Ballet Spring Class

A few weeks ago N had another visitor's week at her ballet class. She's really learned a lot, and continues to enjoy it, regularly wearing her ballet slippers around the house. Here are some highlights from that day:




Dressed as Madeline with her teacher.


This is one of my favorite poses. She's pretty good at pointing her toes.


Her curtsey!


She won't smile for pictures anymore.



Picture from my mom's b-day.

Updates and Milestone: Learning to Read

N is still doing ballet and loving it as usual. This session, there is only one other girl in the class, so she's really learning a lot of technique. In fact, last week, the other ballerina didn't come, so N had a private lesson! She still LOVES to read, often reading books from memory or just making up her own stories by looking at the pictures. She's got quite the imagination. The most exciting milestone for N is that she has started to read. She's in the stage of sounding out words with short vowels.

Easter 2009

We had a great time decorating Easter eggs with my girlie.  I tried something new this year by blowing out the eggs instead of hard-boiling them.  I've always hated the stinky "rotten egg" smell that seems to permeate the house the minute their done boiling, and although I've read that it's perfectly safe to eat them dyed, I just never liked the idea of it.

So I followed instructions from Martha Stewart's website by first making an egg drying rack.  This was actually very satisfying to do!  And then I followed her other instructions for blowing out the raw eggs.  This proved very tricky as I was just using one of the nose suckers that you get from the hospital when your baby is born.  But out of a dozen and half, I managed to get a dozen of them blown out.  The rest of them cracked in the process.  And then dyeing the eggs was more challenging for N too since the eggs weren't heavy enough to sink down, we had to hold them submerged in the dye.  But all in all they turned out well. 

Didn't take any pics of us dyeing the eggs, but here are a few pics of decorating with my two kiddos. 













Besides egg dyeing, we continued our Easter tree tradition with 42 days of ornaments to learn and celebrate the covenant God has made with us from Creation to Jesus' death and resurrection.  It was fun to see how much more N remember and understood this year.  Not only is it helpful for her, but it really helped me to prepare for Easter. 

Family pic from Easter Sunday after church (thanks iversohn!). 


After the kids naps, we went to my parents' house to have an egg hunt. This was T-Max's first year participating.  He was only about 5 months old last year.  (see last year's).  N was so great at letting T-Max find some.  She would purposely wait for him to find one that she had already spotted, and even encourage him to get it. 








T-Max LOVES my parents' neighbor's dog, Haley.  He will look out the window and call, "Haley!"



I love this shot Peter took.






It's so difficult to get both kiddos to smile at the same time, and our little girlie is WAY into silly faces...as you can see!








T-Max's mouth is oozy with M&M slobber.  He stuffed his mouth with goodies from the eggs. 



Silly faces!










Back in November, N and I planted some tulip and hyacinth bulbs in our front yard.  She had anxiously been waiting for them to bloom.  We enjoyed out hyacinths for a few weeks back in March, and finally our tulips bloomed.  And they all looked so beautiful.  Here they are:





Hope you had a great Easter too!  More Easter pics and other recent pics on flickr.