Cora's Color Party

Last Saturday was Cora's second birthday party.  We invited her three little best friends, who all happen to be boys, and we celebrated with a color party.  My original plan had been to do a "rainbow party" which is still what it was, but I decided to avoid that term after doing an internet search!  Plus, "color party" seemed less girly and she was, after all, the only girl there.  :-)

We started out the party by making colored rice pictures.  I dyed rice different colors (it's just dry rice plus food coloring, pre-mixed with a few teaspoons of rubbing alcohol, shaken in a bag and dried in the sun) and let the kids drop it on their glue, like glitter.

When the extra rice was all dumped into a big container, the kids played in the rice bin with cups, spoons, and containers.

I have ended up keeping the rice bin in the garage, and Cora and I have played with it a few times since Saturday.  

After we were done with the rice, we tried our hand at finger painting!

When we could finally drag ourselves inside (it was a gorgeous morning!), we let the kids play with rainbow stackers (that they got to keep) while we got ready for cake!

The outside of the cake was nothing impressive, but the inside was much more exciting!

I've had several people ask me how to make this cake, and even though you can find some recipes on the internet, I'll share what I did (and what I learned!), in a separate post.  Stay tuned.

After cake, we opened presents.  Among other things, Cora got her first princess dress.  She loves it!  (Isn't it hilarious that she is playing with train tracks in her princess dress?)

We ended the morning with a few photos of the kids enjoying their rainbow lollipops.  

I was going to show a few pictures of the decorations, but there really isn't much to show.  I'll show the two things I did do when I write my cake post.

Cora's real birthday is the day after tomorrow.  It's a whole week of birthday fun around here!  :-)

Apple Picking 2011

Every year we go apple picking.  It is one of my favorite (pre-)fall traditions.  I can't remember why we didn't go last year, but we have gone every other year and plan to go as long as the kids will go with us.  Two years ago we went a whopping four days before Cora was born!  I don't have any pictures of me (thank goodness!), but check out this picture of little, three-year-old Brennan!

This year was my favorite apple-picking trip ever!!  The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and the kids had a ball.  Brennan was a terrific apple picker, and Cora was content to just ride in a wagon the whole time, which was good because I pictured her picking rotten apples off the ground and throwing them into the basket faster than we could stop her.

After we paid for all 23 pounds of apples(!), we sat down and had a picnic lunch.  The whole morning was honestly like a taste of heaven.  The kids were happy and carefree, petting the farm owner's dog and playing with sticks and running around trees... It made me temporarily forget sickness and financial stress and schedules and Jim's schoolwork.  It was a freeze-time moment.

My mom's birthday was yesterday, and, with the help of my in-laws, we surprised her with a basket of Cortland apples (the best in the world... they had to be bought up there), Hershey kisses, and a copy of these pictures:

Next year there will be a six-year-old, a nearly three-year-old, and a six-month-old baby in the apple picking photos!  It's still hard to believe.

Party Prep and Nesting

I have been quite absent lately, and I would normally blame it on being busy, but that's not entirely true.  I have had plenty of down time when I could have been blogging, but instead I've been intentionally "lazy."  I've been reveling in naps and keeping up with housework and resting as much as possible.  I've been tired, sick, and feeling a huge urge to "nest."  And you know what that usually means...

Yes, we have another baby on the way!!!  Baby Riggs #3 will be making his or her debut right around Easter (early/mid April).  I am just over ten weeks pregnant right now with one healthy baby (it's amazing how the thought of twins grows more scary as you have more kids), and I am sicker with this pregnancy than I think I have ever been with the others.  I started throwing up five weeks ago, and I'm sick for about 6 - 10 hours every day.  Emotional, stressed, and sick is not a pretty combination.  So, I've been laying low and trying not to subject too many people to my tears or vomiting.  Instead, I've been doing things that are more productive.

I usually feel my best in the mornings.  I have never once had real "morning sickness," but with each pregnancy I have been sick in the afternoons or evenings.  (With this baby, I'm sick in the afternoon and evening.)

During my productive morning times, I try to do things that will help our family later in the day.  I have been making a lot of soups and foods that can be frozen because the last thing I want to do at 4:00 in the afternoon is cook.

I've also been busy getting ready for Cora's second birthday party.  It is coming up this Saturday (her real birthday is the following Saturday, October 1st), and we are just having her three boyfriends over for a color-themed party.  (I was calling it a rainbow party, but that has all kinds of crazy connotations on the internet, so now it's just "Cora's Color Party.")

I have made a gorgeous balloon wreath that I can now use for everyone's birthday...

... and I have been busy dying rice that the tots can use to make pictures and play with using cups and shovels and other stuff:

(This is just a sampling of the colors... I made more.)

The party is scheduled for 10 AM, so I should be at my best to enjoy watching the kiddos play.  I'm looking forward to Saturday, partly because I can't wait to celebrate my girl, and partly because it puts me one day closer to being done with this sickness.  Four weeks to go until I should feel good again!

Kindergarten Homework

I knew Brennan would have a little homework in kindergarten, but I figured it would be an occasional worksheet and lots of reading logs.  I did not expect to get bombarded with projects right from the beginning!  Kindergarten is a lot of work for a parent!

First, Brennan brought home the class gingerbread man.  Each child in Brennan's class brings home the gingerbread man for one night, and then the parents document in a class journal what the gingerbread man did while at home with that child.  Since Brennan was the third child in his class to bring it home and he had been sick (thereby postponing his back-to-school celebration dinner), the lucky gingerbread man got to go to the Olive Garden!  Here he is, enjoying chocolate cake with Brennan:

Brennan cracked me up.  He treated that little guy like a real, visiting friend.  He even strapped him in a seatbelt on the way to the restaurant!

You wouldn't think it would be a big deal to write a quick journal entry, but by the time we had the kids in bed and I had packed lunches for the next day and done a few other things, I didn't get the journal entry done until almost 10:00 at night.  Late night for kindergarten homework!

Another project the kids had to do at school was make a shoebox business to go in Wee Willy Winkie's imaginary town.  We were to use alliteration, and it was an easy decision for Brennan to make Brennan's Bookstore.  We were expressly told not to do the project for the child, but to work together, so that is just what we did.

When I saw some of the final projects at the school, I was amused and amazed.  There are some very creative and ambitious parents out there!  Even still, I have no regrets about Brennan's project, as it is a perfect representation of him.  It is precise, detailed, accurate, represents something he loves, he did most of the work, and it makes perfect sense.  It is sooo Brennan.

Notice that three of Brennan's cars have disappeared.  :-(  I don't think he noticed because I brought the project home for him and put the stuff away.

To celebrate the end of their nursery rhyme unit, the whole kindergarten at Nolensville (well over a hundred kids) participated in a nursery rhyme parade.  Brennan was a spider, either from The Itsy Bitsy Spider, which I guess was a nursery rhyme before it was a song (also both Brennan and Cora's favorite song at Cora's age), or the spider from Little Miss Muffet.

Again, the creativity at the parade blew me out of the water!!  Some of the costumes were just amazing!!  We were told to make the costumes using items from around the house (I think the idea was to avoid canned, pre-made costumes), and that made the parade so much fun!  I honestly thought it would be lame, but I enjoyed it tremendously.

Brennan's costume was just black pants and a black shirt and two pairs of girls tights, cut apart and stuffed with poly-fill, then safety pinned to his shirt.  He wore black socks on his hands and feet and we took the waistband from one of the pairs of tights and made a headpiece, which Brennan decorated with paper eyes.  Pretty easy.

There is one more project I created for myself that is kind of silly.  I made Brennan a fun first-day-of-school lunch.  It consisted of tunafish sandwich on fish-shaped bread, "water" (blue jello), "fish food" (strawberries), and goldfish.  He loved it, but I learned an important lesson as a new kindergarten mom:  Teach your child to put the lid back on containers of unfinished food before putting them back in the lunch box!  (Imagine a lunch box full of watery, blue jello!)

I'm sure there are many, many things we will both learn this year!  :-)

Kindergarten!!

We have been anticipating the start of kindergarten for what feels like forever.  Academically, Brennan has been ready for a long time.  Socially, it's right where he should be.

B has been excited about starting at the big school for almost a year, I think.  He is excited that in kindergarten he gets to play on the computer more, he can drink chocolate milk during the day (usually a special dinnertime treat), and he will go on fun field trips.  He has shown no reservations about having a new school.

Last week Brennan had his kindergarten screening.  Our school district does what I call a "slow start."  The kindergarteners get screened one at a time over the course of a few days while the "big kids" (first grade and up) begin regular school.  Brennan's scheduled screening time was last Thursday at 9:30 AM.  I have been preparing him for it for probably six months.  I have told him that he will get asked lots of questions, and the purpose is to find out what he knows so they can find just the right teacher for him.  I told him that if he knows an answer to something he should answer confidently, and if he doesn't, it's okay because they will know what he teacher needs to teach him.  I thought that all of this preparation would be enough.

What I didn't properly prepare Brennan for was the fact that he would have to go answer the questions by himself and that I couldn't go with him.  When the teacher came to get him (forty-five minutes late, so he was very engrossed in play), he freaked out.  He clung to me, crying, and the lady had to pry him off of me.  I basically had to leave the room and walk down the hall so he was left with no choice but to follow the teacher.  It was heart wrenching.

From what I was told, Brennan calmed down and successfully completed his screening, so that is good. However, it left me wondering how he would do on the first day of school.  Would he pull a similar stunt, or would he take to kindergarten like a fish to water, the way I had expected him to all along?

As part of the "slow start" in our district, the kids go in batches for a half day (one batch goes half day on Tuesday, and the other goes for a half day on Wednesday), and then they stay with those same batches of kids to each do a full day on either Thursday or Friday.  Brennan's half day was Wednesday, and his full day is tomorrow.

We walked up to the school yesterday morning, and I wondered which one of us would cry first: Brennan or me.  As it happened, neither one of us did!  He was excited and happy and got to work right away making his fruit loop necklace.  His teacher welcomed him by name before I could even introduce them, and she made him feel like the only child in the room.  When Cora wanted a fruit loop to eat and Brennan told me I needed to ask for permission before taking one, his teacher said, "Brennan, I love you already!"  :-)

As I said, tomorrow is the first full day with a few of his classmates, but Monday is the official first day of school for all kindergarteners in our county.  There will be twenty-one children and their parents all gathered in Brennan's classroom taking pictures and saying goodbye.  It won't be as overwhelming to the kids because they will be in familiar territory with some familiar classmates, but I have to wonder how I will do.  The first day of kindergarten is a much bigger deal than I ever could have imagined.

I am officially now the parent of a school-aged child!