Lizzie is 1!

Lizzie is officially a one year old! Actually she hit one a few weeks ago on September 2, so I am a bit late in posting about it. Although we have no family in the area to celebrate with us, we had a marvelous time. We have an adopted "aunt" who came to celebrate with us. Thanks for the great pics Aunt Barb!

The cake: We have a tradition of naming the cakes I make if they are animals. It was over 90 degrees, very humid and of course our AC was broken. (Still is, thank heavens it has cooled off.) Anyhow the frosting was melting faster than I could pipe it out and running down the sides of the cake... thus the poor bear was named "Droopy."
We had to work with Lizzie a bit to convince her to blow out a candle, she is a bit more timid than her ferocious siblings and took a while to warm up to the idea. Here the girls celebrate Lizzie's success while practicing. I love how supportive my children are of each others' successes. Did you notice they seem to be wearing the same outfits they wore the first day of school? Wow, you are observant! This IS the first day of school. Poor Lizzie.. doomed to have her birthday on the day she has to go back to prison every couple of years ;).
Getting ready for the big moment! She was much more interested in getting her hands on the cake than she was in the candle. I finally had to take the candle off the cake and hold it up to her so she could blow it out.
Being a cautious eater, here she is making sure I haven't botched the thing.
Hmmmm not bad!
Grandy and Papa always send fun packages for birthdays and holidays! Here is Lizzy enjoy the first of many to come! She had a fabulous time with the box.. first it was a drum, then it was a table, then it was a thing to hold on to while she danced, then it was a thing to climb, then it was a thing to sit on... Mom decided to stop there before it became a thing to fall off of.
Once we got the box open lots more fun was to be had with the bubble wrap. At first she was rather terrified as her more ferocious sisters made a racket jumping on them. Then she became possessive and growled when anyone tried to pop her bubbles.


Fun picnic basket! So fun in fact that her sisters often sneak it away from her to play with it themselves.
Reading the card. Yes, my children are brilliant.. reading by age 1! Sadly they not only inherited my brains but also my terrible eyesight....

BACK TO SCHOOL

Everyone is in school except Lizzie. The first day of school is always bittersweet for me. I do miss the girls when they are gone. Everyone was pretty much ready to get back into the swing of things. Sam was a bit hesitant as she did not enjoy her teacher last year. However her teacher this year seems terrific and she is loving her class so far. She is in a 5th grade class of gifted students. They are digging into the 6th grade math curriculum. I better start brushing up!

Emma is in 2nd grade and really likes her teacher as well. She announced to me yesterday that she is the only kid in her class that takes lunch to school, but she is glad. She knows we reduce waste that way and she gets more of the food she actually likes, being a somewhat picky eater. Fairfax county provides pretty good lunches. There are some areas that need improvement but generally the food is healthy and tastes ok. Looks like Emma is going to be heading to the gifted center as well next year. It will be nice for her and Sam to be in the same school for a year before Sam heads to middle school (talk about feelings of denial!)
Mandi has started Kindergarten! She has the same teacher Sam and Emma had and is very happy, she was really hoping to get her. She is probably the youngest in her class as she turned 5 a couple of weeks after school started. She was very happy to be the first in her class to have a birthday. We will see how much she likes it when she is the last in her class to get her drivers license. Her picture really shows off her spunky personality. The P.E. teacher told Samantha the other day (while she was waiting for the GT bus) that once Mandi steps foot in the gym, she OWNS the gym. I will have to find out exactly how she is owning the place chuckle.

While the girls are in school, Lizzie has been having fun getting mom all to herself. Her favorite activities include stealing the mouse from the computer desk and removing the batteries, eating dog food when mom isn't looking, vacuuming the floor (its a competition to see who gets to it first, Lizzie or the dog,) climbing anything she can get a leg up on and, of course, learning to walk!

BACK IN BUSINESS....FOR NOW

Well, I have not posted for some time. We headed up to Palmyra to see the Hill Cumorah pageant July 18 - 20 then flew to Utah July 22 for 3 weeks. When we got back our house was devoid of beds, furniture and clothing as we had all our hardwood floors refinished. Our whole house is hardwood flooring except the basement and the kitchen, so there was no way to do it while we were actually living in the house. Here is Max enjoying our nice new smooth and pretty living room floor. Billy managed to get the entire house packed into the attic or the basement... my hero! We decided while all the furniture was packed away that it would be a good time to paint everything so we got busy painting. Sam's room became "paint central"


In the midst of all this craziness, we have had some trouble with our camera and it looked like we lost all 200 of our pictures from Utah in the process of transferring them to the computer. Man was I BUMMED!!!! However a few weeks later Billy, while working to delete a bunch of stuff off the computer so we could upload a video of Lizzie's birthday, discovered all my pictures hiding in the recycle bin. (Did I mention.. he is my hero?) I am very happy he found them and once again feel motivated to start posting although I continue to have problems with the camera. Perhaps it is time to send a letter to Santa. We are still working on putting the house back together and fighting off various varmints. The floor guys let in mice who apparently had a REAL party while we were in Utah. We found a dead bird in the basement, also let in by the floor guys.

YUCK!

Shortly after school started we discovered lice...yes LICE on Samantha and Emma. I have never in my life had lice and neither has Billy. Luckily we have contained it to just the two girls. Getting rid of them has been a P A I N! I am not sure if they picked them up from someone in Utah or from a friend here. They are nasty critters and going through two heads of hair every day for 3 weeks is not my idea of fun, it has taken me about 2 hours a day, sometimes more and really sucked up my time for other things. Well at least life is not boring!

The Lizard

Lizzie is growing so fast. Her nickname has been evolving from hiccups (which she rarely has anymore) to Lizard. Billy is mainly to blame chuckle. She is into yoga, mainly the downward dog position. She does it much better than I have ever been able to do it.


Mandi shot this picture of her. She looks eager to finally achieve her lifelong goal of gnawing on the camera.












Lizzie taking a breather at Emma's Bday party.













She has her first tooth! Of course she has to do things her own way so instead of growing the center two in the bottom or the top, she is growing one tooth on top one over from the center?!
She is supremely camera shy for some reason, every time we have tried to get a picture of this tooth she clamps her mouth shut... it is so funny. Billy ended up having to force the issue as I did want this pic before her other teeth break through.

Emma's Birthday!

Emma is SEVEN!! I am in denial (as I usually am every time my kids get a bit older.)
She wanted a horse party at our pool (go figure.) We decided to re-name a few games to make them horse friendly. We played horse horse pony (duck duck goose), stomp the fly (kids tie a balloon around each ankle and then try to stomp everyone else's "flies" without getting their own popped,) and mustang river round up (freeze tag, only with a wrangler, a corral and having to swim under captured mustangs to free them.) We also had a pinata and of course a cake. Our camera battery died near the end so we have no pics of Emma blowing out her candles or opening presents. Oh well.








Being silly










Getting ready for the pinata. It wasn't til later that I realized both boys escaped this picture.
Emma playing with Lizzie in her luxury yacht


The cake. I am really glad I decided to take a picture of it before bringing it to the pool.... our camera battery died during the pinata fun. I am not a very good artist so the horse was a bit of a challenge but I think most people did recognize it as being one snicker.
Overall it was a fun but busy weekend with the last day of school, Emma's birthday and Father's day all in the same weekend.

School is out!!

I am always so happy when school gets out and I get time with my girls. Here in Fairfax County they start the day after labor day and finish mid-June which feels late to me. The kids don't have their minds on school after Memorial day when the pool opens. Last year they didn't get out until June 22 which was horrid. This year since we didn't use any snow days they were able to move it up to June 13 which was much better. Emma thought it was a great birthday present :) Now we will be spending our days at the pool, we practically live there in the summer time. We go in the morning, sometimes we stay through lunch and then we go back again after Billy is home from work for an evening swim. It will be challenging this year keeping an eye on 3 swimmers and a bobber. Sam and Emma are very good swimmers now. Mandi is getting there quickly but I still need to keep a close eye on her as her feet don't quite touch the bottom yet.

Here are some end of the school year pics:
Samantha's strings concert. My word the place was packed. They said this was the largest group of 4th graders to take on strings that this school has ever had. She has really enjoyed playing the violin this year. I am hoping she will keep at it for next year.
Samantha's invention! Samantha had to invent a machine for her final science project. She teamed up with her friend and they built this handy dandy pet feeder!
Emma with her lovely teacher, Ms. May. She was such a perfect fit for Emma and she provided Emma with advanced work so she wouldn't be bored in class, I sure wish Emma could have her for 2nd grade as well! Ms. May is just a lovely person, we will miss her and I really hope she is around when Mandi hits 1st grade. Sam's teacher was..well.. lets just say they had a wee personality conflict. She is a nice lady but I don't feel she as a teacher was able to serve some of Samantha's needs as a GT student. Two days before school was out, watching Sam struggle to finish a bunch of math homework using concepts they had just learned that day I think I finally conceded that the nickname people have been using may not be too far off the mark.... Miller, the killer (tee hee.)
I usually let the girls keep a few of their favorite pieces of work from the year and then throw the rest out. We take pictures of some if they are hard to part with. Lizzie had great fun with Emma's "discard" pile! She sure made a mess. Looking at it, and considering how many students there are in the area, I think its amazing we actually have any trees around here, good grief.

Memorial Day Camping!

We have made it a yearly tradition to go camping over Memorial Day weekend. We went with 3 other families: the Hliboks, the Bricks and the Torsiellos. We had a blast! We sure missed the Snow family who we started this tradition with. I am not as good with the camera now that I am busy with Lizzie, so the pics are a bit short of spectacular but at least we took some. We camped at Shenandoah in the Matthews Arm campground. In the past we always camped at Big Meadows and we really love it there. Matthews Arm was ok but I much prefer Big Meadows. There were lot of bears in the Matthews Arm area. Everywhere we hiked we saw bear scat but we never actually saw any bears. Rats! One hike, everyone we passed was like.. "Oh there are bears right up that way." We never saw them. I supposed with Mandi singing at the top of her lungs all along the way it would be silly to think we would catch glimpse of any wildlife snicker. But hey, I guess I should consider myself at fault. I told the girls when hiking in bear country, we should make some noise as we hike to alert bears we are coming as they don't like being caught off guard. Mandi took it to heart and made sure she scared off every bear in a 3 mile radius, bless her.

We have never had much of an issue with ticks, but this time around I caught one climbing in Emma's hair as we hiked and we found two sucking away on Mandi ick. Billy found an awesome little gizmo called the tick twister at the pet store a couple months back. Max had been getting quite a few during the spring. These things work like a charm! They are so much easier to use than trying to use tweezers and ending up with squished ticks and buried mouthparts.

We are outgrowing our van! We are gonna have to get a rack of some sort put on top cuz we were really squished in there for this trip! Mandi has the leaning tower of pillows next to her... when we hit the twists and turns along Skyline drive the poor girl got buried.
(Notice the cute Lizzie feet)


Billy has a tradition of building a swing for the kids when we go camping. He bought new rope this time around and they had a great time. Sadly it was short lived. The kids tore the swing down before I had a chance to try it out. Emma had a good time on it!Lizzie has decided she is a true Kendrick and loves camping just as much as the rest of us!
(Wait til she sinks her future teeth into her first s'mores!) I think we got this baby seat from Billy's sister. It's pretty ancient but is fabulous for camping! I haven't seen any out there in the stores so really glad we have this one.

Lizzie does circus tricks even in the wild! Hey even bears like being entertained.
This was a 4 mile round trip hike to Overall Run falls. The kids did great on the hike, it was pretty challenging for little legs and for my flabby out of shape big legs.


Sam and Emma cool off in the nice coooolllddd (says Emma) water. They saw crayfish to boot!

The boys enjoy an afternoon nap. Our tent is pretty enormous.. I love it. You can see the dog den in the center which is so very nice to have. I am not fond of having dog hair and footprints all over our stuff and this way he still feels like he is part of the family. (In the picture Max is not in the den, he is sneaking a snooze on Sam's Hello Kitty pillow which I found humorous.)

Dutch Oven cooking! I finally resurrected our dutch oven which got caught in a huge storm camping at Shenandoah a couple years back... even though it was under a tarp, the rain was pelting sideways and we literally had a streams running under our tent and thru the campsite (another story for another time)... so our poor dutch oven rusted like mad. We were very new to using one and didn't realize the need to deal with it immediately. We are now older and wiser and I have painstakingly stripped, and restripped and stripped again to get rid of all the rust. We made German Pancakes, Mountain Man breakfast and peach cobbler. All turned out very yummy! However, hunger is the best sauce.. it took soo long for everything to cook, that may be the main reason everyone thought it was so good haha. I just need to figure out how to use the coals more effectively, it seems everything took twice as long and triple the number of coals recommended for it to get cooked. Granted it was pretty windy in the mornings and evenings but still... I hope to get more practice in this summer and nail down the technique.


Krazy Kids!! Right before we left on Monday we took group pictures. I dont have the whole group pic yet but here are the kids being.. well.. kids. We had such a great time, the kids all got along wonderfully (well ok, a few incidents of drama with Mandi.. but then what can you expect snicker.) Notice Max is NOT in the picture. The dog here is Sierra, who belongs to the Brick family. The minute we started breaking camp Max climbed in the van and refused to budge. I can't decide if he was just anxious to get home or afraid we would leave him haha. The poor guy is not a fan of camping.. we have a hard time getting him to eat while camping, but he does like the family time, the great outdoors and all the fun hikes.