Pancake traditions!

  

 

Anna Kate always makes us laugh!

 

Definitely a lesson girls of all ages need to understand and embrace!  I wish I had been stronger/more confident during my pre-teen years.  I would have been granted a lot less heart-ache and second guessing myself.  Hopefully my girls can learn from my mistakes.  In psychology, it’s called our “internal locus of control.”  I wish I had fully understood what this meant going into junior high!  Noelle and I already have lots of these types of conversations.  She gets it. 

 

Noelle did this really cool braid the other night.  She called it the pull-through, and I’m impressed!  Anna Kate got a huge bruise on her cheek one night after she fell out of the bed.  Boo!  She was sleeping with Rara in our guest bedroom on the bed I slept on as a child.  It’s high and I’ll put foam and pillows down next time.  Accidents can always happen and you can’t be too careful, but when we took Anna Kate to the ER as a baby after she fell out of a bouncy swing, the pediatric ER doctor there told us, “If a child is seriously injured and the parent says they fell out of the bed, that’s when we get suspicious because kids usually don’t get seriously injured by falling out of the bed.”  That helps me sleep better at night.  But if anyone is going to fall, it’s going to be Anna Kate.  Bless her heart, she has been falling all of her life, but she’s not clumsy at all.  She’s just our roller and spinner, I guess.

 

Bekah kidnapped Noelle!

After art camp, Madeline and Noelle moved on to cooking camp with yours truly! 

 

One thing I do right, is a summer pasta salad!  Rose made the creation to the right.  I asked her what the title of her picture was called and she said (I kid you not), “Big cookie jar that floats in the water and only Rara can get it first.” 

Concert night!

 

Prepped and ready to sleep to accomplish yet another attempt at the beach wave.

 

Noelle wants to conquer “the beach wave” so badly this summer!  I had it figured out last summer, but it was too hard on my back, so we’re trying all kinds of different ideas to see what we like best.  French braids and curling iron twists together are next on our to-do list.

Mommy/Daddy/Daughter date night!

 

Our little artist, teaching and creating! 

What’s so funny, Mikey? 

 

There’s nothing funny about these steaks.  Mike’s got them figured out!

And then this walks in the kitchen!  I don’t know what to do with her!

 

Noelle made sandwiches for her little sisters one day with picks in them that said, “Best sisters forever!”  She also figured out how to do pencil dangles with all different sorts of animal charms on them.

 

I caught a (little) snake in the yard this week!  I was gardening and had on my gardening gloves when I saw what I thought was a huge worm in the dirt.  I grabbed at it, and had to shuffle some more dirt to find it again, but once I got it in my hand, it’s tongue hissed out and it started wiggling from side to side, and I was like, “That is not a worm!”  I held onto it because I really wasn’t scared but even if I had been, I wouldn’t have dropped it because the kids were all over the yard!  That made for one exciting night playing outside!