Family Time

After a much anticipated arrival Lizzy's grandparents arrived! Lizzy loves spending time with them.

Lizzy's 5 Year Old Birthday Letter

Lizzy –

Your 5th Year – 5 times the Sun

Lizzy you are now 5 years old!

You go to preschool and have learned so much. You love learning things on your own. You can now count to a 100, read, write, and spell words, and add and subtract. Right now you especially love to spell and write words.  You will be starting kindergarten this year!

Your favorite foods are edamame, sushi, broccoli, watermelon, and strawberries. You like eating fruits and veggies of all kinds. Your favorite sweet treat is ice cream. You love to get ice cream from the ice cream man.

You like to play board games, pretend school, and color. You love going to the park and this year you learned to do the monkey bars on your own.  You love to swim in the pool and you can now float on your back and swim on your own for a short time.

Your favorite TV shows are Scooby Doo, My Little Pony, and Funniest Home Videos. Your favorite movie this year is Frozen. You still love to sing and your favorite songs are all from the movie Frozen. You love to sing Let it Go.

With mommy you like to spend time painting each other’s nails and playing My Little Pony during bath time. With daddy you like to watch Spider Man and color coloring books together.

You are very loved and you fill our lives with joyous sounds with your singing and stories everyday.

Happy Birthday!

Love,

Mommy and Daddy

Frozen Party!

Lizzy meets her favorite princesses Elsa and Anna. We cooled off in the snow they had in the parking lot and had snow cones on the first 100 degree weather day of the year here.

Duplo Blocks Activities

Lizzy hasn't been very interested in building with legos yet. She has tons of bricks but still she hardly plays with them. I was almost about to toss out the duplo blocks because she has so many legos and the duplos are for younger kids but I decided to see want else we could do with them. I went on pinterest and there are lots of free printables for the duplo blocks. We printed some color matching, counting, and pattern activities. Mostly because I can resuse these with the kids I work with but Lizzy really seemed to enjoy them and it's also been a big hit with the kids I work with so far.

Splash Pad and Park

First Swim at Home!

Easter 2014

For Easter this year Lizzy had lots of fun doing an egg hunt and party at school, an egg hunt in town, and another egg hunt at home. Lizzy met the Easter bunny and got a nice filled basket on Easter morning. We dyed eggs together and Lizzy put princess stickers on each egg. Lizzy learned of Jesus' resurrection by reading the Bible for Little Eyes and story telling with resurrection eggs. Later we enjoyed a cool dip in the pool and ended the day building the puzzle from all the puzzle pieces she found in her Easter eggs this year. A busy and eventful Easter.

Lizzy's 1st Pedicure

Lizzy has been doing very good with doing her chores. Lizzy now vacuums, cleans the sliding door window, picks up her toys, wipes down her bathroom sink, and her usual tasks like brushing her teeth and getting herself dressed on her own. As a reward she worked towards getting a pedicure. She saw an ad for kids pedicures in the mail and of course she wants to have one. Lizzy enjoyed it and mommy did too!

Hiking Hole in the Rock

We wanted to do an easy hike with Lizzy so we went to Papago Park in Phoenix and hiked to Hole-in-a-Rock.  It was just the right difficulty level hike for a almost 5 year old.

Day Trip to Sedona, AZ

We finally took a day trip to see Sedona, AZ. Lizzy's favorite part was getting her feet wet at slide rock and having homemade ice cream! It was the perfect day for Sedona!

After Chocolate Fondue

Happy St. Patricks's Day : )

Youtube Video Link 

Ladybugs

Last year around this same time we ordered the Lore Butterfly Garden kit and Lizzy got to see the butterfly life cycle then release the butterflies into her favorite park. This year we are doing the Lore Ladybug kit. We already got the ladybug larva in the mail and watched them go into the pupa stage and hatch into ladybug beetles! They all hatched and we have lots of little ladybugs! We have really enjoyed these kits and it's a great educational Springtime activity.

Strawberry Picking

Updates and Youtube

You may have noticed I haven't been posting as much to this blog lately. Honestly, I have been losing interest in posting here with other things going on in my life so I am starting to be more interested in started a vlog type channel on Youtube to share what we do. I enjoy watching Youtube videos and all the various vlogs on there. I know I posted a while back about Lizzy making cooking videos and I do have some to posted on youtube. You can find our channel here. For now I will keep this blog going by posting here and there. I hope to start vlogging and posting on Youtube more. I will link those videos to this blog as well so anyone who is interested in watching can easily find the videos.

Some Updates on what's been going on with us:

Lizzy is going to Kindergarten next school year. The schools in Arizona are so different than how Texas is. There are so many choices whereas in Texas everyone just went to the public school in their area here in Arizona there are charter schools for all kinds of interests, you can opt to go to any other school in any other district and their are waiting lists for most of the better schools. Luckily Lizzy has been accepted to our two top choices for schools and we are excited for her to start Kindergarten.

Lizzy and I went to Houston this week to visit family and had a great time. This is our first trip together without Mike (Someone has to stay home with the dogs).  So much has changed now that Lizzy is 4 almost 5 in May. I use to have to pack so much for her when we traveled and carry on snacks and toys but now anytime we go anywhere we just go. Just a carry on for us this trip.

Lizzy and I still do lots of fun activities together but she now helps come up with activities and ideas for the kids I go see for work. Lizzy is more into math, reading, and writing cursive right now. Lizzy goes to all my work events and is very helpful. This weekend she was in her first parade for my work!

We enjoyed watching the Olympics although Lizzy doesn't watch for too long. She likes talking about the countries the athletes are from and the flags. We found a place mat at Walmart that is a map of the world we look for the countries on. Lizzy likes figure skating in her socks so I think she enjoys figure skating the best.

We have been more active lately. Lizzy and I take walks most days through the trails in our neighborhood and go swimming when it's warm for exercise. I have been focusing more on my health which is another reason why I haven't posted as much but I am happy to report that I have lost over 30 pounds. I never thought I would be back to my pre pregnancy weight!

Well I hope you all will check out our vlogs where we can share more of what's going on with us. I just posted videos from our day at the dog park!