Birthday Girl #2

Our second little princess also had a birthday earlier this month. Here are a few pictures of the celebrating we did.

Since big sister had blueberry muffins on her birthday, Sarah Claire insisted on having them, too.

And this is what happens when your three-your-old tries to get her ice cream cake out of the fridge herself! We're lucky it was still edible at all!

 We salvaged enough for everyone to still get a piece.

 She loved the handmade personalized necklace that Lee Anna made for her...

And all three kids had fun playing with the new additions to SC's kitchen--wooden slice and bake cookies and a wooden birthday cake set. They even had their own bake sale!

And this was in the birthday box from Mimi! She loved being Smurfette, and walked around singing the Smurf song for a good half hour.

Happy Birthday, Little Princess! We love you lots!

Birthday Girl #1

It's high time we got some birthday pics on the blog! June is birthday month for both girls, so we had a fun week with lots of celebrating! Lee Anna chose to have her party at a local water park again this year, and we all had a great time enjoying the sun and water.

 We made some fun cookies n cream cupcakes (with Oreos on top and inside!)!

Here she is blowing out the candle on her birthday blueberry muffin (which she requested weeks in advance).

She got to open one gift before we left for the water park that morning. Daddy sent her on a little scavenger hunt around the house for it.

 One clue was even hiding in the freezer!

 She had a wonderful time with lots of sweet friends!

 And Sawyer had a pretty good time, too!

She got to open the rest of her gifts when we got back home, including this cute outfit from her cousins. We had a wonderful day celebrating our beautiful eight-year-old. We love you, Lee Anna Belle!

Eating Out

When people move from one country to another, they usually have to make major adjustments in what they eat. Usually. We have had to make some minor adjustments to our eating out fare, but overall we have it pretty good! We don't have Taco Bell, Moe's, or any other Tex-Mex fast food, but we get all the McDonald's, Burger King, Hardee's and KFC that we need.We've taken a few pics lately to demonstrate the similarities and a few subtle differences. 

Here's Sawyer holding the Hot Wheels cars he got in his kids' meal at Hardee's.That's pretty normal, but ...

Lee Anna is standing in that same Hardee's. We're the only customers at 12:45 on a Saturday afternoon! The work crew was still coming in when we got there, and there were no other customers. Not one. The locals have a little different eating schedule. They were packed out by 4:00, and probably stayed busy until the wee hours of Sunday morning, but noon:45 was too early for lunch!

Most of the fast food joints have play places like they would in the states...

And the burgers and fries are pretty similar to the American originals.

One thing we see more of on this side of the ocean is sleeping children. Like eating schedules, sleeping schedules are also very different here. Families don't typically have a set nap time or bed time, but they just assume that if their child is sleepy enough, they'll fall asleep--which they do, all over town! And this week, Sarah Claire acted just like a local. On the way to Burger King for supper yesterday (at about 5:30) she fell fast asleep in the car. She snoozed for about 20 minutes before waking up to eat with us. No one who saw us even batted an eye at the sleeping toddler, though, since we see kids sleeping like this everywhere we go.

We are so grateful to have all these places to go and eat. (When we don't feel like just having them deliver!)

We're Smiling!

Can you guess why we we're all smiling around here?

We are officially finished with our 2011-12 school year! Second grade and kindergarten are in the bag for these two. Today was our official last day. We've been winding down for the last few weeks, but today we really finished everything up. 

We finished our last two read-alouds--A Little Princess and a wonderful biography of Gladys Aylward. My goodness, that woman had some adventures! We probably could have finished the read-alouds a little sooner if I hadn't had to keep stopping to wipe my eyes and swallow the lump out of my throat. I just love that my kids are being exposed to such wonderful stories--fiction and non-fiction!

We celebrated with a special End-of-the-School-Year lunch, and then a surprise trip to a new little children's museum that just opened near us recently. "Museum" might be a generous term. It's really just one big room, but they had lots of fun, educational activities. First the kids got to go "shopping" in a big fruit and vegetable market, then they had to weigh their food to determine how much it costs. Since they see these kinds of scales used regularly, they loved getting to do it themselves.

When they had finished shopping, they put on doctor's coats and stethoscopes and played doctor with a big skeleton. Then when they finished that, they got to build little cars and towers out of some special building blocks. And all that playing cost just about $5 each. We will definitely be going back there!

And, since this will be my last school-related post for a while, here's Lee Anna's last writing assignment of the year. Her assignment was to write a story about a trip into space. Enjoy!

Does it get any better...

than Oreos and bubbles? Not for these guys!

Thanks to our awesome friends visiting from the states, we enjoyed some real-live, authentic, double-stuffed Oreo goodness tonight. It was wonderful!

For the Birds

We had a blast celebrating Sawyer's sixth birthday with an Angry Birds birthday party last weekend! Here are the kids, decked out in their new t-shirts from Mimi, practicing their best "Angry Face."

A sweet friend took pictures for us during the party, which means that this party was a lot more thoroughly documented than some of our other birthdays. I'm so glad she got pictures of everything.

 There were birds...

 and pigs...

 all over the place!

When all our guests had arrived, we went up to the roof to play our real-live Angry Birds game!

 Have you ever seen such fierce concentration? Those pigs don't stand a chance!

We also had lots of bubbles for those who were waiting their turn with the slingshot.

 And the swingset got a good workout, too!

 We went back inside for pizza, and then had fun playing "Pin the Beak on the Bird."

By the time we got back upstairs to do the pinata, it was pretty dark, but they all still managed to find the candy that fell out!

Here's our sweet photographer enjoying a hard-earned cake & ice cream break.

We are so grateful for this sweet, silly, energetic, thoughtful, 

affectionate, wiggly, snaggletoothed little boy.  

Happy Birthday, Sawyer!

Plugging Along

We're steadily making progress toward the end of our school year, hoping to be done in about a month. In between the dusty days in April, we had some really pretty days. Some of those became Roof School Days! 

We've also been sprucing up our roof a bit this week, getting ready for a big event coming this weekend. You'll get to see more pictures of that soon, I'm sure.

This guy finished his Kindergarten math book this week. Here he is with the completed Book B! First grade, here he comes!

And here is our most recent art project! Sawyer is turning six this weekend, and he decided long ago that he wants an Angry Birds party. So I decided to combine party prep with elementary art, and we had a paper mache morning last week! We discovered that Lee Anna is much more excited about having gooey stuff on her fingers than her little brother. But while he wasn't so thrilled with the actual paper mache process, he loves the final product! Look for these guys back in another blog post soon.