No school....

The girls had this week off of school. They call it "ski week" around here, although we didn't do any skiing. Monday morning began with Emily running in to tell me that Hannah hit her with the Rubbermaid lid to a box that we keep toys in. So, I did what any good mother would do and told her to go hit her back. In fact, I told her she could use another lid as a shield and that she should go find a sword. This is what they ended up with:

Ruel even got in on some of the action:

We did plenty of Dance Dance Revolution challenges, visited a friend in San Jose that I used to work with and hadn't seen in 6 years, had some playdates, and the girls even wanted to practice the piano every day (I've been trying to teach them recently, but it's been inconsistent).

On Thursday, we went with some friends to the Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield, about 80 miles from here. The last time we went, Hannah was 3 and Emily was 1. Here are some then and now pictures. (Please ignore my scary hair from 2005!)

Cute, big girls! What fun! All in all, a good week (even though it rained a lot) and I think we're ready for school to start back up again tomorrow!

A little bit of everything.......

Here are some of the things that have been going on here over the past few weeks. Hannah had her V.I.P. day at school a few weeks ago and we all got to go and hear her talk about all her favorite things, what she likes to do, and answer questions from the class. The kids always want you to tell a funny story about when your child was little, and I didn't want to scar her for life by telling poop smearing stories or anything like that, so Ruel told the story about when she was 2 1/2 and went with him and his 12-year-old boy scouts on a day hike. She got out of the backpack he'd been carrying her in while they were taking a break and followed one of the scouts a little bit. Ruel couldn't see her and went to find her just as she was about to step off a rock onto a sleeping rattle snake. AAAHHHH! He grabbed her just in time. Thank goodness I wasn't there. Anyway, I digress. Here is a picture of all of us on V.I.P. day.

Later that afternoon, we got the movie "Matilda" from Netflix in the mail. The kids and I sat down and watched it together and really enjoyed it. I don't want to ruin it for you if you haven't seen it and may want to, but at the end there is a part where the girl and her adoptive mom are shown doing lots of fun things together, including eating lots of lots of chocolates that they'd always been forbidden to eat in the past. It just looked like so much fun, so I told the kids to get their shoes on because we were going to the chocolate store! We drove over to See's candy and picked out some chocolates to buy, ate our samples, and the kids each got chocolate lollipops to eat (right before dinner). Here's the proof:

That was a lot of fun! The next day was "Wacky Wednesday" at school. Unfortunately, Hannah was sick (hmmm..... too much chocolate??) so only Emily got to dress up. Actually, she didn't want to wear wacky clothes. She only wanted wacky hair. This picture was taken before I finished up the back of her hair, but it's still pretty funny.

Then last night, the girls both went with Ruel to a Daddy/Daughter "Sweetheart Dance" through their Y-Guides group (YMCA sponsored daddy/daughter group organized through school). Hannah's done it before but this was Emily's first year. Here are the official pictures from the dance (didn't turn out so great but I have some better ones of the girls below).

Here's Sleeping Beauty before the dance, too exhausted from all that getting ready nonsense.

Ironically, Hannah wanted her hair curly and Emily wanted hers straight. We're never happy with what we have! (I told them that if it rained, they were both in trouble!)

Emily: "I got woken up for this?"

Looks like she got warmed up after a while! And today she lost another tooth, so it looks like the tooth fairy is coming again tonight! Big weekend!!! Here's the new grin.