First Day of School 2012

I know several of these blog posts are out of order. These are the pictures from the first day of school. Joshua the first day of 6th grade with his best friend Keelan (he wasn't happy with me, clearly)

Zachary (4th Grade) and Sarah (1st Grade)

Anna is TWO!

Well, technically she won't be 2 until 6:49pm tomorrow evening, I really can't believe two years have gone by since she was born. My little 8#, 20.5" baby girl is now a 36#, 37" crazy monster. She wears 4t in leggings, shirts, and dresses and 3t in jeans. She knows how to roller skate, climbs everything, is quite good at throwing and catching and running and jumping, loves music and dancing (she even "plays" the piano while she sings sometimes), rides any rides the amusement park will let her on, and is just a crack-up. She taught herself all of her letters (uppercase and lowercase) and numbers by sight, and is working on putting the sounds to the letters (a-a-a-apple starts with a). She loves to look at signs, books, clocks, etc anywhere and call out what letter or number she sees. She knows her shapes and loves to yell "Look! It's a yellow bus!" every time she sees a school bus. She loves to watch Blues Clues and sing along with the songs. She loves to look at pictures on cell phones or the computer and tell you who is in the picture. She has a friend Lexi who she tells me all of the time "Lexi is my best friend!" Fortunatley, they play one to two times a week as Lexi's Mom and I trade kids back and forth. She loves our new church, and enjoys MOPS and Bible Study days as she gets to "play with the kids" and "have fun." She is exhausting, but so much fun! She sleeps with her musical puppy Violet (Leapfrog, I believe) and set it to "10 minutes of bedtime music", her pillow that her brother made her, her blanket with "hair" (fringe), her cup of water, a book, and her "beep beep" (shape-sorter car). We need to move her out of her crib and into a bed (she has been climbing out of her crib for a really long time, and none of our kids have been in a crib this long), but I'm afraid she'll terrorize throughout the night. I plan to get that set up for her this week though and we'll see how it goes. Newborn

In the NICU

1 Month

1 year

An Exmple of her craziness ~ in July at 21 months, she climbed all the way up this by herself and went down the slide

And at Adventureland back in May (19 months) she rode everything they would let her on. She is sitting next to Jason in this picture. She did not like the concept of standing in line, and would be yelling about wanting to fly!

Fall 2012 Pictures

The kids were out of school last Friday, and I took them to the Arboretum to take pictures. It had been a while since we have done that and it is one of our favorite places to go. In fact, we may go back next week if everyone is healthy and the weather is nice enough when the kids are out of school for conferences. It is hard to get good pics of all of the kids by myself, but we did get some good ones!