It's time for Kindergarten!!!

How can it be that Madeline has now reached school age?  She has been so excited for this day.  In fact, on the day she turned 5 she asked, "Does this mean I get to go to Kindergarten tomorrow?"

Well, the long-awaited day finally arrived, and the school has done a great job of slowly integrating the Kinders.

The class list--they're going to have a great year!!

Open house day.  Madeline gets to see her classroom for the first time, meet her teacher and some of her classmates, and find out where she will sit!  She is so excited by all of it!

Aug 25 was the first day at the school.  The Kindergartener classes were each split into 3 groups and each group went to school for only an hour to allow for some focused time with just a few students and the teacher.  She was bummed she couldn't spend the whole day there, but at least she got a taste of school life!

The big day, Aug 26....all ready for her first full day of Kindergarten!!

They were given a project to bring in on their first day.  They were to decorate their name sign and bring it to school.  As Brian says, "She knocked it out of the park!"

One week until Kindergarten...

In other activities, I took the week off before school started to spend some extra time with Madeline.  She made a list of all the things she wanted to do.  I thought it would be long, but it ended up being quite doable!

The first thing we knocked off the list was making ice cream.  We went shopping for the ingredients and she decided to make peppermint with chocolate chips.  Olivia sat in her chair and cheered us on as we rolled the ice cream ball all over the back yard.  "Good job, guys!" she kept saying!

The finished product was quite tasty

Olivia really thought the hard work paid off!

We made multiple trips to the park, visited the Children's Museum, planted a new flower, did lots of baking and had a fun week.

Driving cars at the Children's Museum

Sisters in line...

Here are a few other fun things...

Olivia has decided that she wants to wear goggles just like Madeline and she cracks us up!

The Seattle cousins were in for the weekend and we enjoyed hanging out, BBQing and swimming on a hot summer day!

We also celebrated Sana's graduation with chocolate cake!!

Of of Olivia's new games is to stack her cups to make her "sand castle cake for my birthday." She then uses the binoculars to take pictures.

Blowing out the candles

Silly sisters

A leftover photo from the summer concerts in park.  We celebrated the last one with special popsicles from the ice cream truck!

A weekend in the desert

We took a weekend getaway to Palm Springs for some desert scenery and to experience the tram in Mount San Jacinto State Park.

Daddy and his girls at the vista on the way into Palm Springs

Picture of the girls didn't turn out nearly as well, especially since Olivia was literally trying to eat my hair!

One of the highlights of their trip was getting to sleep in the same bed!

Watching the Potty Song before bed

Not bad of Olivia and I, but Madeline seems to have spotted a bear in the distance!

View out the window

Madeline on the way up.  She wasn't quite as enthusiastic or brave on the way down.

View from the top looking down.  It was quite the tram!!

This trekker did fabulous on the hike and logged 5+ miles!!

Selfie!

Olivia did great in the backpack and decided to take this time to catch up on sleep!

A rare family photo

We rewarded ourselves with a treat when we got back into Palm Springs

Silly Ice Cream faces...Madeline's is intentional, Olivia's not so much!

What a fun weekend adventure!

My oh my, how these girls are growing!!

It seemed like just yesterday that we had a toddler and a baby and now all of the sudden, we have two big girls!  Here's a bit of what's been happening here this month.

Olivia loves watching her sister take swim lessons every week, and she loves the water, so we decided we'd try out swim lessons for her.  She had her first lessons on Wed and was super excited!

She did great for the first 2/3 of the class, but then she got sad and screamed for the remainder of the class.  I think she was tired and hungry.  We'll give it a few more tries and see how she does.

Here are a few pics from some park fun earlier in the month:

 Here they are having fun in our pool.  They have used it a lot this year.  Brian and Madeline go for a dip nearly every weekend.  Olivia and I are a bit more cold-blooded, but Olivia does love the water, just like her sister did at this age!

Olivia's "Brrr, I'm cold" face!

In other news, today is Madeline's last day of preschool and daycare.  How can it be that she will start Kindergarten in just 1 week?!?  She wanted to do something special for her teachers and decided that she was going to write a book for each of them.  They turned out so cute that I needed to scan them.  She received only minimal help and came up with the story lines all by herself!

Story #1: Me and Ms. Amanda (I did my best to let her write the stories in her own words, even though, I really wanted to correct her English!) :)

Story #2: Me and Ms. Tiffany  (You'll notice a bit of theme in the plot!) :)

Maybe she'll grow up to be an author one day!  I love her illustrations, the fairy is my favorite :)  Being the last day of preschool means that Brian and I get a huge raise today, as moving forward we'll only have 1 in full-time preschool/daycare!  Woot woot!!  We're celebrating by taking a little weekend getaway to Palm Springs.  I'll plan to post after our weekend mini-vacation!

My oh my, how I love my big girls!