Our Little Dancer

This year, Ellie has been taking dance at Miss Michelle's house. She had a fun class, full of good friends and they learned tap, ballet and tumbling. Last night, they had their final dance recital. She got wear a cute tutu and leotard:

At this recital, they performed a tap dance. Ellie had a big smile on her face the whole time and she danced really well.

Isn't she sweet?

I just love that I have this sweet little girl.

Her class- Olivia, Ellie, Sydney, Teia, Sierra, Storrie

They were so cute. On the way home, out of the blue Ellie says, "When the man asks me to marry him, I am going to say yes." Funny because we never talk about that, but little girls must inherently be romantics....

More Before and After Pictures

I don't know about you, but I love before and after pictures, everything always looks so much nicer after so it is fun to look at. For the next few weeks I am going to have a ton of posts about the kids and all their end of year events and recitals so I thought I would take a break to post some before and after pictures of the downstairs of our lake cottage. We'll start with the bathroom. It still needs a lot of work, but it is much better now. Before it was a nice light blue color, with that obnoxious counter top, but very, very, very, very dirty:

After it is a lot cleaner, we have yet to replace the counter, but we have come up with a scheme that ties it in. (we have put a chair molding up on the line, I will take pictures and replace these the next time I go up).

Check out this shower....isn't that one of the most disgusting things you have ever seen? I actually saw one worse once, but the guy living there was blind....

And after:

Ha! The shower is still the ugly teal and brown, but the shower curtain covers it now. I have cleaned it out. I want Joe to re tile the wall, but that isn't a priority for him...yet.

Next is the living/dining/ kitchen area. It is L-shaped. The first picture is to the left when you first walk in the door. I thought we would put the couch there, but it didn't fit so we did something else which you will see shortly. You can see the yucky carpet the previous owners had. That mirror was fine and we were going to move it, but Michael took care of it for us (2000 pieces later luckily no one got hurt).

Here is the area after. Joe changed out the light and we painted the walls and ceiling and tiled the floor. The table we had, it came with some bar stools I used at my house, but I never needed the table. I think it works perfect here. We plan to replace the door soon.
This is the kitchen. Notice the wallpaper backsplash and stencils above the cupboards. I don't know if you can see it without enlarging the pictures, but the cupboards are all nicotine and dirt stained and the handles are very "retro." The counter is laminate and we have plans to put some Silestone counters we have from when we had our old ones replaced, but that hasn't happened yet....I promise to post pictures when it does. Check out the range...it is so small the oven doesn't even have a window.

Here's the intermediate after. We peeled off the wallpaper backsplash, painted all the cupboards (and even the inside). We cute the hole for the stove bigger and got a nicer one. We have a newer fridge, but that isn't in this picture. I want Joe to put tumbled travertine in 2" tiles in as a backsplash, wouldn't that be nice?

Here's a before from the front door to the kitchen. Notice the yellow blinds and the nasty carpet. We had tile put in and have taken down the blinds (we will need to replace those at some point).
This is the couch from our game room. Joe got it for a steal from one of his rich friends. I have hated it since we got it, so when we needed a couch for the "cottage" I volunteered to have it go so that I could get new ones for our game room. (The ones I got I am very much more happy with.) The room is so small that the couch fills it right up, but its so nice to have a lot of seating there that we don't mind that there isn't a ton of space left.

Another view of the living room before:
and after:

What you really don't get to appreciate is how horrid the place smelled in the before stage, but it is all gone now.

Now doesn't this look like a nice place you would want to come visit and stay in for a little while?

It's All About Adam

Yesterday, Adam had two big events: his end of the year gymnastics Olympic day and his end of year piano recital.

The gymnastics Olympic day is a special one hour even where the gymnastics teachers let the kids show what they have been learning with the parents standing nearby to watch (and take pictures). This past year, Adam spent the first 3 months in a tumbling class, and then when he decided that he didn't like that (there were all girls and him in it) we put him in an all boys gymnastics class. Since he went into the all boys class, he has taken off and really enjoyed himself. He learns a lot of parallel bars:

strength training exercises (Adam is on the Jurassic Wall in the picture):

rings:

and tumbling and flips- on the floor, and the trampoline and on the vault. Since it is all boys he feels more comfortable with all of the things that he does. He really likes his coach, which I think also helps a lot for him to enjoy it.
At the end, they also gave him a fun "gold" medal:

As soon as that was over, we rushed over to the church for Adam's piano recital. He has been playing since last August, and I think he has progressed really well. He played two songs, "Boom, Boom Indian Drum" and a duet with his piano teacher, Mrs. Mecham of "Do as I'm Doing."

Here is him playing his first song:

Tortilla Soup

Shortly after Adam was old enough to eat people food, I found myself cooking two meals at dinner, one for Joe and I and one for Adam. He was a pretty picky eater so it made sense. As he got older and I had Michael and became more tired I realized quickly that that wouldn't work. Since then I have tried to make the kids eat what we are eating for dinner with mixed success.

It has gotten better over the years. Recently I decided to try to get them to eat tortilla soup. Usually when I try to feed them soup they act like I am serving them poison and there is a lot of whining and stubborn not eating. There are often trips for one or two children to their rooms until they can return and eat what is in front of them. I thought that tortilla soup might be a hit because you take the soup and add tortilla chips and cheese to eat it. What's not to like? The first time I fed it to the kids there was a big rebellion. Unfortunately, Joe wasn't around so I got to put up with all the theatrics. Adam and Michael have learned that they better eat what is in front of them, so they reluctantly tried it and decided they didn't like it. Next thing I know they are plugging their noses and eating it. They told Ellie, "Just do this, plug your nose and you can't taste it as much." I about died laughing inside.
The next time I tried to have them eat tortilla soup they ate it with just a few complaints.
Yesterday, I served it again for the third time. One kid sat down and whined about how they didn't like it. One said, "Oh I kind of like this stuff." After they started eating, Michael said it was good because there were tomatoes in it! (He usually hates tomatoes in everything.)

So I guess the forcing the children to eat is working? They surprise me sometimes, they now really like vegetables, and caeser salad. I try to have something at every meal they really like so they can fill up on that. It is usually some kind of bread.

Anyone else have any tricks to get their kids to sit down and eat without the whining?

Michael and Ellie's Gymnastic Olympic Day

Adam, Michael and Ellie have been doing gymnastics this whole school year. Michael and Ellie are in a program called Fundamental gymnastics in which they separate them into classes according to age and expose them to all the different gymnastics equipment and teach them basic tumbling. As they do this, their body becomes more flexible and they also become stronger in other things they do. I have really noticed this past year that my kids have become a lot better at cartwheels and flips.

At the end of each school year, they have a special day when you can actually walk into the gym with your child and they go to different stations and show you what they have been doing. We like to go to this because it is a good time to show Joe what the kids have been doing since he is always at work when we go to gymnastics.

Some of the different things that they do are walk and crawl and somersault on the balance beams:

Practice somersaults and cartwheels and flips:

This one is called the log roll:

They also learn trampoline jumps and flips- Michael especially likes this one they flip into a pit of foam bricks.

They also get to climb a climbing wall and a rope and a rope net. The boys really enjoy these, Ellie doesn't like them as well.

They work on the bars, doing pullups and pull overs and such (I never did gymnastics so I just watch and don't really know what everything is called).

At the end they are given gold medals. These medals mean a lot to my children and sometimes it is like pulling teeth to get them from them to put them in the scrapbook!

Good job Ellie and Michael, you are doing great at gymnastics!

Our 40 new Trees

Joe decided that we needed more trees in a few areas at our property. Joe found some red oak seedlings on Craigslist, so he bought 50+ of them and then we went about planting them. We started by having Joe dig holes with his power auger, then we would come along behind and put a tree seedling in.

The trees were all about 1-2 feet tall and bare roots, so it was easy to put them in.

Everybody helped:

The seedlings have been in cold storage so they didn't have any green leaves yet.

The kids also took turns with the hose, watering them.

A few weeks ago, Joe used the extra rocks we had from redoing the planters at our house and made a fire pit. This picture was right after it was done, before the cement dried. We used it a couple of weeks later, it was perfect, we didn't have to worry as much about Nate around the fire because it had clear boundaries.
Another project that we did last month was to make planters around the "cottage" at the property. Before the grass grew right up to the foundation, and it was growing into and destroying the foundation. We pulled the monkey grass out of our home (two plants that the builder had put in had overgrown until there was enough to fill these planters). We need to go back and add mulch, but we will get to that someday.
If anyone ever feels the need to have physical labor, we have about 200 more projects just waiting to be done!