Birthday Week 2010

We've had fun celebrating our girls around here this week. With their birthdays just separated by one day, it looks like the middle of June is always going to be a big time for our family!

Instead of one big party, Lee Anna had several smaller celebrations for her birthday this year. First, we had two of her good friends come spend the night last weekend. Their family is going to be spending the rest of the year in the states, so all four kids were glad to have one more play day before they left.

Lee Anna made the birthday crown she's wearing above about a month ago and has been saving it for her big day. We spread out the presents that she had received from grandparents and other relatives, so that every few hours she got to open another one. All of the kids got excited when it was "present time!"
They loved decorating (and eating!) their star cookies on a stick!

Later we got to have some other friends over, and there were a few more presents to open. That's also when we ate her birthday cake (pictured at the top). Lee Anna chose the colors and design, and Aunt Claire made it happen!

On the day in between the girls' birthdays, we took a little mini-vacation to a nearby hotel with a great swimming pool, wave pool, and kids' water play area.

We stayed until the kids were wrinkled up like little prunes and completely worn out. It was wonderful!

Sarah Claire loved the water--and the ice cream!

So that's how we celebrated our firstborn's birthday this year. Stay tuned for pictures of Sarah Claire turning one!

June 15

Six years ago, on June 15, I was holding this two-day-old princess...and now I'm holding this!
One year ago, on June 15, I was holding this brand new little angel...

and now she's one year old!

Happy Birthday to both of my girls this week. I love you!

May Days

Well I am starting to come to grips with the fact that maybe I'm not going to be able to post as much as I used to on the blog. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to get back into posting more frequently, but until then I'll keep popping in when I can.

We've had a fun month full of activity. It started out with four days of houseguests--sweet friends who wanted to see some camels and sand on their way back to the states--followed immediately by Sawyer's fourth birthday. Here's my too-grown-up boy ready for his birthday breakfast on "the special plate.

We had a great time celebrating his birthday with lots of friends that night.
Then, a week later, it was time for more monkey pictures. Sarah Claire is quickly approaching her Big Day, so this is her 11-month monkey picture.
She decided that eleven months was long enough for a girl to stay down, and she took off walking this month. For the first few weeks, she was walking mostly with her arms straight out in the air, which is, for the record, ADORABLE.Here she is with big sis in their precious new dresses, just walking down the hall like she's been doing it forever.We've had to say several hard goodbyes this month, but thankfully we've also gotten to say some fun hellos. We like those a lot better! Just last week we said hello to Aunt Claire, who is going to be here with us for the next month. We are having fun teaching her about our crazy life--and she is fitting right in!

So that's what we've been up to lately! Thanks for sticking with us even when we don't check in very often.

Baby Steps

I'm a couple days late with Sarah Claire's ten-month monkey picture, but it's not because I haven't been trying! She has been a little bit under the weather this week with a nose running like a faucet and eyes producing massive amounts of yucky stuff.

However, as yucky as the stuff in her eyes was, she was not interested in having them cleaned. My attempts to wash them usually just triggered more crying which meant more runny nose and eyes!

So, my first two attempts at a monkey picture came up dry, but today we finally got a decent one. You can still see some of the redness in her eyes, but trust me, this is much better than she's been looking! I'm so glad that she's feeling better, and just amazed that she is really ten months old already.

This has been a fun month. She is an expert speed-crawler now, and she is so very close to walking. She took three tiny steps in a row one time today, but she usually falls after her first step. She is also doing lots of baby signs for us--dog, cat, more, all done, bye-bye, duck, and no-no are all part of her repertoire. And she gives the sweetest kisses in the world. :)

Happy Tenth Month to our little princess!

Our Little Poet

Lee Anna and I have read lots of poetry together this year, and she got excited when I told her that her assignment today was to write her own. She declared immediately that they should be "silly" poems, and then we worked together to come up with some ideas. The assignment was to write an "imagery poem," so we talked about making comparisons and painting pictures with our words.

Here are her compositions:

The Clock
One day my father climbed
into the clock
to make it ding.
He was the dinger.
I thought it was the clock.

The Rain on My Head
The sun shone on my head,
so hot that the sweat came down
from my head like raindrops.

The Hurricane
The baby goes from room to room
making a mess like a hurricane.

The Monkey
My monkey brother climbs, climbs, climbs
in our jungle house.

The Dust Storm
The dust rolls out like a sleeping bag
spreading out to be slept on.

I admit I'm extremely biased, but I was impressed! We both had so much fun that we will definitely be writing more soon.

Sunrise Celebration

Happy Easter, Everyone! We hope you had a joyful day celebrating Jesus.

This morning we did something new for our family--we watched the sun rise from a sailboat on the river! Our kids haven't seen many sunrises in their time (especially if you don't count the ones from an airplane window!), so this was a special treat.That 4:30 a.m. alarm sure was early, but definitely worth it. The kids only took a minute or two to come out of their fog and remember that we were going on a BOAT! Once that sank in, they sprang to life. We made the short walk to the sailboats and waited for our friends to join us.

We had a great time singing together (led by my floating minstrel husband), eating delicious breakfast treats, enjoying the peaceful calm, and of course watching for the sun to rise.

Here's our first glimpse!

We had a double-dose today, because we also got to spend time later with more friends as our families celebrated Easter together. I don't have any good pictures from that get-together, but we had a great time telling and reenacting the Easter story, enjoying lots more delicious food, and even hiding an egg or two. It was a wonderful day.

Happy, Happy Easter! He is Risen!

Special Visitor

We've had a special guest tagging along with us this week. The kids' cousin Autumn has been reading about Flat Stanley at her school in Texas, and she asked if she could send him to us.We were so excited to get Stanley in the mail, and we're having fun showing him around our city. Lee Anna even made some extra Stanleys to accompany Autumn's on all their adventures.
So far Stanley has seen the world's longest river, a thousand-year-old fortress...

and some slightly-newer establishments! We thought this last one would be meaningful for a classroom full of kindergarteners.

We have big plans for Stanley this week. Tonight he gets to go to the airport to pick up Mimi and Papaw who are coming for a short visit on their way to visit Uncle Andy. I guess we'll let them tag along with Stanley this week, too!

It's Monkey Time Again...

Sarah Claire is nine months old!

Our little princess is now towering over her monkey! As a matter of fact, before this photo shoot was over, she had thrown him out of the crib onto the floor.
She's come a long way in her 3/4 of a year of life. At last week's doctor visit, she weighed 8.8 kgs (19 lbs, 6 oz) and was 70 cm (27.5 in) tall. And the general consensus these days is that she looks a lot like her brother. We heard it four times in four days (from four different people) last week!

Here are some of my favorite recent pics...

We love you, Sarah Claire! You are a joy and a delight!

Our Little Artist

Today was an exciting day for Lee Anna. She got to go to her first day of Art Class! A sweet homeschooling friend of mine talked to a local art cafe about doing a class for our kids. They were happy to schedule a time for them to come.
So today, four very excited five-and-six-year-olds started working on their first project--a giant paper mache watch that will be a working clock! Today they assembled the pieces and "painted" the paper on. Next week they'll get to paint their watches. I'm hoping someone who has finished first grade will actually install the clock mechanism.

Lee Anna has been beside herself with excitement about this class. When I first told her about it (which was only two days ago), she said, "Oh, that will be great because I'm a really good art...um...artist." It took her a minute to think of the word for it, but she loves to do it!

Yesterday evening I suggested that she might want to pick out her clothes for today, and she came back with her t-shirt from the Jacksonville Zoo, chosen very thoughtfully because it has paint splotches all over it. She said she thought it would be a good one for art class "since it has art stuff on it."

Not long after that, Jason found her on the couch playing with her Magna Doodle. She told him she was just practicing for some things she might have to do in her art class. We'll be sure to share pictures of her finished products.

*Update from Tuesday, March 2*

Today one of Lee Anna's school assignments was to write about her first art class. Here's what she wrote:

On my first day of art class, I got to start making a huge clock tht looks like a giant watch. My teachers are going to put the machine in it and make it work with the hands. And I'm going to paint a dot right where I want the hands to be. My art class was at Art Cafe. David was ther. There were four kids, but I can't remember the other two. I wore my shirt that I got at the zoo for my brother's birthday, because it was a kind of art shirt. I liked it.

Streams in the Desert

We've been here a little better than four years now, and this is the second time we've seen enough rain to measure. In America, rain is considered a good thing. Here, well, it's a little different. This past Thursday was rainy-looking all day. It showered a little in the morning, and just stayed cloudy and damp all day.

Then, about 6:00, we started seeing lightning in the sky. Before we knew it, the wind was howling, and the rain was gushing and we even saw some hail! It made us a little nervous when we heard the hail tapping on the windows. It made the little ones more than a little nervous!

Lee Anna's rain gauge had over an inch of rain in it Friday morning. Of course, that's on the edge of our balcony, under the edge of someone else's balcony, but it had an inch of water in it from somewhere.

The bedrooms in our house each have glass doors to the small balconies, but we discovered that they're not really water-tight. We rolled up some towels next to each door and held back the deluge.

These street pictures were taken the next day, probably 18 hours after the rain had stopped. When you only have water in the roads once or twice a decade, it's not really worth investing millions of dollars in a drainage system. It'll be dry in a day or two.

The trees are all green and pretty today, but all of the dirt that had collected on them is now in the roads. When it rains here is a lot like when it snows in the South. People aren't really used to driving in water, and everybody that can stay home does. We had meetings cancelled Friday, and I saw lots of stores closed on Thursday while it was still sprinkling.

This last picture is of the hailstones collected in a planter off our front porch. There's not a local Arabic word for "snow," or "hail," so we just call it all "ice." But I was reading a local online paper Friday morning and clicked the Google Translate button and in English it said there had been snow in our city! No, there wasn't. But a good thunderstorm is just about as rare as snow here.