Gabriela turns 4

Four years ago, Brendan and Isa were in school all day, and I was bored at home for 8 long weeks counting down the days until Gabriela was due! She was a super-awesome baby, who allowed me to still volunteer a couple days a week the rest of Isa's Kindergarten year (she went right along to every field trip and activity quite comfy in a sling). She became the class mascot, and her first belly laugh was in class one day while Mr. Barnhill was having "rug time" w/the kids. So cute!

Gabriela has developed into a very spirited, fiery, little girl, who doesn't seem to have an "off" button {we joke she's got adhd on crack} She has challenged me in every way possible (check out my early blogs), but I love her and am so grateful that she's a part of our family. Her dimples continue to work magic on anyone :)
She kept telling everyone that she wouldn't be 4 until her party, even though we explained that technically she already was 4 based on the time she was born (way over her head apparently).

Emalyn enjoyed her cupcake very much :)

Even though we didn't get a picture of everyone, we were able to celebrate her birthday with all of her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. We're so grateful to have almost all of our family close by (she got to see her far away family through skype, so it was a great night). What a beautiful girl!

Potatoes

The other night at the dinner table, Emalyn kept asking for more potatoes. I was quite impressed because she usually doesn't like them. I don't know how 5 people at the table managed to miss this, but instead of eating the potatoes, Ema was using them as earplugs. Nice. [You can see in the last photo the potatoes sticking out of both ears, yum-o!]

September

This is all I have of September, and Danny took the pictures. I've never gone so long without taking pictures! It must have been a pretty boring month :) Danny took the kids on a ward campout to Mt. Lemmon and they had a blast! {Emalyn & I wimped out and had a slumber party with my sisters at their house}

October is always a busy month with tons of birthdays and the holidays coming up, so I should be back at the end of the month with more fun pictures...

August

The first week in August brought the start of a new school year for us, and a bit of change. Isa started 4th grade and loves it! She has the same 4th grade teacher that I had (Ms. Leonardo) and we both love her!! It was so weird for me to sit in the same classroom w/the same teacher (22 years later) on back to school night!

The other change was Brendan entering middle school, 6th grade. Since we're not at all impressed w/the middle schools around here, we started looking into charter schools. The more research we did, the more we realized we just didn't feel right about anything, until we thought about homeschooling. I was pretty intimidated with the thought of it (I have several friends in NC that did it and developed their own curriculum), but it still seemed overwhelming. I had several people in the community tell me about AZ online virtual academy, which is basically an online charter school. We looked into it and decided to do it. We love it! Brendan has a teacher, a curriculum already set up day-to-day, books & workbooks for each subject, & tons of supplies for science experiments and art projects throughout the year! It was so great to have everything done for me, and he's doing great. He's very disciplined and plowing through really well. I'm so proud of him! He doesn't like pictures of him so much anymore, so I don't have one of him to put on here. I'll sneak one soon...

Isa and Gabriela got their haircut at the salon in preparation for the new school year, and Gabriela had a blast being a "big girl".

With everyone back into a routine, I'm able to pick up more sewing/quilting time again. I wanted to make Cajsa a baby gift, but couldn't ever settle on what to make. After I saw this pattern for a baby ring stacker, I knew this was it! It turned out really cute and Adison enjoys it now.

I stole this picture from her blog :)

My parents went up to Utah and brought back down tons of tomoatoes & cucumbers from Cajsa & Brad's garden. They were SO good! They also brought with them a HUGE zuchinni from one of Cajsa's neighbor's garden. We made 4 batches of zuchinni bread and had fun experimenting with different add-ins (chocolate chips & pecans).

With the camera flash these loaves look a little flourescent orange, weird. They weren't. They were so good we ate all 4 batches within a week (the plan was to make them all at my parents house so that they could eat most of it :) It worked)!

Trouble with a capital "T"

Emalyn's hit that age where I can't take my eyes off of her for too long, or else. Here's a couple of things she's been into lately...

She loves to get into the pantry and empty out the contents of the powdered sugar, regular sugar, and brown sugar on a pretty routine basis.

She has discovered how to text...nothing more to say.

And, she loves all things water. Loves to swim, loves to play with water in her play kitchen, but most of all loves to climb in the bath or shower dry or wet. All the time. This time she heard Gabriela taking a bath and ran right in to see. A couple minutes later she was squealing with delight and when I checked, she had climbed in and was having a grand old time, soaked pajamas and all.

Rainy days

We love monsoons. We didn't get too many this year, but when we did, we made sure we played as long as we could in the wind & the rain. We'd turn out the lights and watch the sky light up with a spider web of streaks of lightning, followed almost instantly with thunder that made the girls "oooh & ahhh" every time :)