Cauliflower anyone?

Here's one of 3 enormous heads of cauliflower I harvested from the garden earlier this month. Big, right? I still have one more growing that I'll probably pick next week. That's a lot of blanching!

Three weeks late

Madeleine's been in school for three weeks now. I'm so proud of how well she's doing and how much she loves it! I had to uphold the long-standing tradition of taking her picture the first day and here it is. So cute and excited!

Home again

We had a whirlwind of a trip to PA. Flying out Thursday and back on Sunday made it a quick trip jam packed with family time. Despite all of us being sick, we had a lot of fun. We spent as much time as possible playing with Uncle Bubba (Justin's brother Aaron), his girlfriend Jess, his new puppy Buoy, the kids' new cousins Ella and Brooke, and of course Nanna and Pappy (JoAnn and George). We have some pictures and videos that I will try to download over the next couple of days. Thanks for a great time and congratulations again Nanna and Pappy!!!

Reasonable? Ha!

Forget getting to bed at a sensible hour. It's already 1:30am, I have to be up by 6am, and I still have tons to clean up. Ugh. The kids are both sick (runny noses, dry cough, P's sounds like croup...) and my throat hurts. We'll be "that family" on the planes tomorrow. Prayers and positive thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I'm a little airplane now

We'll be little airplanes tomorrow as we head to PA for JoAnn and George's big day on Saturday. Today is full of errands, laundry, last minute food preserving, and hopefully a reasonable bedtime. We'll be back on Sunday so you'll have to wait until next week to hear from us again. Have a great weekend!

Success!

She did it! Madeleine completed her first day of preschool :) Despite Ms. Nancy having to pull a screaming Madeleine off Justin, Madeleine had a great day at school and wasn't too thrilled to come home with Parker and me, especially when she found out she'd have to wait until Friday to go back. I was told she cried and whined for 2 minutes, said she was all finished, and wanted to go do some art. That was it. Unbelievable, right? Sometimes Justin and I doubt the way we've parented her because of her ability to "freak out" for extended periods of time but it seems like we're doing a relatively okay job. I'm sure Friday morning will have another short meltdown but that's to be expected. As long as she loves being there and says she wants to go back I'm happy.

Countdown to school...

Madeleine will go to her first day of preschool tomorrow. Yikes! Justin's agreed to take her--I can do shots and the like but saying goodbye on the first day of school would wreck me. We've casually talked about school over the last few days but hopefully not enough to get her too nervous. She has been telling us she's nervous because she will miss us but she understands that there will be lots of other kids there who will want to play with her and that makes her excited. She also gets that I'll pick her up before lunch so she doesn't have to spend that much time there. I think Parker's going to feel short-changed because he's stuck with ol' mom while Maddie gets to play with tons of other kids; I'm curious about the kids' reaction when they see each other tomorrow afternoon.

One thing that has permanently changed: remember this kid?

Madeleine can now attend school without the crazy halo of fuzz surrounding her head. On my last trip to see Katt, my hairdresser, she recommended a product called Deva curl to help control Madeleine's curls. She told me to fore go shampoo and simply rinse her hair with water, use the Deva conditioner, only rinse some of it out, and let it air dry. Here's the result:

Two little bobby pins to hold her bangs back and she's good to go! I'll keep working on figuring out how to style it but it is pretty hard to get a 3-year old to stay still for mom to "fix" her hair. In her mind it doesn't much matter because she'll be wearing a bike helmet most of the afternoon to ride her bike :) How time flies...