Happy 8th Birthday Lilipop.

Wow, that was a lot of fun and to prove it I have photos!
Lily didn't want a party, she did want a sleepover and she is getting one just as soon as school is over and done with and once we are back from a quick birthday trip that we are taking to Orlando and the Treasure Coast.
Today she awoke bright and early, as if that is something new and we bebopped downstairs and Rosie could barely wait to give her a card that she had written all by herself. Lily was so happy with it and even more excited with a huge bag that Rosie gave her that was filled and I mean filled with Silly Band*s. Rosie kept telling her, "Happy Birfday" Lily" until Lily told her she could actually stop. Slowly but surely Lily opened her gifts and answered phone calls until we finally asked her if she had received anything from us. She said that she had received a card and love. We than asked if she had opened a gift from us and she looked perplexed. We told her that we always buy her a gift and hadn't she said she wanted something in particular. After all this prompting she said she had asked for a new bike. We asked her to find it and that we would give her hints. Man this was fun cos it was up the street at a friends house...ha ha ha!
She wondered around the house with us telling her she was either warm, hot or cold depending on her location. Finally she got to the front door and we screamed, HOT. She ran outside and ran to the bike shed but all she saw was her old bike. She ran to our cars and so on and so on until finally she started to walk up the side walk and figured it out. (BTW do you have any idea how hard it is to find a girls bike in blue? No you don't? Well I am here to tell you it is flipping hard! She wanted a blue bike and we were not going to stop until we found it for her but Jacob was getting quite tired of the shopping...I will leave it at that.)

Lily and her bike.



It's not Lily's fault that her birthday falls in the summer or that the temperature today was 93 degrees with a feels like temp of 112 (according to accuWeather.com) or that I have had a migraine now for 6 days so her and I went out for a ride ( so help me G0d I thought I was gonna die). Thankfully after about 20 minutes it started to thunder so we had to race home. She loves her new bike and can really go fast on it. So now I have a biking buddy, so long as Rosie isn't with us on her organ grinders monkey's bike. After lots of fluids and a quick shower it was off to Jakie's house to meet her new puppy and celebrate with her for a while.





We left Jakie's and took Lily to Samurai for dinner. She chose the restaurant and we thought it was a great choice. It is owned by Benihan*a so we knew she would love it and we also knew she would love it more when she saw her BFF's there. Hollis and the girls were meeting us there. As Hollis put it, we are family and we have to celebrate our kids birthdays together. Lily did a double take when she saw them, it was great. Since we were 9 we had the whole table to ourselves and our chef was really great he truly entertained the kidlets, us too for that matter. The girls were mesmerized and laughed and giggled on cue at all of his tricks. I have never been a big fan of Benihan*a I think all the food tastes the same but samurai was fabulous and we were all really happy with it.

BFF.

Onion Volcano
Flipping a shrimp into his hat. He flipped 'em all over the place.
Hmmmm.


Birthdays are not complete without cake and ice cream so we came back here and let them eat cake. Lily made her cake this year with minimal help from me. It turned out really well and she loved it.


Happy, wonderful, fun loving girls.



Lily had a great day but I think that is quite obvious from her smile. Thank you to everyone that made it so special, she really felt the love.
Happy birthday Lilipop.

Eight.

Tomorrow Lily will turn 8. It seems awfully big to me. It means she will enter 3rd grade when she returns to school in the fall. It means that even more of her baby teeth will fall out of her cute little mouth. It means that she will grow even more independent. It means that she will lose just a little bit more of her innocence, yet not too much as she is only 8. It means lots more questions from her that will result in her having fits of giggles as she finds out what "that" word really means.

It means she is growing up and as much as I find that so very very hard I just love this little girl so much and love to see the person she is becoming.

She keeps telling us that she wants to move and I really hope that this year will be the year it happens. I would like nothing more than for her to get into a different school district and be closer to her friends. She is becoming such an accomplished rider that she knocks my socks off with her talents. She can be bossy with Rosie but for the most part she is very protective and sweet. When we are out she naturally plays the role of protector to her. She loves to read and reads way beyond her grade level. I swear if she could figure out how to read in her sleep she would. Suddenly her art has taken on a mind of it's own and she can draw everything and anything. She was asked to join the school art team and loved every minute of it.

It is a rare moment to find Lily with a sad face. She is smiley 90% of the time and this has been the case since she was very young.

You cannot pull the wool over her eyes for anything. This kid needs the truth and the facts. So long as things are told to her in an age appropriate manner she can handle anything but if you try and sugarcoat something for her you had better watch out. She knows exactly what she wants and nothing will change her mind. She has many perfectionist qualities and they can drive an onlooker insane.

Most of all she is an all round kind sweet person with a heart of gold. She doesn't "get" mean people and can't figure out why anyone does anything unkind. (hope she stays this way) If someone is sad she is usually the first on the scene.

Lily you are amazing and we love you so very much. I hope that being 8 is everything you dreamed it would be and more.
I love you with all my heart and then some.
Mummy.
xoxoxoxox.

Very Well Hydrated.

We have been in the pool A.L.L. T.H.E T.I.M.E. I have so many pool photos that it is ridiculous, in fact I haven't even bothered to download most of them. I have them on every single camera that we own including the underwater one. I have photos of the kids in our pool, Jens pool, the other Jen's pool, Hollis' pool and Jakie's pool and they haven't even got out of school yet. This is going to be a wet summer.
Rosie is swimming like a champ and is now trying to conquer swimming with her noggin above the water. She insists on wearing goggles but never quite has them tight enough so is always peering through a puddle of water. She has no fear but does have respect, thank goodness.
On Saturday we went over to Jakie's house and she had this sudden desire to remove the screen enclosure around her pool and set right to it. Lily helped her and as they ripped the screening loose Lily would swing on it until it came down and would splash into the pool. We worked for hours and I just hope she doesn't regret it.

Ripping the screening



After all the hard work


What Rosie did while Lily worked


Once all the work was done Jakie, her daughter Carolina and I all played Hula hoops but I had the camera ~snort



We had so much fun and laughed like kids.

Summer's Here.

The weather is getting hotter and hotter and not gradually but in big, huge lumps every single day. The good news however, the pool water is warm enough for swimming. Once the girls realised this there has been no stopping them and they spent the whole day in the pool on Saturday and then woke up bright and early on Sunday so that we could go and spend the day with Hollis and her girls and spend some more time in the pool. Once school gets out I have a feeling you will find me poolside, daily.
As always a fabbie time was spent with the girls laughing and carrying on. Such a great friendship has developed here and it is all thanks to Hollis' youngest daughter Trevi (more on that in a separate post coming soon.)

Pool fun.

These Girls They Are A Changing

Stop the clocks...PUHLEASE.

It is happening in a blink of an eye. My girls are growing up so fast. Lily is losing teeth on a weekly basis and her face looks so very different now. Her perfect little white baby teeth that were all lined up like tiny soldiers are moving around as her jaw grows and she is getting huge gaps between her teeth and then of course the inevitable happens and one starts to wiggle. The wiggle is aided by an excited little girl and before we know it there is a gap as the tooth falls out. Her smile is funny now as she has lots of gaps and spaces and new little "icecaps" of teeth breaking through her gum line.

She is also getting quite tall and very strong. The other night after her bath she wanted to see if she could pick me up. I stood perfectly still knowing full well that there was no way she would be able to when all of a sudden I was lifted about 6 inches off of the floor. I was in complete shock to think that Lily could pick me up so easily. Admittedly I am not very big nor very heavy but still......the nerve of the child. LOL

She is very into Silly Band*z. This is the first craze she has ever been involved in. (for those of you that don't know what they are they are rubber bands in silly shapes and you wear them as bracelets. They have trading values and all the kids are wearing them)


They are like hotcakes and very hard to find. I have been seeing them in the oddest places and always pick them up when I do and keep them stashed away. A great week at school and she gets a trip to Mummy's prize patrol and always picks Silly Ban*dz. Rosie wears them too because what Lily does, Rosie must do too.

For the first time ever Lily has had a brain challenged in Math. She could not get her head around multiplication tables. I found this very odd as I taught them to her when she was 4 and she had no problem but now she has a mental block and it was making us both crazy. I didn't show her that it was making me crazy and just kept plodding along and trying different techniques. Finally it clicked. Not sure what happened but I was getting ready to take her to Aunt Pammies house for a few hours cos that woman can teach math to a stone!

Both girls are so excited to go to to England for the summer. We have a lot of plans over there this year. A bloggy bash, meeting with my cousins that I haven't seen since I was 10, and of course all the normal friends and family fun. I think we need at least a month. ( now British Airways needs to get it's game face on and quit mucking about)

Rosie is also growing and changing. The growing is not quite as noticeable cos it is after all Rosie that I am speaking of. She now calls herself a big girl because only baby's wear diapers. She is dry all the time but still wears a diaper at night even though she never pee's in it. A couple of days ago she asked to take it off so I did....very happily. I heard her use the toilet and then a few minutes later I heard her again and this pattern continued until she finally came downstairs and announced in a somewhat flabbergasted tone that she needed a diaper as she could not sleep. I have tried to get her to wear pull ups at night but she thinks they are swimming diapers and flatly refuses, stating that she is going to bed not to the pool. If nothing else this kid is a hoot.

She has finished her Alphabet Soup class and is now raring to start school in September. She talks non stop about needing her lunch box and getting new shoes, just like lily.

She no longer calls Lily, "Big Lily". It is a bit sad as I thought it was the sweetest thing. I suppose now that she too is a big girl she doesn't have to.

She still cannot say "almost" she says "oafter" so when we are almost there or she is almost done she is "oafter there or oafter done. Cracks us up. Washcloths escape her too they remain "lofjoffs". Funny little Peanut. Other than that her speech is pretty much sorted.

Her demons have been sleeping lately! Amen to that. Not sure what all the summer plans will do to that but again we will just work through it. I hope everyone understands that when I say NO, it is for a reason.

The biggest change in Rosie is this; orange is no longer her favourite colour. You could have knocked me over with a feather when we were out shopping a couple of weeks ago and she chose yellow over orange. I stood back and let her choose and she made her decision. I thought it was a one off thing but it isn't she is now very into yellow with orange falling into second place. Yellow is a much easier colour to find. Now if she would just stop calling it blue we would be golden! (wait, maybe she is colour blind like me and really thinks it is blue, or maybe it is blue and only I think it is yellow)

Both of the girls are loving the fact that the pool is finally warm enough to swim in so that is where we are heading today. I have 2 little fishies and in this weather I am so thankful for that. Rosie is swimming better and better by the day. I had a very disturbing conversation with a surgeon from childrens hospital the other day regarding the lessons given to children to teach them to roll onto their backs and float when they fall into the water, I'm not talking about swimming lessons but survival lessons. Apparently they don't work when the kids just fall into a body of water and are surprised by it. Many of the kids that drown or nearly drown that arrive at the hospital have had these lessons. Don't let your guard down and think for one minute your child is protected because you have done this for them. The element of surprise takes over and they forget what they are meant to do. ( end of public service announcement. )

So when you see me please don't tell me how big the girls are getting because I am painfully aware of it. I don't need you to remind me. My babies are growing up much to fast and there isn't anything I can do about it. I love the changes and embrace all the new things that they learn, just don't find it necessary to tell me K.
Have a wonderful Sunday.

Feeding The Fish

I was going to call this a post for Grandpa but I am not actually sure that my father even looks at the blog anymore but I hope he does because he will love this post.

We had plans for today but they got all messed up what with one thing and another so we quickly made a picnic, jumped into the car and headed south to Islamorada in the Florida Keys. It really isn't very far and as long as there aren't any traffic snarls we can get there lickety split. We decided not to tell the girls what we were doing since every plan we had made for this weekend had blown up in our faces and each time they were really disappointed. Just the idea of having food in the car makes them really giddy and this time we added the DVD players to the mix so pretty much they were ecstatic.

We had been to Robbies when Lily was 3-ish and it was just a dock and little more but now we pulled up the car to the sounds of a steel band and lots of little market stalls etc. The place has grown for better or worse depends on what you like I suppose. we paid our $1 entrance fee per person and the chap let the kids in free and we headed towards the dock. We asked Lily to read the sign that explained that she must NOT put her hands in the water as the tarpon DO bite and that she must NOT hand feed the pelicans as they Do bite etc etc. Jacob struck up a conversation with one of the owners and he offered Jacob a pole to attach the under water camera to so that he could capture the tarpons feeding frenzy from a different vantage point. Needless to say Jacob was in heaven doing this and one of the fish even bit the pole. Rosie was terrified of the whole scene and needed to be carried. After a few moments I explained that the huge pelicans were very sweet birds and the enormous fish were just hungry and wanted the fish that we had in our bucket and that nothing could hurt her so she decided to suck it up a tiny bit...not a lot though at this point. After taking a few photos Rosie watched Lily and Jacob feed the fish from the comfort zone of my arms and finally decided to get down and investigate things for herself. Before we knew it she was chucking the fish wildly into the water and having a fine time of it. As each bucket would run out of fish she would yell for more. When it was time to leave she was the one who begrudged the idea the most!
We had a fantastic time doing something so simple and the girls are already begging to go back again.

Rosie clinging to Jacob still rather unsure of it all. Lily however was loving it.



Rosie getting looser.

Looky I'm holding a shark, That is what she called them and who was I to correct her. I was just glad she was having fun.

Feeding frenzy

I have no idea what she is doing??
Want some fish bones Lil'? EEEEEWWWW, No way Daddy.




Heron looking so regal and the sign behind her reads, Islamorada Queen!

Pelicans Birdnapping a boat
All that fun is exhausting I tell ya'.

Chef Lily.

This post is bought to you by Chef Lily. Actually it is bought to you by me but is about the fabulous dinner prepared by Chef Lily.

I cashed in my very first Mothers Day coupon last night and went straight for the big one: making dinner. When I first handed it over Lily got a little wriggly and just didn't really know what to do so I told her to look in the fridge and in the cupboards and asked her if there was anything there that she thought she could use. Within minutes she had decided she was going to make toasted cheese sandwiches with clam chowder and raw veggies on the side. Once the decision was made she set to work and I manned the camera. Rosie ran around the island yelling, "the kitchen's on fire" not very helpful but awfully funny.

Lily would not let me help her at all even with the sharp knife that she used to slice the cheese. I hovered around feeling quite useless as she did an amazing job. She flitted from the stove to the island, stirring her soup, slicing tomato's, cutting cheese, toasting bread, arranging raw veggies into little dishes, getting dresses for dips and even set the table and placed a candle on it. Oh wait, I was allowed to light the candle since I was not going to let her do that! I was given a lovely cold glass of milk to drink and I think it complimented my food perfectly.

She pulled it all off and was really pleased with herself, as she should have been. Even Rosie who is an extremely fussy eater complimented the chef at least 10 times. I enjoyed every single bite and could not believe that such a wonderful feast had been prepared by a 7 year old. Lily and I love toasted cheese sammies as opposed to grilled cheese ones and these were superb in my opinion as she loaded them with sliced tomato.

Thank you Lily for a really fabulous dinner, I enjoyed every single morsel and I think you are a wonderful chef.

It's A Simple Thing

A girl and the love of horses. Marquesa was the first horse Lily ever rode at the stables and she has loved her ever since. She never rides her anymore because Marquesa is a beginner level horse and Lily is now in advanced classes but the love and trust has not faded. This evening Gema just picked Lily up and placed her on her bare back. As you can see Lily was in heaven.

Cashing In My Mothers Day Gifts

Lily took great pride this year in making me my gifts for Mothers day and her teachers really did put some thought into them. By far my favourite is a little coupon book that she put together containing 9 coupons for various things.


6 of the coupons are already filled out and 3 of them are blank so that I can choose what I want them for. She could choose as many or as few as she wanted so she chose all of them. Sweet girl.

This is my favourite:


Some of the others include: vacuuming one room, washing the dishes, breakfast in bed, a car wash and a batch of cookies.

This one however is going to be a real challenge and I cannot wait to cash it in and see what she pulls off! She already told me that she has some ideas. She is a smart kid so I think I will do it soon just to see how she handles the situation because if nothing else it will be a whole lot of fun.

I'll let you know what we have and how it goes.

The blank ones will be used for lots of hugs and kisses cos I can never get enough of those and since the kid looks like she'll be working like a slave I think a reward will rather nice for her too.

Oh, and on the back she even wrote an expiration date! I have to use them before December 24th 2010.

Mothers Day

Thank you girls for making this a day that no longer makes me cringe, no longer makes me wonder why me, no longer makes me cry, no longer makes me wonder if I will ever hold a child in my arms and understand the love of a Mother. You have both bought me such happiness and filled my heart with a love that I sometimes think goes beyond human measure.

I understand now why it took so long because this is just how it was supposed to be. You 2 and us. The perfect family. We go together like bread and butter, toast and jam, because you are my heartbeats. You are the chocolate in my life and without you I would not be.

I do find it strange that society dictates that we need a day to honour our parents because I truly believe that every single day is Mothers Day. I revel in both of you. Sometimes we have bad days and I mess up and handle things really terribly but those days are rare. We have fun and can make lemonade out of the worst lemons. We have adventures out of the every day mundane stuff but that is how we do things. Going to the grocery store makes us laugh our goofy heads off.

I love you both and thank you for all the little things. Thank you for making Mothers Day something that we all celebrate together as a family.

Look over your shoulder.....I'll be there.

Mummy.

Self Expression

This morning Rosie wanted to do some painting and all I had on my agenda to do was clean the house so I set up her easel and let her paint her little heart out. As I cleaned she painted and painted and trod in it and walked around to find me. She walked some more and painted her hands and touched the cupboards and touched the chairs, she climbed on the step stool to wash her hands and painted the sink and everywhere in between. She had such fun and I ended up with a REALLY clean house. A win win situation.

These photos were taken when she first started, before things got really messy and the paint got spread hither and "throw". I realised after I cleaned up the footprints and the hand prints that they would have been much better photos. The green paint one inch think up to her armpits would have been better fodder than these but at the time I just forgot all about the camera.