Spring spring spring!

What a beautiful weekend.  Both days were fabulous outside, and it just makes me feel good to finally have the dreary, rainy, cold April overwith.  Bring on MAY!! but not necessarily the 31st birthday. I'm okay without that...

Emily konked out pretty easily for bed tonight - we've had a crazy week, and weekend!! Wednesday, I took her (and Audrey) to Cici's pizza because her class was having a field trip there and she was sooooo excited about it.  Thursday, the Iowa Cubs mascot showed up to her preschool, and although Emily is generally pretty scared of giant mascots, it turns out that "after all, I like Cubbie Bear!!"  Friday was a picnic lunch for the preschoolers, but we had our picnic lunch with Megan instead.  We went up to Ames in the morning to pick her up, and ate at a park in Ankeny on the way back to Des Moines for Emily's first ever SLEEPOVER. Can she really be old enough for that??  The great thing about a sleepover with girls this young is that they were so excited that they completely wore themselves out and were asleep by 8:30, without any reminders to quit giggling in their beds.  Amazing.  However, at 5:50 AM, the lights were flipped on in her room by little girls looking for a misplaced stuffed cat, and I highly doubt they went back to sleep after that.  It was a really great weekend, and Emily is ready to have Megan stay over again tomorrow night. :)

It was pretty fun to see how Emily interacts with her class.  Her teachers have to overemphasize some things to get all the kids to pay attention, and it's a little bit paralyzing for Emily.  You would be hard pressed to pick her out as the youngest of the bunch, though, which was reassuring for me to see.  I also liked seeing how much her teachers really like her, and like Audrey, who was confused to see them there but enjoyed being passed around to different people. 

I suppose I'm going to sound like That Mom again, but I would swear that I've heard Audrey singing, really singing.  Yesterday I thought I heard her matching pitch with one of her toys singing Old McDonald, but wrote it off as coincidence.  Tonight, though, I was holding her while I was one-handedly perparing supper, and I distinctly heard her sing the first two lines of  twinkle, twinkle.  I swear I did.  When I looked at her and asked her if she was singing, she did her little nod.  Now, the nodding is adorable and generally I think she really is answering what i've asked her, but her answer is yes to probably 90% of the time, so there's that disclaimer.  Anyway, she refused to do it again when i asked her to sing more, but i heard more of it later when she thought I wasn't listening. What a stinker!  :)  And I think I heard her chiming in with Megan and Emily yesterday, when I asked them to sing two songs while they were waiting for me to get ready to go ride bikes with them.  They were so sweet, just looking at each other and singing together - it was beautiful.  Even poetry, or lines from books that Audrey knows, will cause her to pause and calm down.  If she's freaking out, I just calmly start in, "In the great green room, there was a telephone..." and by the time I get to three little bears sitting on chairs, I've got her rapt attention.  Pretty handy!  what an expressive, beautiful little thing she is!

And, oh yes, the bike!!  Emily now has a Bike With Pedals!  Travis found it on Craigslist for $10, and went all the way to Waukee one night after the girls were asleep to get it.  It's perfect - it's hot pink and has training wheels, streamers on the handlebars and decals of ponies all over it. He hid it in the basement because the next morning he flew to North Carolina for work.  He was back the next day, but she managed to find it while we were down there doing laundry.  I felt SO bad, because Travis wanted to surprise her with it, but she was certainly surprised anyway.  I got such a kick out of her telling Travis on the phone about what she had found, and that it was pink with pedals and "There are flowers on the... on the... where you put your bottom!"  and the whole time while she was thinking of the words, she was patting her little backside.  So cute!!  Anyway, I think when she finally got to take it out to ride on Friday afternoon, she was a bit disillusioned that it was so much harder to pedal than she was anticipating.  But she's a trooper - she was determined to figure it out!  We took her and Megan (on Emily's balance bike) and Audrey (in the wagon) down to the church parking lot so she could have some room to not worry about traffic or falling off the sidewalk or rolling down a hill too quickly.  It was one of those moments for me where I just couldn't believe how fast this little family is growing up.  Pictures on picasa, of course.

Emily had Travis and me in stitches tonight.  Trav has told the story about the guy who we hired to fix our basement, that was probably 80 years old and scolded us for not having a handrail.  He told us (twice) a horrible story about a woman who fell down the stairs on christmas eve and died, so he makes sure everybody has a handrail now, in his deep voice saying, "Gotta have a handrail!"  So tonight, when Emily saw Travis coming up the basement stairs, was going on in her little voice, yak yak yak yak, "I told you," then as low as she could, "You gotta have a handrail!"  Writing it down makes it sound kind of lame but it was absolutely side-splitting to hear. 

I wish, wish that I could think of everything I want to record when I sit down to blog. These girls do adorable things all the time, and sometimes I manage to get a FB post about it but mostly I just laugh and try to enjoy the moments as best I can. I gave the girls a little dish of ice cream after supper tonight, and later, I looked up to find them both holding their dishes up, drinking the last few drops.  One pink bowl, one purple.  I wish I could upload that mental picture!!