First Communion

Photos from Jaybird's First Communion:

Jaybird in the backyard, before heading off to Mass!

Note the leaves barely budding on the apple tree.  It's been a long winter.

The first communion children get to be hospitality ministers.  J's passing out programs.

Second row from bottom, far right!

Jaybird and her good friend shared a first communion day!

There were more children receiving first communion--this is just from the 8:30am mass.

Jaybird and Fr. Jim, our pastor at Saint Mary's Parish.

A rare picture of the family, beside the church parking lot.  Thanks Mary F!

J made the cake, Mom made the icing.

We had a picnic that afternoon with pizza and watermelon (J's choice).  Grandma, Laurie, and Mary were there too.

It's always exciting when Grandma can visit!

Happy day! Or: How can I keep from swinging?  (cue groan)

It was a lovely day for Jaybird and those who love her.

Sisters

Julia's new haircut

To me, it looks like she is off to high school.  Wow.

The late January update

While the weather encourages hibernation (at least to us Southern transplants), we never stop.  A few things going on of note:

Bear got third place in individual and group kata at his first karate tournament!

Really, he's happier than he looks.

He also did an internship (more like job shadowing) for two days as a required project at his school for 7th and 8th graders. So his internship--at his instigation--was to shadow theology professors. My colleagues were very kind (he couldn't do it with me per se) and he really enjoyed it. He liked the college classes and mentioned he thought he could do the work. ;) He also interviewed a priest at our seminary on campus and the Dean of Campus Ministry. Last I heard, he wants to major in Theology, and double minor in Math and Communications. That's...creative....I guess we'll see.


 Mouse is a cupcake baker!

She got some cupcake tins and a decorating kit for Christmas and we have had quite a bit of cake since. Good cake too! This mixes in with a cupcake recipe book and a series of girls books on a group of friends who make cupcakes for fun and money. Her first cupcakes were pineapple upside down cupcakes. Yum.

Jubilee Girl got a haircut! Pictures coming soon!

The Music Man has all kinds of things going on...more at the Adopting Alex blog!

Sporting Rachelle's knit hat!

Mudpuppy is three and bored. Well, not all the time, but he is a bundle of energy and taking it out on our living room. Yikes. Beyond that, he showed us he is learning to read. He began picking out words and reading them, and pointing to letters and doing the appropriate sound. He isn't full blown reading, but clearly he realizes that those words mean something, and he is determined to figure out what.

Matthew sporting his knit hat from Rachelle!

Finally, we had a great visit from Joanna and her family. Joanna is a person we had only met online but extensively that way!)--a young woman who made it her mission to get the Music Man a family. She and her family live in Canada and were in MN visiting relatives--and swung a little south to meet us. We had such a pleasant visit! And we were thrilled that Joanna got to meet Music Man, and he got to meet her.

Joanna and Alex.

We'll try to get more cute stuff up soon. Its all crazy around here, but there is an abundance of cute too....

Starling

Horse camp

Yeah, we've been away from Gracewatch for a while...something about an adoption or something....

Anyway, catching up on our backlog...some pictures and videos of the girls at horse camp, one of the highlights of their summer.

And BTW, the first day of school today went great--smiles and good reports all around.

The girls' birthdays

The girls celebrated their birthdays over the weekend...with Jubilee Girl turning seven and Mouse turning ten. Since their birthdays are so close together, we usually combine the celebration, with separate cakes.

Jubilee Girl is smiling because this birthday cake was preceeded with "ral" pizza from Godfather's.
("Real" in her opinion...!)

Mouse received a new scooter from her grandparents, while Jubilee Girl got a new
(much-needed) bike from mom and dad. We got each girl a bell for their handlebars,
so now they can go up and down the sidewalk together ringing their bells. They are
also showing off new purses they received from their grandparents; they have been
taking those things everywhere!

Mouse had wanted a dollhouse she could paint and decorate. This corrugated
cardboard one was perfect...she has spent hours constructing the little cardboard furniture,
as well as making her own accessories (tissue-paper bedspreads and pillows, a toybox made
from a matchbox). She spent a few more hours this afternoon painting the various rooms
with a friend.

On the afternoon of her birthday, Mouse wanted to paint a mural on a wall.
We set her up with paint in the garage. She painted the whole wall under the stairs
white as a preparatory step to painting the mural.

Jaybird: Annoyed at not being part of the family before her birth

Where has Gracewatch been lately??? I have all sorts of wonderful video/photos and stories to tell, and so little time to tell them! All I can say is that lately my kid-free time has been limited to MAYBE an hour in the afternoon and an hour after bedtime...which gets sucked up into other things, like doing our taxes! I promise I will catch up soon.

Having said that, I couldn't let this one wait.

So...we can generally expect a fit/tantrum from Jaybird about once a day, usually after school when she is "done" in terms of her energy for being good (they have gotten less frequent and less severe over time). It's hard to know what will trigger these. Yesterday, it was dehorning paste. Yeah, I don't know what it is either, but it was in a bedtime story we read ("Betsy's Up-and-Down Year"), and she found it VERY UPSETTING.

Today she was looking through our 2004 family journal; after half an hour, she came stomping into the kitchen with a scowl on her face. "WELL. How can this be a FAMILY journal when I AM NOT EVEN IN IT???"

"Oh, this is from 2004, honey...you weren't born yet."

"Well, couldn't I have even been in mama's womb???"

"Uh, no, not yet."

"You mean...YOU DIDN'T EVEN KNOW ME???"

"Nope. We don't know you were going to come along."

Slight pause. Then: "Waaaaaaahhhhhhhh!" And Jaybird exits the kitchen, hysterical at the thought of her non-existence in our lives....

....only to re-enter fifteen minutes later, dropping the family journal open-faced on the table and folding her arms across her chest, still scowling.

"I would like you to read this page, please."

So I take a look. Turns out she had drawn a picture of the whole family...including herself...and inserted it into the sleeve for the first page of the journal.

I have not laughed so hard in many, many, many days. I am still laughing. And I suspect I will be laughing over this for many years to come.

And yes, Jaybord, your picture will stay exactly where it is. : )

Don't Let the Jaybird Stay Up Late

True story!

Found this book completely covering this sleeping child's face. I pulled the book down a little for the sake of the picture, which wouldn't have looked half as good if it had just been a book in a bed. : )

First haircut

Mudpuppy had his first haircut today...long overdue. Jaybird went first, so he could see that there was nothing to be afraid of. Here's how it went:

And here is how the girls look with their new, shorter hair...prompted in part by their desire to avoid all the tangles and hassle of brushing out long hair:

Aren't they cute?

"Amazing Grace"

Lately the kids have been singing "Amazing Grace" to Mudpupp -- don't ask me how this started, I'm sure I have no idea. In any case, he really likes it, and demands that they sing by repeating, "Song! Song!" until they do.

Stranger still, he has started learning the song himself. A few times now, he's sung the entire first verse all the way through -- although only when we're not paying direct attention. If we ask him to sing, he just looks at us silently, smiling. His pronunciation lacks a great deal, but he gets the basic shape of the words, as well as the melody: "Amazin' 'ace, sweet ah sound, ah save ah wretch lie me!" and so on, all the way down to: "...was los', now ah see!" It gave me goosebumps the first time he did it -- while I was changing him!

Mudpuppy likes to swing on the big-kid swings

Picking pumpkins last weekend - he was a little intimidated
at first by all the pumpkins, but enjoyed seeing a real cat
close up.

Helping with the pizza dough. He believes in being VERY liberal
with the spices!

Mouse and Jaybird carving their own pumpkins. Bear is
"too old" for such things.

Grandma hanging out with the kids on a sunny fall day by the lake.

This afternoon we were prepping the kids for our All Saints party at church -- Bear went as Paul Miki, Mouse as Elizabeth of Portugal, and Jaybird as J8ulia Billiart. We helped them find symbols of their saints to use as hints in the "guess the saint" game. At one point, I asked Jaybird to pick something up in the bathroom, and as she did, she cheerfully said, "Well, I am going to be a saint someday."

"You think so, huh?"

"Yeah, 'cause a saint is just someone who loves God a real lot and is dead. And I think I will love God a real lot when I am grown up!"

That's the hard part, isn't it -- the loving. The dead part, not so much.

A magnificent fall

This autumn has been pretty magnificent, if you ignore the rather cold and dreary weeks we had in the middle of September. Some highlights:

This afternoon we got out and raked leaves. It's a bit weird to be throwing
leaves into the compost while we're still harvesting basil and tomatoes,
but there you go.

The littlest kids enjoy being pulled to the compost pile in back. Their job is
to keep the leaves from blowing away en route. Jaybird is ready to roll in
the wheelbarrow (background); she enjoys being dumped in the growing
pile of leaves at the end.

Here's where all those leaves come from. They glow on the trees on sunny days.

Every noon, before his nap, Mudpuppy insists on going on a walk by the lake.
This is his favorite park bench (actually a bench swing).

We've taken quite a few fall color walks as a family lately. Last weekend,
we walked along the creek at Moyer Park in Bloomington. Here's Jaybird.

"Uncle Andy" on the same walk.

And the kids on a walk in the bluffs the week before that.

And today we went to the Bluffview Fall Festival, which was held on a farm.
See Jaybird (Dalmation cape) on the hayride?

Meanwhile, the older kids spent most of the time jumping around the haystacks
piled up to the rafters in the barn.

And besides the fall color, we've also been enjoying a profusion of Morning Glories--finally!