All our planning and waiting is over. Our Summer Sabbatical trip is finally here!
Girls are very excited for our trip to start as we walk to our gate.
We started thinking about this trip over 3 years ago. It took a while to figure out what we wanted to do since the girls are still fairly young, especially Katie. After seeing beautiful pictures my friend Tasha would send each summer while she was at the Cape with her children, we decided we wanted to include that somehow in our travel plans. But where else to go?
Our trip has finally shaped up to the following:
New York City - 5 days
Pennsylvania - 3 days
New Hampshire - 6 days
Boston - 3 days
Cape Cod - 7 days
Newark - 1 day
Total trip days gone - 28 days
Zoe and Katie so excited to fly!
Mimi and Sophia got to sit together for the 5 hours flight.
Katie fell asleep as we circled for 45 minutes waiting to land at Newark airport.
Zoe has been doing gymnastics since she was 3. She started on the Arizona Dynamics development team right after her 4th birthday. She moved up to the highest level development team in December of last year. she has amazed us how she is able to juggle practice at the gym 8 hours a week and her school work. She loves the sport. She is always doing handstands, bridge kickovers, and many other tricks all over the house and outside.
To introduce the girls to the competitions, they invite the level A development team to join the Level 2 team girls in three meets during the fall competition season. They started practicing their routines back in July for the first competitions in October. Until now they have only worked on individual skills, so to put them together into a routine and remember the sequence in more than one event certainly took some time. The floor routine was challenging for them to get their routine synced with the music. It was amazing to see the progress the girls made in such a short time.
Her first meet was the Rock-n-Roll Classic which was hosted by Arizona Dynamics. Zoe actually woke up not feeling well that morning. We encouraged her to still go since she didn't have a fever and she wanted to. By her last event (beam) she was getting wobbly and clearly wasn't feeling well. It was later that weekend she ended spending time in the hospital with a respiratory virus.
This morning we decided we better pick most of the apples from our apple tree. The temperatures are getting pretty high and it is a delicate balance of letting them get big and them getting fried by the heat. We planted the apple tree the week Zoe was born so it is now 5 years old. It produced so many apples this year we actually cut some off in April because the branches were getting so weighed down.
Zoe and Sophia had a blast helping John get them off the branches. Katie walked around holding a basket and throwing the 2 we gave her to play with. I am still not sure what we are going to do with all the apples.
We will probably eat some, make some pies, and freeze some.
Today was filled with family and hearts. We started the morning with heart shaped zucchini nut bread and strawberries. The girls thought that was pretty neat and devoured their breakfast.
We had heart-shaped pizza for dinner followed by heart-shaped cookies with Zoe's help. Dinner was accompanied with Modern Marvel's history of chocolate. Sophie was already in bed for this part of the evening but Zoe loved it. Even asked why the show was over.
Zoe and Sophia had fun putting together their valentine gifts to take to preschool with Mimi on Tuesday night while we were at our Bible study. They came home with valentines from all their friends at school yesterday. It was pretty cute opening each one and watching the girls get excited to find out what each person got them.
In October Zoe's preschool class got to take a field trip to the local grocery store to learn how they work.
While sitting in the tooth paste isle the children learned the rules of good teeth brushing . They got to visit the produce department and test some of the apples customers can buy.
Next they visited the "COLD" foods. Zoe got the see the packing area for all the dairy products and experience how chilly it is in there.
They stopped in the cereal isle and learned about sugar in cereals and how to make good choices for breakfast. In the meat department they were able to taste some lunchmeat and cheeses. They eneded the tour getting to play cashier and checkout a few items.
I think all the children had a good time. To view additional pictures visit our Flickr website here.
Today it is official - Katie can crawl. She has been up on her hands and knees and rocking for a while now. She has even moved backwards some, but today she figured out how to move forward. Zoe encouraged her a lot with her stuffed animals. She started not feeling well yesterday and didn't have a great night, so I was surprised to see her eager to play and move this afternoon. Zoe was so excited to see her crawling. She has been asking me just about since Katie was born if she could crawl yet. I absolutely love to watch my girls together and see how much they love each other.
Grandparents Day was this past weekend. Yesterday at preschool they invited the grandparents to come for a celebration with the children. Sophia's was first thing in the morning and Mimi went with her, while Zoe's was at the end of the class time. Papa Crowley and Mimi went to hers. I heard they had a good time.
John and I were out of town this weekend while Zoe and Sophia were with Mimi. We came home last night and Zoe started singing for us. It was so cute we decided to record it this morning so that all the grandparents can enjoy them. They both seemed a little camera shy, but loved doing it. Enjoy!
