Carlsbad Trip 2012

Another trip to Carlsbad this year! We took along cousins and Nana. It was a long trek through the caves with three little girls.

The Start of Summer

Summer has started, and also summer classes!  Naomi it taking Soccer, Basketball, Theater, Swimming, and Zumba!

This is a warm up for soccer to strengthen those legs.

The first basketball class was in really gusty winds, you can see Naomi's hair flying.  The temperature also dropped to about 75 after having been about 90!

Tadpoles in the pond at the park where she has most of her classes.

In her first theater class, they were trying to get the kids into character.  Naomi was a police officer (because of her hat).

Here she's saying 'Stick your hand up!'

The next time around she was a pirate, and she said 'Argh!'

Getting ready for swimming.

Jumping through a hula hoop to see if they can touch bottom in the deep end.

Gotta have the snorkel gear!

The rest of Memorial Day Weekend

Naomi hosted a tea party at Yaya's house.  The girls enjoyed Pomegranate lemonade tea, Baby Bell cheese, and pastries.

Her cousins Jessica, Madeline, and Rebekah were able to attend.

We also took the kids out to White Sands National Monument.  Naomi is always pretty cautious about going too fast, but luckily the sleds moved pretty slow with her.

Here she is trudging back up the hill to go down again, it's a lot of work!

She's standing at the top of the dune.  It was very bright and pretty warm that day.

This is 'Thank goodness I finally made it back to the top!'.

Target Practice

We went down to Las Cruces for Memorial Day weekend, and our first outing was some shooting practice at the range.  Naomi is sporting her stylin' ear protection.

Pa is helping her to aim her gun.  It's a little 22 rifle.

Now Daddy's helping her out.

Aunt Jennifer is holding her up.  I think she wanted a better view of the milk cartons being shot.  It's always fun to see if they are hit because water starts to spout out of them.

Yaya is in her gun slinging position!

Kindergarten Graduation

Naomi's last day of Kindergarten.  She's holding a picture that I took of her on the first day of school back in August.  She's ticked because she did NOT want me to take a picture of her!

Poor Naomi was the very last one to graduate since they went in alphabetical order.  She's receiving her 'diploma' from Mrs. Mosley.

Here we are after everything was finished.  They had an ice cream social for the kids after the ceremony.  There was some pretty strange combinations since the kids made the party food list on their own.  Naomi's ice cream creation consisted of mint chocolate chip ice cream, cookie crumbles, sprinkles, whipped cream, and cherries!

Party Number 2

For our second party of the season, we headed down to Las Cruces to celebrate with the family down there.

Naomi has 2 girl cousins who both have birthdays within a month of hers, so we typically celebrate all three together, we'll see how that goes as they get older.

Each girl has different tastes of course, but I didn't want to make 3 different cakes (although the one cake is 3 different flavors...).  Naomi likes a Japanese movie called My Friend Totoro, so I made a little Totoro for her side of the cake.  Hannah loves Star Wars, and if you look on top of the castle you can see Luke and Darth Vador dueling (they are on top of the castle because the girls will all be going to Disneyland later in the summer and this is when they found out), and Jessica loves dinosaurs, so she got 3 friendly dinosaurs on her side.

This is Naomi and another cousin, Christina, who lives in Las Cruces.  We can Naomi Christina's mini-me because they look so similar (you should see pictures of Christina when she's younger, the resemblance is amazing!).

To complete the Disney theme we rented a Princess bouncy.  The kids all had a great time in there, and while there were no injuries, the bounce house did deflate at one point which scared some kids.

One of her birthday gifts was a bat, ball, and glove to play baseball.  Naomi has talked about playing baseball for a while (especially since we go watch Isotopes games during the summer), but I always figured she was a little too young.  Boy did she prove me wrong!  She was great at it!  Within 5 minutes of starting she was already hitting balls that Yaya pitched to her.  Just goes to show that I don't always know ;-)

Party Number One!

It's that time of year again!  Birthday time!!!

It's hard to believe that Naomi will be six in just over a week.

For her 'friends' party this year, we booked a party at one of the local Bounce House places.  March weather here is not usually nice enough to have outdoor parties, and I didn't want to have to clean the house before or after 20 5/6 year olds ran through it!

My camera was dying, so the shots are limited, but the kids had a great time :-) 

Naomi invited her entire class, many of her MOMS Club friends, and her cousins!

This is the first room where they climb around in a huge jungle gym/obstacle course for 45 minutes.  They then move on to the bouncy room where they can choose to go down huge slides, through inflatable obstacle courses or just jump around.  The kids were WORN OUT! 

Naomi still loves the characters from 'How to Train Your Dragon' so the folks over at Say it With Cake made her an awesome fondant toothless for the top of her cake.

Toothless came home with us and hasn't been eaten yet...but I figure his days are numbered...

Suspiciously Quiet

You know when your kids are little, and you suddenly realize they've been suspiciously quiet for too long?  I feel like I've been that way recently.  The truth is, we have been up to something, but in a good way!  We have redone the floor and paint in our great room and part of our front room.

Here is the end product:

Now let's see how we got there!

 This is a good shot of our new paint color.  It is similar to the color we had in there for the last couple of years, just a bit darker.

 Here are the guys laying the new flooring.  Thank goodness a coworker of Michael's and his father came to help because it would have taken us FOREVER!

This is a picture of the room before the carpet and laminate were ripped out, but after the pony wall had been torn down. 

 Michael working on taking the pony wall out.  I'm sure this wall was a good idea for some people, but for us it divided the room too much and was a great area for stuff to accumulate.

 We invited one of Naomi's cousins to come draw on the pony wall before it was torn down.  I did this with my family as a kid before we took a wall down to add an addition on to our house and I still remember how much fun it was!

We love our new floor and new look for the rooms!  Hopefully we'll be able to get everything sorted out and rehung soon!

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 ;-)