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 ;-)

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!