Proud moment for Addie!

This has been a long time coming and after lots of crying during hair brushing and talking about it, Addie asked that she get her hair cut. She and I have spent a good amount of time talking about kids with cancer who don't have any of their own hair and how we could give her cut hair to them. She really wanted to do that.

The before

Before

Could she be any prouder?

Getting her hair all ready to be ponytailed

She got her hair separated into four ponytails

And then the first cut started

And started...

And finally was all the way through!!!

After the cuts!!!

She loves having her new hair blown dried

The final do!

Checking herself out for the first time...

The back of it.

Soooo proud of herself. When she looked in the mirror for the first time, she said, like only my Addie could, "This is the real me. I was hiding behind my old hair."

I can't explain the sense of pride I feel for having Addie be my daughter on days like today. She's so generous and has a wonderful sense of wanting to help others. She just made my day.

And I can't even begin to explain how easy her new hair is to manage!! She took a bath tonight, washed her hair, I brushed it in 8 strokes and blew it dry. Easy peasy!

S-L-A-C-K-E-R

How do I explain my complete slackerness with regard to this poor blog? You, my loyal blog readers, must be on the verge of an outburst without having your daily-er, ok, sometimes weekly- blog stories of life in our household. All I can say is, life is busy. It's good. It's busy and good.
Some highlights from the past couple of weeks...
We have beautiful weather all weekend long, so we were outside all day both days. We needed that! The moonbounce made it's first appearance of 2010. Baby Claire (who poor thing, is always going to be called Baby Claire, even when she's 30) came up to our house for her first visit. Ben and Addie love her so much. She's so tiny and beautiful. Muddy even got a chance for some squeezes!
We had one trip to the Emergency Room in the past few weeks. Surprisingly, it was for me. Very long story short, I passed out, hit my head on the floor and ended up with a bad concussion. That was over a week ago and I'm still dealing with incredible neck pain and soreness. Not fun. I haven't been able to pick Addie or Ben up since then. All things considered, they are doing relatively well with understanding that I'm in a lot of pain. Although the night when I called home to tell them I was in the ER, Addie LOST it. She was hysterical and couldn't be calmed down. I'm pretty sure just about every depiction of hospital that she has seen involves someone dying, so it's hard for someone almost 5 to wrap her head around the concept that Mommy is at the hospital to get treatment and feel better.
Speaking of which, how is it possible that she is almost 5 years old??? Wasn't she just born? Didn't she just learn how to walk? She's full-on reading now. It's rare that she has a conversation where she sounds like a 5 year old. Just simply amazing.
Swim lessons are going well. They will both be in the Advanced Pike class one more six-week session. Their teacher told us last night that Addie is just on the cusp of being able to move up (has to be able to swim 1/2 the length of the pool unassisted, do front and back floats 1/2 the length). She felt that it was better to keep Addie and Ben together in the class one more time and hopefully move them both up together.

Surprise of a lifetime

The surprise lasted and we successfully shocked Addie and Ben by taking them to their first Broadway musical. Addie spent the whole show singing each word.

They were convinced we were going to a movie, until....

Meeting their cousin

Claire is two months old now, and therefore is able to meet her cousins for the first time. She's up to 8lbs 3 oz now! Here we are holding her at Rob and Erin's house yesterday. Claire slept through the whole visit, which is mighty impressive especially with my two quiet children...

Addie's smile couldn't get bigger

This is Ben holding Claire, just after kissing her forehead.

Ben LOVED to hold her little hands.

He was just so content to sit there and hold her. He really wanted to be able to pick her up and carry her around. I think we'll be spending lots of time with Ben taking care of her.

Water park pictures

Here are the pictures from the water park, via the not-too-shabby-underwater-cameras!

Addie happily turning the steering wheel to squirt some poor unsuspecting person.


Fantastic picture of Uncle Jeremy and Ben on the racing slides


Happy girl after sliding down one of the racers.


This is of Addie as she slid down the blue fully-enclosed tube slide.


This is Ben, as he was "taking a picture of Daddy." He didn't realize he was holding the camera facing the wrong way!


This is how my lovely children chose to spend a lot of their time, standing over the geysers, spraying directly onto their you-know-wheres. These will be bribe pictures later on in life. And as Addie said, "It makes me feel like I'm tooting." We're so proud.


This is my daughter, who until two months ago didn't like getting her head wet, standing directly in the path of the huge splash of water that a large buckets dumps every few minutes.


Onkteb in the lazy river


Ben standing on a geyser

Again, you get the picture.

I should note that just as we were leaving the second day I noticed that the life vests my kids were wearing were for infants!! Duh. Oh well!
Thanks to Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Amanda for the pictures!