebrations

Saturday was Emily's birthday party. The girls' birthday parties have been pretty low key events thus far. Small get togethers for the immediate family, our best friend Marian who is like an Aunt to the girls and the grandparents. My parents did not make it to the party this year. I think it is the first year that they've missed it. I think we got brave a couple of times and invited over one little playmate for Emily. We haven't really dived into the kid party thing with games and toys and kid food. I've decorated a few times but the food is usually geared towards the adults. I figure that the birthday girl is usually so excited about their birthday and gifts that they don't really eat that much anyway. So I try to make it worth while for the adults to make the long drive out to our house and concentrate on the food for adults. One of these days, I will probably bite the bullet and have a party with their friends.

Anyway, since Emily needs another toy at this point like another hole in the head, we decided to get her some neat decorations for her room (plus a few clothes and shoes that she needs anyway). Marian got her some neat princess activity and coloring things which she loves and a necklace and a game. She's not really good with playing with toys although she thinks she wants them. She doesn't have the imagination to play with them unless it interacts back with her like her leap frog things or video games or unless she plays the toys with her sister who provides the imagination. But she loves games which forces us to play with her and she loves drawing, coloring, painting and the like. In the past, her other best gifts had been books and dress up clothes. The books is probably why she is so smart and the dress up clothes because they play becomes all about Emily.

Her ever generous grandpa got her a little desk of her own since she loves to read, write and draw.

A look down memory lane...

I wanted to do a neat pictorial of Emily's life to the present. I wanted to decorate her room while she was at school yesterday. I wanted to make her favorite dinner for her last night. I had planned to attempt a castle cake for her birthday party...but you know what they say about best laid plans.

Anyway, since I already went through most of Emily's thousands of photographs from when she was born. I picked out a few that jumped out at me and I put together a few collages of when she was little.

This is shots of her from when she was born, up to about when she was a year old...
Okay, so it was hard to narrow down the pictures that year since there were over a thousand easy. That's the nice and bothersome thing about digital pictures. You can take so many more of them but you are afraid to throw a single one away (believe it or not, we threw out a ton already). You can click on the picture to see a larger image of it to see the details.

Don't worry, I managed to narrow down the pictures better in the next collages. This next one is of her second year...
And here is year 3.
Here is her fourth year. This is the year that Emily insisted on getting a haircut like Dora the Explorer. We cut it but we put our foot down on the bangs. Unlike her sassy little sister, I think Emily's hair looks best long.
Year 5. See, hair grows back pretty quickly.


This is up to her 6th year birthday. Look at that...she barely looks like a little girl anymore! *sob* She's going to be taller than me before she hits puberty!

Princess Emily

Yesterday, my self proclaimed princess, Emily (personally, I question her lineage) turned 6 years old. Wow, they do grow up fast. It seemed like just a little while ago, she was my little angel......please, take no note of the pitchfork she stole from the devil.

Anyway, yesterday, we celebrated her birthday, but as time (and patience) did not permit us to do all that we wanted for her birthday, she will probably be getting bits of birthday celebration over the course of 3 days. Saturday is her birthday party when her grandparents usually come and we have a more formal celebration.

We are still trying to unpack the house so we took a full truck load of stuff to DI (of course we brought home several bags worth too). We took a little too long looking at stuff there so we ended up taking her to McDonald's for her birthday and I made her some cupcakes.