We had two graduations, of sorts, this past week. On Monday, Sarah “graduated” from Mother Goose on the Loose story time at the library. I was kind of sad; we’ve loved the Mother Goose program ever since Anna was a baby. Sarah has really enjoyed it and learned so much. Anna and Sarah do many of the rhymes and stories and songs at home. I didn’t get any pictures, but we had a good last day; Sarah was happy the whole time and participated in everything and enjoyed herself. It was a good way to end. But even though we’ll miss it, it also means twice-weekly library trips will be reduced to once a week, which is nice!

Then yesterday Anna graduated from preschool. She’s had a great two years there, and this year she has made some sweet little friends as well. But again, though it’s the ending of something great, I’m looking forward to the next phase of our lives—homeschooling, which means not just “book learnin'” but all the activities and relationships that will enrich our lives. Here are some graduation day pics!

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Anna turned 5 today! She is such an amazing kid and a wonderful blessing to our family. She shows kindness and compassion to those around her and nurtures those who need care. She has an amazing mind and astounds us with what she has learned. She loves her family, and she shows so much love to Sarah that she has far exceeded our expectations of what a big sister could be. She is a joyful child and finds excitement in the most unexpected (to us) things. We love our Anna Elizabeth!

The birthday party went pretty smoothly, despite dreary weather driving us indoors instead of our original plan at the park. I was a little nervous about having 15 kids plus nearly as many adults in the house, but let me tell you, it was the quietest, calmest 5-year-old birthday party in the history of humanity. I guess sweet, quiet Anna is drawn to sweet, quiet friends! There weren’t even any crumbs on the floor after they ate their cake and snacks. It was uncanny. But they DID have fun, I think. We had a couple of games, a craft, the cake and presents, and they enjoyed just playing too.

Here are a few shots of 5-year-old Anna:

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We’re entering new territory with Anna—we’re starting to read some chapter books aloud to her right before naptime, and sometimes in the evenings. I thought we might get through a couple a month, but we finished FIVE in January. Since David or I need to read them first, we’re going to have a hard time staying ahead! It’s a bit of a challenge to find books written on that level that also have content appropriate for a not-quite-5-year-old. Many of the classic children’s favorites are, in my opinion, better suited for kids at least a couple of years older. Anna is loving it, though, and she’s SO ready.

In January, David read her The Boxcar Children and Surprise Island, and I read Helen Keller, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and The Courage of Sarah Noble. Up next? David started The Blue Bay Mystery with her today, and I will start Little Sioux Girl, a book I loved as a child and borrowed many times from the library. And I have a large stack and an even larger list of books to peruse for future read-aloud time. I’ll try to keep the blog updated with what we read!

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The girls and I managed a little trip to Tulsa for my youngest niece’s first birthday party this past weekend. The girls had fun playing with their cousins, I stayed sane (mostly due to the fact that my parents were there in the same hotel to help!), and overall we had a good weekend.

Anna and Addie are good buds!

Hopefully Kendall and Sarah will be too, when Sarah gets a little older. They’re only 6 months apart.

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Anna got to take the “Star Board” to school this week and be the class star! Every week a different child takes it home and brings it back filled with pictures and things. Then they get to tell their classmates all about the things on the board. Anna and I had fun picking out pictures that represented some of her favorite places, events, and moments.

I thought, since I need to blog more and all, I’d just post the pictures she chose. (Click “more” to see them all.)

Riding her bike (this was on her 4th birthday):

Reading to Sarah (she does this a lot and we all love it):

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… because that’s where the book bags were sitting after our trip to the library. That’s where the girls just plopped down and started looking at them. My, how these girls love books! And I’m so glad! We have a lot of good times reading together.

Anna is reading picture books and easy readers very well on her own. We read plenty of them to her as well, of couse. I’m about to start reading aloud some chapter books to her. Sarah still loves board books, but more and more she is reaching for “real” books to look at and be read to her. She’s pretty good about sitting through the whole thing, although sometimes it’s hard to get through it because she is so excitedly pointing out things on every page! But that’s wonderful as well.

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I imagine there comes a point in the life of every mother of a girl when she feels the urge to sew a dress for her daughter. And I suppose that every mother of more than one daughter wishes to put them in matching dresses at some point. While mine are still too young to balk at the idea of matching or at my sense of style (or lack thereof), I decided I’d better get on it.

Due to my self-imposed limitation of sewing only straight lines and right angles, I bought 2 matching t-shirts and made gathered skirts to attach to them, naturally turning what should have been a 2-hour project into an all-day affair. That is what I do best, after all.

They came out looking like dresses, so we’ll call this a success. Anna loves hers, and even though Sarah is in an “I’m going to freak out about trying on new clothes” phase, she got used to it, so I’ll take that as a compliment. :)

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Anna started 4-year-old preschool yesterday! She’s grown so much since last year!

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… and finally playing outside some! Whew! Fall is here, right? Ok, maybe not. But it’s possible to imagine it is when we can step outside in the evening and the temperature and humidity are not both still 98 half an hour before bedtime.

Here are the girls playing outside tonight on the tire swing and sandbox:

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I’m on a children’s literature kick. After reading the book Honey for a Child’s Heart, which I highly recommend to anyone with children, I am newly inspired to fill our home and our lives with good children’s books. I tend to go overboard with my inspirations, and I have an overwhelming desire to read every good book out there right now, forgetting that we have a lifetime ahead of us to enjoy them, and also forgetting that I need to cook dinner and do the laundry.

Lately I’ve been wanting to introduce more poetry to the girls, so I checked out Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses with illustrations by Tasha Tudor. (I intend to buy one, but I first wanted to peruse the library’s collection to see which version I liked best).

For a baby gift, Anna was given the CD A Child’s Garden of Songs, which is a selection of Stevenson’s poems put to music. I had planned to read Anna some of the poems from the book this morning. Well, as soon as I explained to her what the book was, she went and got her CD, read the titles off the back, searched for the same poems in the table of contents, found them by flipping through the book to the correct page number, and proceeded to read them aloud to her favorite baby doll, Charity, whom she had retrieved from her room just for this purpose. All by herself. She’s four, for crying out loud! I just stood there watching. Literature, rhyme and meter, art, reading, research skills, counting and number recognition, nurturing role-play—all happening at once. If that’s not education, I don’t know what is.

And I wondered what we’d do all summer while she was out of school.

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