Anna's Artwork

Here are some of the things that Annabelle has been drawing...I don't know what order the pictures are in, so I will just tell you what they are and see if you can guess which is which!! There is a picture of a little girl that she scracthed out (but I had to take a picture of it because it was her first time to add limbs!!), a fly, a bumble bee, a fish, an airplane, Cinderella and an elephant...

Anna's Airplanes

The first airplane is one of the first ones that Anna drew in March of 2005. The second one is one she did in November of 2005 and the third is a recent one....there are many, many more in between...

ANNA

This is the first time that Anna has written her name by herself without me around...(you have to kind of hunt for the first "A", but it's there!!)

Reader's Digest

I walked into the kitchen the other day and heard Sophie saying, "Once upon a time, in a faraway land. There was a king and a queen." I thought it was pretty cute that she was telling stories to herself, but even cuter when I saw that she was reading her bread!

Mom, the paci-Nazi

content with paci....
it's taken without warning...
life goes on...

In the front yard

Swimming lessons

We finished our swimming lessons last week (we were taking a two-week course...) While we didn't learn to swim, we had a blast. Annabelle was pretty upset the first day when she found out that she had to get in the water by herself. (We told her that one of us would be swimming with her because we thought that we would be....so she was not prepared to "swim" solo....) It didn't help that mommy was across the pool holding Sophie the entire lesson. Once she stopped screaming, she spent the rest of the lesson sucking her thumb and pouting. I really wasn't looking forward to bringing her back the next day. I was pretty shocked when she got in the water without much hesitation the next night...she even laughed and talked with her teacher. At the end of that lesson, I was getting out with Sophie and I had to walk past Anna...she said something to me and I had to walk over to her to hear what she was saying. I was worried that she would want to get out with us (her class had another 15 minutes left), instead she asked me, "Mommy, do I have to get out now?" By the end of our course, she was an expert at blowing bubbles and relaxing on her back, she's getting pretty good at kicking and working on combining the rowing and kicking, she walked to the end of the diving board (sat down and kind of leaned into the teacher instead of jumping off). I was shocked to see her even getting close to the board! She also went down a little slide. While Annabelle saw swimming lessons as a social time...(she seemed to like the down time of splashing and laughing with her new friends more than the times when she had to actually do stuff with the teacher), Sophie took the lessons pretty seriously. She wanted to practice during all the breaks. She would always be trying out a new skill. By the end of the two weeks, she was a pro at relaxing, pretty good at bubbles and could hold her breath and be passed from person to person for a few seconds under water, she jumped in off the side and went off a HUGE slide. I couldn't believe that she did this! She did it the first time with her eyes as big as saucers...then asked her daddy if she could do it again! I think one of Sophie's favorite parts was taking a shower before getting in the pool. She would've stayed in the shower the whole time if we had let her!!