The 6th Birthday Frozen Fête

For months before her late-summer birthday Gracie was talking about having a party. I'm sure it comes as no surprise that our now-not-so-newly minted 6-year-old is, like the rest of the nation's young girlies, quite enamored of Disney's Frozen. What may surprise you, though, is that Gracie's goofy, talkative, crafty, ham-tastic mother is actually terrified of throwing children's birthday parties. Terrified. I seriously worried about this day from the moment Gracie mentioned having a party. Which was silly, I know, because they're 6. But there you have it.

Anyway, because of my great, great, great love for our firstborn, I sucked it up and threw a party anyhow. We decided on a morning-pajama-party/Frozen theme, and it was pretty fun to see a gaggle of giggling girls running around in their princess-y pjs and smacking each other with balloons. :)

We started by swapping jewelry (several had worn sparkly fake jewels along with their jammies, of course) and then sat down at the table to watch Frozen and make (and eat) Fruit Loop necklaces.

Everyone had different methods, patterns, and procedures, but everyone was pretty focused.

I cut out paper snowflakes and hung blue crepe paper, and Gracie made some of her own decor to put by the HAPPY BIRTHDAY banner over the fireplace (Crayola marker illustrations of an ice palace and other snowy things).

Then they adjourned to the sofa to discuss the film and eat their necklaces.

Did I mention there was much trading of plastic jewelry? Here they are applying clip on earrings.

When they got antsy again we pulled out fabric markers and everyone decorated a pillowcase to take home.

And of course we had several balloon fights. Little brother was pretty stoked to be involved in these, and everyone was really nice to him and included him. I was pretty impressed with these girls.

Then there was the opening of many princess-related gifts, like jammies, a lunch box, an Elsa doll, and a LEGO Ariel minikit that is still getting played with. :)

The day before Gracie helped me make "ice cupcakes": blue cupcakes with white frosting and purple and blue sugar sprinkles. She did all the sprinkles herself and was very pleased with the result. Before the party she asked if everyone could have a candle to blow out on their cupcake. This simple, thoughtful request absolutely melted my heart, and all the girls were so happy to have their own candles to blow out!

There was sugar all over the table and blue all over their teeth and man were they happy. :)

(Aren't those cupcakes just horrifyingly blue!?)

Happy happy cupcake-blue smiles. :)

The Kindergarten Finale

When Gracie was a baby I started writing letters to her in a little word document on my computer. I wrote about when she first rolled over, how she liked becoming a big sister when Charlie arrived, and, eventually, about my worries about how she (and I) would someday adjust to a life where my baby girl was off on her own in elementary school. And now she's done it!

Kindergarten is over, and she's ready and raring to get to first grade (though she is definitely enjoying her summer vacation, too). She did a great job of her first official year of school, staying on track in all her subjects except for reading, where she actually got a couple grade levels ahead of schedule. Her biggest challenges--at least as far as I can tell--were keeping from being too silly with her friends (her mama had this problem as well at this age) and having to reign in her artistic endeavors on worksheets whose directions didn't allow for artistry. :)

She got to invite us to come to an end-of-the-year assembly, where she received a medal for being on the Principal's Honor Roll all year. She was pretty excited about it:

The assistant principal had to make a rule (announced during the assembly) about not giving your medal to your friends. (This is clearly not their first rodeo.) According to Gracie, there was some dissent among the "friends" in her class in regards to this rule. :)

For now, she's enjoying having some time to play with her brother, hang out with Squish, and read, read, read. She's been working on Matilda, Clementine, and some Magic Tree House books on her own, and Steve or I reads with her in the evenings, too. She's also been drawing lots of pictures, dressing up as Elsa from Frozen in various towels, blankets, and shawls, singing, and playing mommy to Charlie's stuffed fox, Puppy, and her stuffed elephant, Ellie-brons. :)

We ♥ fruit (& moms)

The day before Mother's Day Steve and the kids mysteriously disappeared in the van for an hour or two. When they came home, they paraded upstairs with armloads of something (I wasn't allowed to look) and closeted themselves in Gracie's bedroom for another hour or so. I had no idea what they were up to, only that it was in some way related to my present.

Well. Check it out:

Yes! Steve enlisted the kids to make me a full-fledged fruit bouquet! Complete with star and flower shaped melons and pineapples, cantaloup beads, and strawberry rosettes! It was the cutest and most delicious bouquet I have ever received, and I got to work enjoying it immediately.

(And also, if you were wondering, melons taste EVEN better when they are cut into shapes.)

Happy Mother's Day to me. :)

Singer's Company

This was a big year for our Gracie girl--not only her first year of elementary school as she began kindergarten, but also her first foray into the world of performance. We didn't feel any pressure to get her started in anything this year, but when my friend Cami suggested Gracie join in the second semester of Singer's Company we decided to give it a shot.

Singer's is great because, while the girls do prepare for a show and practice song and dance, it is not all about the performance and competition. Instead they really focus on helping the girls build confidence and learn to support one another as they create their program. And oh man, was it cute. :)

Gracie loved her costume for her performance, so we took some photos before one of her performances. (They did three--two for retirement homes and one for friends and family.) She struck her own poses and was really getting her Blue Steel going, too.

Notice the Elsa-themed jewelry she purchased with her allowance? :) 

 We are always proud of our kids. They are amazing even at the day-to-day level. But every once in a while we get to see one of them really shine, and it is probably one of the most incredible feelings in the world. That's what we felt like when we heard and saw Gracie sing for the first time at the family & friends performance. I loved her confidence. I loved how she stepped up and belted out her part in front of a room full of strangers, with no fear. I loved her courage, and I loved seeing her exulted and empowered by her work and her accomplishment.

Here we are waiting to see her sing! (Charlie took the picture of me and Juliette.)

Here's a little video of the song where she got to do her solo ("Tomorrow" from Annie). She steps in around 0:53 and belts her little heart out. (And you'll hear our friend, who sent this video to us when our memory card ran out of space, say "Niiice," to me right afterward haha.)

Gracie's Singer's Company Spring 2014 from J Walton on Vimeo.

Field Day

Mercy, am I behind.

(Did I pull that off? Can I start saying "Mercy" now? Maybe that should be my new thing. I have bravely started saying y'all on occasion. I've lived in the South for 17% of my life so I feel like I need to embrace "y'all" sometimes.)

Okay. Side tracked. What I mean to say is that in all the craziness of the last few weeks of school followed by our enjoyment of a nice slow summer, I have failed to do much documenting. So get ready for some blasts from our past as we catch up on all that.

In May, Gracie had Field Day!

(Charlie really wanted to go get on one of the school buses. :) )

I am new at this whole mom-of-an-elementary-schooler thing, AND we didn't do a field day at my elementary school. So I don't know if I really needed to show up (there were almost no other moms there). But my girlie was very happy to see us, so I'm glad I went.

There's not much to say about Field Day really, except that it happened and that Gracie actually seemed pretty blasé about the whole thing. :) But it was cute to see her play, and to see how excited she was to show off her baby sis and little brother.

I love that they love each other.

Boosterthon Fun Run

Since this was our first year of kindergarten, I didn't know what to expect when this year's fundraiser "Boosterthon" came around. I didn't think it was a big deal, but Gracie got SO into it that she even made up a "Boosterthon Fun Run" song that she sang around the house. So she called her grandparents and we posted on facebook, and she got some supporters to pledge her a per-lap amount for her fun run to raise money for her school.

She was so excited to have so many people excited with her. There were 55 pledges in her kindergarten class, and 8 of them were from Grace! She was very proud. And she got some cool prizes, too--including an invisible ink pen with which she drew a mustache on her face, and a cool Boosterthon wristband which Juliette is modeling above.

We went to watch her that Friday at school--they were broken up by grade, and the girls ran first. She ran SO hard. I wish I would have gotten a video, but I had Juliette strapped to my tummy and Charlie in tow, so we mostly just sat on the gym floor and enjoyed her. She did some great dance moves to the warm up music, and when the running started her braids were flying. She had little pink cheeks by the end, and completed almost all the possible laps--33/35-- in the time limit!

Afterward I gave her a kiss in the hallway after she'd gotten her drink from the drinking fountain, and she was appropriately happy to see us and then importantly said that she had to go and ran back into the gym to watch the kindergarten boys run.

Darth Vader and (our) Son.

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...  Last Christmas (2012) in Utah...

Steve's big brother gave him a book by comic artist Jeffrey Brown entitled Darth Vader and Son. We all flipped through it and giggled at the idea of Darth Vader parenting 4-year-old Luke Skywalker (Ridiculous! What a notion!) and took it home to rest safely in our bookshelf until we needed a laugh.

And then, one day, as if by fate--or perhaps by the unknowable powers of the Force--it fell into Charlie's hands.

The obsession started slowly.

He knew it was "Daddy's book," and that prowess alone was enough to make it interesting enough to take to bed for nap time perusals, but soon that wasn't enough. He wanted us to read it to him. Nevermind that it wasn't actually a storybook (or that he couldn't possibly get the jokes). So we did.

At first we were kind of stoic about it, but soon Steve and I started reading the dialogue correctly, with Luke's whiny true-to-the-movie intonations demanding they "go to Toshi station after nap" or for Ben to "tell him I'm ready!" Darth's voice got deeper, duskier, and generally more James-Earl-Jones-esque. Soon we'd hear Charlie talking to himself in the other room, doing his best Mom-as-Vader impression as he warned himself menacingly, "I am altering the deal. PRAY I don't alter it any further..."

In fact, Charlie learned so much of this book by heart, it became hard for us to differentiate between his normal three-year-old conversation and perfect recitation of this book. He'd start shouting, "Dad! Dad! Dad!" and then totally ignore Steve when he responded, "What?" Because he wasn't talking to him--he was mimicking the page where Luke interrupts a holo-call between Darth and the Emperor. Or he'd go on a tangent about robots and then laugh to himself, "IIIIIIIII'm talking about Star Wars!" He also became especially attached to R2D2, with whom he seemed to relate on a deeper, more meaningful level than any of the other characters.

Gracie got into the action, too, using her newly honed reading skills to read this book to Charlie when she was feeling big-sisterly. They got a LOT of great laughs out of this, giggling at the pages together as only siblings can.

So you can imagine their joy when we told them we were going to let them watch an actual Star Wars movie. They hustled into the family room and prepared to have their minds blown. Little did they know how very much that would happen.

No sooner had Darth Vader appeared onscreen than I, their mother, found myself tasked with the unpleasant job of explaining the realities of the movie's family relationships to Grace. First item on the list? Letting her know that Darth Vader--the hilarious and oddly clad father of precocious Luke in our current favorite bedtime story--was... the bad guy.

She looked at me, almost disbelieving. "But... He's Luke's dad." (Also, she had no idea that the book had basically been the biggest spoiler of her life--you're not even supposed to know that little parentage nugget until the end of the next movie, kiddo.)

Me: "Yeah, but Luke doesn't know that. He thinks his dad died."

Grace: "..."

Me: "He thinks Darth Vader killed his dad."

Grace: "..."

There were some other interesting moments. Clearly Steve and I had forgotten why this movie wasn't rated G. Like in the bar (you know, the bar where where Han shot first (says the nerd)) when that one guy gets his arm cut off? Remember that? Yeah, I failed to recall that in time to shield her from it, so that happened and she was watching the TV with her brow furrowed as she asked, "Who's arm is that?"

So then I tried to explain (a) whose arm it was and (b) that it wasn't real because the movie was pretend and so the arm was pretend... Yeah.

Charlie, meanwhile, ignored the movie when there were people doing stuff, but hardly missed a moment of R2D2's screen time.

And, in related news, I've been trying to teach him to sing Bill Murray's Nick Winters lounge act Star Wars song. "Star Waaaaars... If they should bar waaaars... Please let these Star Waaaars....

....Stay."

Five years old!

Our girl turned 5 two Saturdays ago! I can't even fathom how this has happened since I was just slouched on our sofa in San Diego with newborn-Gracie propped up on my knees, but she has been waiting for this day pretty much since she turned 4. :) So you can bet we had a countdown going for at least two weeks before.

The day before we asked her what she wanted for her meals (we opted for a "family party" this year so we wanted to be sure her whole day was fabulous) and she had very specific choices--including drinking juice at two meals. I could tell she felt pretty awesome being able to request that. :)

When she woke up in the morning she was just giddy. We started off the day with blueberry pancakes and milk, per her request, cooked by Daddy. Then he left to help with a move and she told him, "When you come back, you miiiiight see lots of celebrations!" (Celebrations=decorations.)

I hadn't actually planned to decorate (is that terrible?) but she was so excited about it that I dug through our everything-closet and unearthed some streamers and balloons. She wanted to help with the decor:

When Steve got home we all piled into the car and hit the Y for some swimming. We haven't been much this summer, so the kiddos were pretty excited to be water babies for a while. We hung out there for about an hour, letting the birthday-girl get her fill, and then headed home for lunch, which was also just as the princess had requested:

Jam sandwiches (no peanut butter), blueberries, and juice.

It's hard to give your mom normal smiling faces when you have to do birthday poses.

She was pretty happy about the Happy Birthday sign, and struck many poses with that as well. :)

She also wanted a photo with Ellie-Brons (her most favorite elephant), and Pascal/Pasqual (the tiny green thing in her hand).

We tried to wait for Charlie to get up from his nap before she opened her presents, but Gracie had been up for an hour already and she was just dying of curiosity. So we let her go at it without sibling interference. She even took time to look at the cards, which I thought was impressive. Then again, she is five, as she kept reminding us. (And five means very, very grown up.)

We enjoyed dinner ("cheesy pasta" aka Annie's Mac and Cheese, watermelon, and more juice!) while watching a feature film of her choice--The Little Mermaid. Eating with a movie on, and not having to share movie-choosing rights with her brother were both great birthday coups for this girl.

And then it was time for cake--Charlie thinks birthday means cake. It is pretty important.

There was a bit of discussion about what kind of cake Gracie girl wanted. She was concerned at first with what her friends might like if they came to a party, so she started off asking for an elephant and then changing to a princess cake "because [her] friends like princesses." I told her they could have princesses on their birthday cakes, so she switched back to an elephant. Imagine her delight when I told her she could have it any color she wanted!

Obviously she chose pink frosting.

She also wanted strawberry cake, so her Daddy whipped up a strawberry elephant cake with pink frosting and a sprinkle-smile. 

She wanted to eat the whole head (there was a chocolate chip eye on there, too) so we gave it to her sans trunk (to keep the sugar high slightly at bay). It was a big hit--she especially thought the ear was very cute--and she named it Emma after her largest stuffed elephant. :)

Happy birthday baby girl!