Christmas

 Christmas morning.  Naomi got an American Girl doll from Santa Claus, and named her Crystal.

 Yaya and Pa took Naomi and Crystal shopping yesterday so they would have some matching clothes.

 Milo got a battery operated mouse toy that he LOVED! Here he is guarding it...  Demi got a cozy warmer, a soft little beany that you stick in the microwave, right up her alley.

The aftermath of Christmas!

Christmas Program, Tooth, amd Cookies

 Hannah, Aunt Rat, and Nana made it to watch Naomi's Kindergarten Christmas Program.  They sang songs about Santa, Rudolph, Jingle Bells, Kwanzaa, and

Chanukah.

 All 7 Kindergarten's participated in the show.  The parking lot and gym/cafeteria were PACKED, I couldn't even find a seat!

 Naomi also lost her first tooth on December 15th!  She has been wanting to lose a tooth since before she turned 5, so this was very exciting.

 She's showing her tooth box.  The tooth fairy left her 4 Quarters in exchange for her tooth!

 Naomi was also in charge of sugar cookies.  She's really got rolling to dough down to an art at this point,she knows how much flour to sprinkle down and she makes the dough the perfect thickness.

 She loved using the little bitty cookies cutters rather than the large ones.

 Here is her arm of gingerbread men.  They are all about an inch and a half tall!  She decorated all these cookies too, good thing because they were too small for me to see very well!

Here are some of the decorated cookies, a lot of them got eaten along the way ;-)

Christmas Preparations

This first 3 pictures are from my phone, so sorry about the quality.  We've had 3 snow days so far this December!  So, I had some extra time with Naomi to do some fun Christmasy things.

Here she is decorating her Gingerbread house.  I put it together and helped her with some rolling and cutting, but she did most of the actual decorating by herself.

Not sure where this pose came from...

I kept having to tell her to stop eating the icing, who wants to eat royal icing that's at least a year old?  Well, I guess a 5 year old would.

I also had to tell her to stop eating the candy.  Usually I wouldn't really care, but I bought this Gingerbread house kit in December of 2010 and who knows when it was packaged...ewww...

Ah, good ol' sideways picture...

This is Naomi and me at the River of Lights.  It is REALLY cold!  The thing behind us is a whale if you can't tell :-)

This is us standing in front of the River of Lights sign.  The blurry orangeish thing is Naomi and I'm the dark blob.

This is a Pegasus that is suspended from the trees, the wings actually go up and down.  This is probably Naomi's favorite part, but by this point we had been out in the cold for about an hour and she was freezing.

Halloween

Naomi decided to be a kitty this year.  She went trick-or-treating with Daddy, Yaya, her cousin, Aunt, Uncle, and some friends.  I hung out at home to hand out candy and work on the class snack for Naomi's class the next day.

She thought about being another character from 'How to Train Your Dragon' and also Cleopatra, but finally decided that a kitty was a good choice.

Here are our pumpkins.  The two little ones are both Naomi's, and both are kitties.  Michael's is the one that looks confused and mine looks sort of scared.

Even the cats got dressed up!  Demi is giving me the evil eye after being stuffed into her skunk outfit, and Milo never stood still long enough for me to get a picture of him.  He was dressed up as Dracula again :-)

State Fair

Ah, it's that time of year again...or at least is was a month ago when I took these photos!

I love going to the State Fair and Naomi does too.  She loves riding on the ponies, that was the first thing we did on both of our visits this year.

McDonald's farm is always fun too. This 'farm' is for kids, they go through a scavenger hunt like list while learning more about farming and agriculture.  After collecting apples, learning about grain silos and tractors, and collecting eggs, she move on to roping cattle. Since Pa has some expertise in this, he helped her out.

Here she is riding her 'bucking bronco'!

She also dressed up like a real cowgirl.  You know she's going to be a cowgirl, veterinarian, food scientist, rock star right?

We also had a chance to meet Miss Teen New Mexico.  She is a very nice young lady!

The day ended with some carnival rides.  Naomi and Yaya rode on the Ferris wheel together, that's them in the yellow one.  She also loved the fun houses and the bouncy houses, but was not impressed with the spinning dragon ride.  Silly girl...

Way back in May we visited Carlsbad Caverns.  We drove there on Saturday and watched the bat flight (sadly no pictures of that) then walked the caverns on Sunday before driving home.  It was a bit of a whirlwind trip, but we enjoyed it.



The had digital recordings that you could listen to explaining points throughout the caves.  Naomi's was a children's version so it wasn't bogged down with terms and dates.  She really liked being able to control it! 

My cambera died at some point early on in the caves (of course right?).  But here are two decent cave shots.  We were there right when the caves opened and walked down the natural enterance.  It was a good thing we were there early because we didn't have much of a wait fot the elevator back up to the surface, people had to wait in line for over 2 hours the day before!! We were prepared to walk back out of the caverns if that was the case (although we really didn't want to) but we were lucky :-)

1st Day of Kindergarten

August 15, 2011 was Naomi's first day of Kindergarten!  She is able to ride the bus, but we live pretty close to the school, so we are just going to walk for now.  Yaya and Pa came up to be a part of the first day!

All the Kindergartner's (and their teachers) will be wearing this yellow shirt EVERYDAY for the whole first week!  While they are super easy to spot, it also means that I will be doing laundry every night so she has a clean shirt to wear the next day.

It's never a good sign when the day starts right this right?  She actually did great.  She 'couldn't remember' a lot of details, but seemed happy when we picked her up.  She did say that she feel asleep during quiet time, but these kids have a long day at school, 9 am to 4 pm!

Here is Naomi's class, there are 22 students right now.  Ms. Mosley (her teacher) is the one standing to the far right pointing at something across the room.  She seems very nice and lives just around the corner from us.

Naomi was happy to go off to school again this morning, and left me with jobs to finish before she got home, including putting some money on her account so she could buy lunch from the cafeteria!

Basketball

Naomi also took basketball again this year.  It is so similar to soccer!  Last year she had a hard time and didn't want to go to practice.  I had already decided I wouldn't sign her up again, but then when it came time to register for classes, she begged to do basketball.  I grudgingly signed her up and hoped for the best.  Amazing, that's all I can say.  She can dribble, she can score baskets, and she can pass the ball.  Apparently between age 4 and 5 kids can really improve their coordination.

Her coach even asked her to move up to Kourt Kids 2 the next time she takes a class, only one other kids was invited to move up, so proud of her!

By the way, does that coach look familiar to you?  The same man (Coach Ray) does all the sports for Rio Rancho parks and rec.  Soccer, basketball, t-ball, flag football, tennis, and more!  He's a great guy!

Soccer

Naomi took soccer again this summer.  It was amazing how much she improved over a years time.  Last year she was timid, confused, and clumsy.  This year she was confident and a real team leader!  She went after the ball, scored goals, and helped the younger kids when they would get confused.  I think her coach was really impressed with her too.

I have some awesome videos of her, but of course am having problems uploading them to blogger...hopefully that will work out soon.

Swimming

Naomi loves swimming!  She just recenty learned to swim comletely on her own.  She'll go to swimming lessons the last two weeks in June, and the first two weeks in August, just before she goes back to school.  Her classes are at our Aquatic center, which has a great indoor pool complete with water slides!  Here she is on her first day, she's all ready with her goggles.

Much to her horror, she's in a class with all boys, including the insructor.  She still seemso enjoy it though.  They are learning to use the kickboards to strengthen their legs. 

 Naomi doesn't care for the kickboard, but she does pretty well with it.  When I told her that I never liked kickboards either, it seemed to make her feel better.

 Naomi loves being able to go into the deep end with her class.  I think the 'deep end' in this pool is about 4.5 feet at the most, but that means that the water is over her head, so it works for her.  The pratice swimming from one edge to another while the teacher spots them.

Hopefully she'll pass this class so she can move on to the next, she's doing great!

Ladybugs

For fun, we bought a lady bug kit (complete with coupon for free larvae!).  Due to weather issues, too hot, too cold, etc, it's taken us a while to get our bugs into their dome.  They came as funky looking long, skinny, black bugs with yellow strips.  They ate some kind of grainy food the lady bug people sent along with them, then traveled up the side of the dome to morph into ladybugs.

I took a couple of shots of them as they were starting their change.

This one makes it look like monster bugs are invading our home, ha ha!

Naomi enjoyed them for the most part, but her favorite part was when we released them today.  We took them into the back yard after lunch and took off them dome.  At first the ladybugs had no idea what to do, their either stood very still or ran all over the bottom of their habitat.  Naomi decided to help them along by coaxing them onto leaves and then transplanting them to a nearby mint plant.  Some of the ladybugs accepted her help gratefully which others discovered their wings and took flight.  One ladybug even decided it wanted to continue to live with Naomi and climbed into her hair!

Sorry, no pictures of the release, I was concerned for the ladybugs safety!  You never know what a 5 year old might do.

Easter Part 2

This is the egg hunt that the Easter bunny set up at our house.  He did a very good job of hiding them!

He hid the hard boiled eggs that we had dyed the day before, luckily Naomi found them all.

Here she is with her basket full of eggs!  We turned these into deviled eggs and egg salad.

We also had an egg hunt over at a friends house.  I'm not sure if she and Max are going for two different eggs or if they are fighting over one.

Coming for the backyard with a basket full.

She did pretty well for herself!

And a pretty pose with her eggs.  Thanks so much to the Kofchur family for having us over for Easter dinner!