A post about Elizabeth

It wouldn't be fair if I didn't do the same kind of post for Elizabeth. So here goes. Elizabeth has embraced her second year of life and all that comes with it. She understands the idea of "the terrible twos" and doesn't let us forget it.

She is very stubborn and when she wants something you might as well go along with her, or else you are in trouble. She is getting much better at school- she had a slight hitting problem associated with the always wanting things her way- and she seems to be retaining some alphabet knowledge. She points to letters and calls them 'A', so something must have stuck!

She is learning the letters and numbers and does plenty of crafts at school. She is learning to use the potty and she is pretty excited about her successes when she has them.She loves reading books and we read one every night before bed. Most of the time it is the same book, but every once in awhile I can sneak in something different.

Elizabeth also loves her sister. She always wants to do whatever Morgan is doing- without fail! If Morgan is done with dinner, then Elizabeth is done. If Morgan wants a snack, Elizabeth wants a snack. If Morgan has to go potty, then Elizabeth has to go potty....you see where I am going with this. It is pretty cute, but I don't think Morgan understands that Elizabeth really wants to be her friend. Nor does she understand that she is teaching her sister plenty of bad habits.

It's getting late and those are all the updates I can think of. I'm sure I will think of more and I will be sure to post about them. But I thought I would end the post by saying that all the pictures in this post were taken by our good friend Kate. Kate went to high school with Greg and she recently started her own photography business and this is the second year we have used her to photograph the girls. We even snuck in some family pictures. I thought I would share a few more of my favorites.

A post about Morgan

It has been awhile since I updated everyone on the girls themselves and since I have great new pictures to share I figured I would kill two birds with one stone.

Miss Morgan recently moved to a new class at pre-school. She is now in the Junior Kindergarten II room. It is essentially the same level she was in before, but now she is in the older class. So instead of being with three and four year olds she is with all four year olds. She thinks it's the grown up class if that tells you anything.

Her class is going back through the alphabet and they spend two weeks on a letter. So far they are up to 'O'. She can easily write her name and spell it for you, and it working on writing small words. She can use scissors, paint, markers, crayons etc. and seems to be having a blast at school. We recently signed her up for a dance class. The teacher comes to the school and teaches several classes throughout the week for all the different age groups. Morgan was very excited because all her friends take dance too. Hopefully soon I can sneak up there and watch a class!

She is becoming much more independent and likes to play by herself. We have fully entered the doll phase of life. Morgan loves playing with dolls (Barbies, My Little Ponies etc.) The other night I watched her play by herself and have conversations with the dolls for over 30 minutes! She does like to play with her sister from time to time, as long as Elizabeth does what she is told. Sometimes Elizabeth doesn't like that though. She also loves playing board games. So far she is a pro at Memory. I admit that the first couple of times I let her win, but now she beats me fair and square.

At the moment those are the only big updates I can think of on the Morgan front. But I thought I would end the post by saying that all the pictures in this post were taken by our good friend Kate. Kate went to high school with Greg and she recently started her own photography business and this is the second year we have used her to photograph the girls. We even snuck in some family pictures. I thought I would share a few more of my favorites.

Thanks again Kate! www.kshdesignsonline.com

Morgan's First Party

One day when Morgan came home from school I realized that she had mail in her pile of papers. It was her first birthday party invitation! In her classroom there are maybe 8-10 girls, and one of them, Abigail was turning 4. So her brave parents invited all the girls to Abigail's birthday party. Morgan was pretty excited.

The party was being held at Bounce U and Elizabeth, Greg and I were allowed to come too. Morgan waited patiently for the day to arrive and when it finally did Greg was at Ball State's homecoming that day so I braved the trip with both girls! We made it to Bounce U and headed into the place and from the moment we walked in Morgan was in her element. She had all her little friends and they were all full of four year old enthusiasm. The party started by getting all the girls together so they could watch the safety video.

They all sat very still and watched the video. You would have thought it as a major motion picture!

Finally it was time to bounce. The great thing about a party at Bounce U is that you get the entire bouncing room to your self. So there were about 10 kids and their parents in a room with several bouncing toys. So there was no waiting or bumping into each other. It was pretty fun. And they even let the parents play!

This is Morgan and Elizabeth in the boxers ring. They had giant boxing gloves that you could put on and box. The only problem- the boxing gloves were about the same size as Morgan so I don't think she could have put them on even if she wanted to!

Elizabeth didn't seem to mind the fact that she was crashing the party. She was the youngest kid there by far. But she had her own fun.

At one point I finally found Morgan in the boxing room. She was having so much fun with her friends!

Before the party moved to the lunch room (which then opened the room for another party to start bouncing) all the girls got together for a picture. The girl to the right of Morgan in the picture is Abigail.

After bouncing the kids were pretty hungry and by this time it was noon. So we headed into the party room to enjoy pizza and juice packs.

And of course there was cake!

All in all Morgan had a great time at her very first birthday party. And then two weeks later we went to her second birthday party for our neighbor's daughter. It appears that my daughter is quite the socialite! I guess I better start keeping a list of attendees for her birthday party next summer.

It's Potty Time!

Over the last couple of months Elizabeth has shown more and more interest in going potty! Which is great news. I decided not to push the issue and if she is into it then great- otherwise I will wait. Well she sees her big sister go potty and thinks it's a great idea.

Every night we have to read "A Potty For Me". I've read this book so many times that I can recite the thing by heart. For the first few weeks Elizabeth just seemed interested in sitting on the potty. She knew exactly what to do and would get the toilet paper when she was ready to be done and then we flushed the toilet and washed our hands. So one night when she said "I wanna potty." I figured we were just in for another trip of sitting on the potty but she surprised me! All the sudden I heard a tinkle and I looked at her and she must have realized how excited I was because she smiled so big!

It caused an immediate party of clapping, cheering and candy eating. Elizabeth was pretty proud of herself. Later that night she asked to go potty again and actually went! Since then we have been having sporadic success. Most of her issue now is timing. She will tell you she wants to go potty- which actually means she just went in her diaper.

For now we are going to keep working on it and I will need to stock up on M &M's which are her favorite reward!

Pumpkins, Tractors and Apples Oh My!

This past weekend Greg and I decided to take the girls to get some pumpkins to decorate the outside of our house. Because after all- Halloween is right around the corner! Instead of getting the standard pumpkin at the grocery store, we opted to travel to an actual pumpkin patch just north of our house. There are plenty of pumpkin patches to choose from in Indianapolis and they all offer a different set of activities, but we went with the standard farm setting. Stuckey Farms in Westfield is an actual working orchard and farm, and they let you pick your own apples and pumpkins. So we headed North to start our adventure.

When we got there the place was packed but we found our way to the orchard and I gave each girl a bag to collect their apples. We had to remind both Morgan and Elizabeth not to pick the apples up off the ground- even after reminding them several times, I think we still brought home some apples from the ground.

Morgan was pretty excited about picking the apples. And wanted to pick nearly every apple she saw.

Elizabeth didn't mind picking the apples either. She did have a hard time keeping up with us from time to time.

But once she caught up she didn't mind taking a moment to smile for the camera!

Elizabeth was not a fan of the leaves and stems on the apples. She would pick one off the tree and then have to stand there are take each leave and stem off before it could go in her bag. The process took awhile.

Morgan seemed to only want to pick the smallest apples on the tree. I tried to tell her to pick the big ones, but we now have a bag full of small apples. I guess they are the perfect size for Morgan and Elizabeth!

After awhile Morgan and Elizabeth's bags got too heavy, so Mommy and Daddy had to haul them around.

Elizabeth found plenty of apples at just her height!

But some of them were just out of reach. Mommy helped get some down for her though!

Then when Mommy and Daddy weren't helping the two of them worked together to get the apples they wanted!

The perfect apple picking team!

After picking apples we decided to take a tractor ride out to the pumpkin patch. This seemed much more festive then picking an already picked pumpkin, and Morgan was dying to ride the tractor.

So we waited for a few minutes for the tractor to come back around. I'm not sure Elizabeth liked waiting very much.

But by the time we got on the tractor, Morgan was so excited. She loved every minute of it. Elizabeth on the other hand did not. She held onto me with a death grip and screamed the entire time.

But once we made it off the tractor she was happy to walk around the pumpkin patch. Both girls checked out the pumpkins and Morgan finally chose one. It is kind of lopsided, but she thought it was perfect. So we loaded it up and took it back with us!

Our trip to the pumpkin patch was pretty nice. We got plenty of apples, a big pumpkin, candy and apple cider! Once we brought the apples home I made a home made apple cobbler and everyone loved it! Now we just have to wait and carve our pumpkin in the next couple of days!

What was I thinking!

Every now and then there are just certain moments where you wonder- what the heck was I thinking. Last week I had one of those moments.

On Monday I got a phone call from the pediatric dentist's office reminding me that I scheduled the girls for an appointment. Luckily they called because I had forgotten. Now when I made the appointment 6 months ago I figured Greg would be able to come with me to help because not only would Morgan be getting her teeth cleaned, but Elizabeth needed to enter the world of dental hygiene. But after I hung up the phone I remembered that Greg was busy with meetings at work and wouldn't be able to come with me.

Now looking back I should have called and rescheduled the appointment. But did I do that? NO! I thought to myself- this will be okay. Morgan did okay the last time and Elizabeth might cry a little but it will be okay.

So Tuesday morning I loaded them in the car and took off to the dentist. I waited to tell Morgan about the appointment until we were well on our way- and the minute the sentence "We are going to the dentist." came out of my mouth, she started crying. In between crying all she would say is "I don't want to go to the dentist!" And that's pretty much how it went until we got back to the exam area.

When the hygienist asked Morgan if she wanted to go first, Morgan quickly offered up her sister instead. So our appointment started with me holding Elizabeth down. I didn't bring my camera to the appointment but it looked something like this:

Then is was Morgan's turn. And it pretty much looked the same! It was a stressful time for everyone. But they have great teeth and now have new toothbrushes. And in an effort to get them to calm down: I treated them to Dunkin Donuts on the way to school.

Pre-K...an update.

I thought it time to do a Junior Kindergarten update! Morgan has been hard at work since the end of August and each week she comes home learning more and more! It's been fun to watch. Plus a few weeks ago Greg and I had to go to our first parent teacher conference. The whole meeting took less then ten minutes, but it was really interesting to see what the teacher had to say. Earlier in the school year they did standard testing on the entire class to see how each child was learning, and where their strengths and weaknesses are. Now I'm not talking I-Step testing here, but it was a diverse enough test to see what they knew. The teacher went over the test and showed us Morgan's answers and she is testing right where she should be! They did the normal items: Colors, shapes, letters and numbers, and then the teacher had a list of questions that each child had to answer. Some of the more memorable ones for Morgan's test are below:

Test: "What growls?"
Morgan's answer: "Your stomach"

Test: "What explodes?"
Morgan's answer: "A baby"

Each week the class learns a new letter, and not only do they learn the letter, they learn how it sounds, how to write it and what things start with the letter. So far they are through "I, i". For every letter we get numerous coloring sheets. This one dealt with D. (Again the color comes out funny- apparently the blog and my work scanner do not cooperate well together.)

She is getting much better at her coloring! She uses all sorts of colors and likes to make things look like a rainbow.

Several weeks ago Morgan brought home the paper that said that her school would be taking class pictures. We were asked to write a check and essentially cross our fingers! I didn't hold out much hope, since sometimes getting Morgan to sit still for a picture is near impossible. But last week while I was home with the flu Greg brought home Morgan's pictures from school and it made my day! The pictures were great.

Both Greg and I look at the framed version we have at home and say "Man, she's old!" She looks so grown up. And special thanks to the photographer for doing a once over on her infamous hair. In addition to her own picture, Morgan got a picture of all the kids in her class. Looks like I better start a file, because she already has a class picture and she's only in Junior Kindergarten!

And the last exciting thing to share with everyone is that Morgan can officially write her own name. They've been working on it since the beginning of school and now every day her papers are signed with her own name.

She still has a little work to do to perfect it, but hey- she's only 4 and I think it's pretty awesome!

Daddy's Helper Monkey

Last weekend after we got home from Monkey Joe's I unloaded the girls and they ran to see what dad was up to in the workshop (a.k.a the garage). Without skipping a beat Elizabeth saw the pile of sawdust on the floor and ran to the wall of tools and picked up the broom and dust pan. She then proceeded to sweep up the sawdust as best she could. It looks like Greg might have a helper on his hands!