Gwyn's 11!!

     I can't believe I've been a parent for 11 years!  Gwyn should not be 11 years old.  But she is.  She's only going to keep getting older.  There are good things that come with age too.  I love that I can have normal conversations with Gwyn.  I love that we can read some of the same books, watch some of the same movies, listen to some of the same music.  I love that I don't have to fix her breakfast for her or dress her.  I love that she still does ask me my opinion about what she wears though.  I love that she can think through things and make good decisions.  She is turning into a young lady that makes me very proud.
 
    Gwyn wanted to go to the meadow on her actual birthday.  She was very excited to share this special place with Mimi and Papaw.  They played in the water.  Gwyn spent quite a while arranging rocks into a wall.  That's one of the ways she's always played.  I remember her lining the Little People up in a line across the toy box.  The Little People are gone, but she still plays like that sometimes.  While we were at the river, we saw a lot of butterflies.  The girls really enjoy trying to get them to light on their fingers.  They don't actually do this very often, but when they do it's quite exciting!  Of course the butterflies don't cooperate very well with photography and children so that exciting moment doesn't usually get captured.

     Gwyn's special gift this year was a Kindle Fire.  She was VERY excited to get her own tablet.  She's been asking for one and saving her money for a long time, but between the grandparents and us we were able to surprise her!

     Gwyn chose to eat at Buca di Beppo for her birthday dinner.  We sat at the Pope table and she got serenaded.  The food was good and as usual was too much for us all to eat.  Then we went home to eat Chocolate Bomb Cake.  This cake could also be called Death by Chocolate.  It's pretty intense and we were all pretty miserable after stuffing ourselves with pasta then cake.  But it was a sacrifice worth making to celebrate Gwyn.

 
    Gwyn's friend party was Hello Kitty themed.  We had it at Oregon Ridge.  Even though the beach is "closed" we planned to have a sand castle competition and play anyway.  Nine of Gwyn's friends got to come and celebrate.  They all had fun building their sand castles.  I made Jason be the judge and we gave out prizes.

     Then the girls all took their swings at the pinata.  I refuse to spend $15-20 on a cardboard thing that is going to get hit with a stick and then thrown away, so we made one out of party hats and filled it with chocolate coins.  In retrospect the weather was too hot for chocolate coins, but they sure had fun hitting it.

 
    The rope from the pinata got used to play tug-of-war.  It was a nylon rope and not intended for tug-of-war, so I think a few girls got rope burn.  But again, they had fun in the moment and no one was bleeding so I guess that worked out.

     Finally Gwyn got to open some more presents.  Her friends really gave her a lot of very nice and thoughtful gifts!  I am so thankful that Gwyn has made good friends here!

     So all in all Gwyn's birthday was fun, both the actual day and the party day.  She says it was one of the best birthdays she's had and that's what matters, that she felt special and celebrated on her 11th birthday.  Happy Birthday Gwyn!  We love you!

Family visits

We tried to get as many "Summer" things in the past few weeks as possible.  Lyla has learned to climb on top of the monkey bars like the big girls and even hang upside down.  This only freaks me out occassionally because her legs are so short that her feet barely hook under to hold her up.  She is also the lightest kid left in our house so she's the one that gets to try out aqua acrobatics.  I can't imagine trying to hoist Gwyn or even Celee up like that!  The girls also got to go celebrate our neighbor's 3 yr birthday party.  Who would have thunk my girls would enjoy a Spiderman party so much?  They wore those masks for the rest of the day.

     We were all super excited that my parents got to come stay with us for the week!  We took them to the farm and showed them the soon-to-be new house.  The girls enjoy having their grandparents around!

     We wanted to go to the Cheasapeake Bay with my parents, but we didn't want to drive to the places that people usually say are the best places to go, so we ended up at North Point State Park.  This is super close to the harbor, and near an island where they dump the dredgings from the bay, so it's not the most pristine of places.  But we had a good time.  We even found a blue crab only recently deceased.  ;)  This park is really neat because from 1908-1947 it was an amusement park with a trolley that brought people to and from Baltimore to the park.  (History!)  The trolley station is still there as a large pavilion and an old fountain that was used to filter all the drinking water at the park to make it taste better.

     The girls also pulled Pete's arm to help them build a "castle" out of driftwood.  Then of course they had to build another one.  I told Celee she looked like an ox in a yoke carrying that one piece of wood.  The weather was awesome and the girls had a lot of fun looking for treasure and building and playing with Papaw and Mimi.

     My parents had never been to Five Guys before, so we introduced them to that.  I remembered to tell them to only get one order of fries to split, but I forgot to tell them if you want a normal sized burger to order the Little Burger.  Needless to say we were all stuffed afterward.  Except Celee, who still won't eat beef.  I am easing back into it myself.

     Gwyn and Celee started soccer this week.  We were late for our very first practice and I only got this picture the whole time, so I'm not going to get the soccer mom award anytime soon I think.  Oh,well.  At least they had mostly what they were supposed to bring.  (I say mostly b/c when we got there one had forgotten to grab her ball.  One had only found one soccer sock, so she wore a normal mismatched sock on the other foot.  The mismatched sock thing actually looked pretty cute though - right up her alley in the style department.)  They have to pick a name for their team.  I like the Turbo Turtles or Green Lightening.  Celee likes Turbo Crocs.  We'll find out this week what the girls decide.

   
     History club was at our place this week.  So my parents went to walk the NCR trail while the History craziness decended on our apartment.  We are learning about early American cultures like the Olmecs, Anasazi, Moundbuilders, and Pueblos.  So we attemted to create our own Olmec statue heads.  It did not turn out the way I envisioned, but I think the kids learned something from it and gave thought into what artifacts early people left behind.   Bridget also did a nifty health lesson with the kids where they clipped pictures out of sale papers to put on their "balanced plate."

Opposite of a balanced plate, we went out for crab on my parents' last night.  We tried
out Ocean Pride in Lutherville this time. Maybe some Marylanders would know if it's just a better season for crab, or if it really was the restaurant that was better, but the crab we had at OP had more meat than what we had in April.  I did enjoy the flavoring better too.  Lyla just enjoyed whacking things with a mallet.

   



 We were sad to see my parents go on Friday.  It's really easy to slip back into the mindset that they are just around like they were when we lived in Mississippi - even though that was around 8 years ago.  I do wish our family lived closer, but in loo of that I'll take the long visits!

Truth vs pride

This was written some time ago in a moment of clarity.  I thought it appropriate as I contemplate the coming new year.  ;)

Lord, give me the wisdom and self-reflection to know when something is true - Your Truth.  Help me not to let being right be more important than speaking the truth.  Help me to see your messages in other people's opinions and arguments, regardless of the messenger.   Push my pride so far out of the picture that I can be a witness for you even when I am wrong.  Let me model for my children the humility of one who can only boast in the living Christ and no knowledge or understanding that came of my own works.  You give wisdom.  You give understanding.  All the Earth is yours, from quantum physics to 3rd grade math word problems.  From theology to simple acts of compassion.  You completely overshadow my pride.  Let me live that truth.

Amen

School started FurRuhl

We did indeed start school.  I did not get that "first day" picture I was going to attempt though.  Oh, well.  We did portraits though.  So yay for the beginning of school!

     Gwyn had her first consult with an orthodontist this week.  Yep.  She'll have to have braces.  But not for a while.  Apparently there are other means of torture they can do before braces that might help.  Just kidding.  She still has lots of baby teeth and they are going to do *things* before braces.  We aren't sure yet what that means, but we'll find out in a week or so.

     The girls did their last Art Club meeting.  It's funny that no matter what the project is, if Marta brings out chalk the kids inevitably want to crush the chalk or shred it to make something.  So they ended up grating the chalk and mixing it with buttermilk to make paint.  Pretty cool.

Lyla is often my little helper in the kitchen. She's getting to be a pretty good wonton wrapper too.  She loves to help me do this and is so proud when we're eating and she can say SHE made the wontons.

     We had our first History Club meeting.  We did a geography lesson and learned about hemispheres and continents.  The kids made their own globes with the equator and prime meridian on it and the axis poles.  Then we attempted to paste the continents from flat paper onto the round globe.  Later we peeled grapefruits and oranges and attempted to make flat maps with our round peels.  This was all to illustrate the difficulty that cartographers make when they create world maps and how they have to choose what is important to the purpose of the map in deciding what to cut or distort to get a flat picture of a round object.  Then the kids also did a health lesson.  They are doing the presidential challenge so they had to take measurements to gauge their level of flexibility and strength.  Later we'll remeasure and see how they've hopefully gotten better.  I love Gwyn's posture in the last picture.  She's my least "athletic" child.  But she and Celee did ask to sign up for soccer this Fall, which starts this week, so who knows?  She may surprise us all.