Little Swimmers

Between swimming at camp, beach weekends and trips to the private club on Braeburn, these girls have been in the water nearly every day this summer!  Addy is now an amazing swimmer and Ella can go anywhere as long as she has her noodle. 

Happy Birthday Granny

This blog posting is very belated, but the birthday celebration wasn't!  We had a great time celebrating Granny's 90th with her. What a special night!

Happy Father's Day

Kitchen Progress

Hard to believe that this time next week they will like be covering the walls up and we'll be close to ready for cabinets to go in. Lots of progress.  Unfortunately, I think that most of the budget is going towards things we will never see, but you'll have to trust us that we have some lovely new plumbing and electrical wiring. 

Here are some pictures of before demo and I stood in the same position and took pics tonight.  I think it is going to look really different tomorrow because a lot of the walls studs you still see are going to be gone.  Gonna look a little different - yippee!!

 View 1 Before 

 View 1 Tonight

 View 2 Before

View 2 Tonight

In The Ocean

Ella went from not wanting to put a toe in the water to this...

I think that this picture pretty much sums up the girls' relationship - sisterly love!

Kitchen Remodel Lesson Week 1

Kids dinners must be prepared on tall counters. I've been using the table to prepare dinner plates...no bueno, I can't keep the kids from eating before everything is ready. Yesterday they were done eating and were asking for dessert before Michael and I had even taken one bite of our dinner.

Kolter Kinder Awards

Where did the school year go??  I can't believe Addison is finishing kindergarten. I remember last year we were just starting to figure out school uniforms, backpacks, and all of the new school, new school year activities.  Last week the school had Kinder Awards, no real awards necessarily, but the teachers called each kids name and the principal gave them a medal.  I'm not sure we could have asked for a better introduction to "real school" - Addison's teacher and classmates are the best!

 Ms. Glapion - best kinder teacher every!

My baby is growing up TOO fast!

Summer 2013

We are in our beach routine and loving it!  Memorial Day was a very busy weekend down at the beach, but we were able to squeeze in a spot at the water and did plenty of hole digging, sand castle building and Addy's newest sport - riding the waves on her new body board. 

 Addy made an alligator out of sand and took it for a ride.

 



 Addy followed with a ride on the body board.

 

 Maybe the best purchase from the Big Store, ever.

Princess Ella is starting the summer anti-water.  Again.  She didn't even want to get out of the car at first.  After a nice snack, she was eventually back on the sand.  Not in the water yet, but no doubt she'll be jumping waves soon!



Little Dancer

Ella took her first dance class this spring, she wasn't 100% sure about it at the first class, but did great the rest of the class.  Parents were invited to the last class so Addy and I went to watch Ella. I was pretty amazed at how well she listened and participated.

Ella and her good friends at both school and dance class.  

Dress Up Princess

Sleeping Beauty

 

Tinkerbell dress, pink bunny pants, yellow crocs - perfect!

Happy 3rd Birthday Ella!

We celebrated Ella's actual birthday with a trip to the Mexican restaurant...what girl doesn't want queso on her birthday!

What Ella didn't want was to have her picture taken though! 

Happy Birthday Party Ella!

Ella's 3rd birthday kicked-off with a Doc McStuffin's inspired birthday bash with all of her buddies from school.  A fun time seemed to be had by all!  Ella has a lot of boys in her class, so the little bounce house was probably the biggest hit - a couple of times the girls were brave enough to get in and play, but it was a little Wrestlemania-like. 

 Me and Ella in the "Clinic"

Bounce house and bubbles - what more could a 3 yr. old ask for!

 Mid-morning party = lots of snack eating.

Ella turned shy when it was time to sing "Happy Birthday".  She didn't even want to blow out her candles, but luckily her friends were around her to help, so we counted to 3 and all her friends helped blow!

 Ella loves icing

Happy cupcake time!

Birthday girl!!

 Lots of Ella's friends have sisters that were in the same preschool class as Addy - so there was a mini reunion for the big girls. 

Silly birthday girl was totally not into unwrapping presents, but fortunately Addison was there to help out.  

Leave it to a new purse to get the girl excited!

Maroon and White Game

On many levels we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into today - we'd never been to the Maroon and White game and we had no idea what the girls would be like in Kyle Field at a football game.  The Maroon and White game is a scrimmage between the offense and defense at the close of spring practice.  Pretty sure they'd been doing it for years, but we'd never been.  After a little research we figured out that tickets would be $12 for the 4 of us to go, which is WAY cheaper than what it would cost for the 4 of us to go to a real game in the fall.  So off we went! Had a tasty lunch at Wings and More then headed to the stadium.  Girls got to experience the amount of walking required when going to an Aggie football game, and there were certainly comments about it although Ella got lucky and got carried some.  Got to the stadium, it was general admission so we finally found some seats and we were set. 

I feel like I maybe watched 2 minutes of the game.  I made 4 trips to the bathroom for potty breaks (thank goodness we had zero accidents, so it was worth it), we did the best we could to keep Ella from bumping or kicking the people in front of us (I'm not sure about bumps, but I did have to brush popcorn crumbs off the back of the guy in front of us only once), Ella and the stadium steps are a recipe for disaster (on at least 2 of the potty breaks she tripped in the same place on the way up the steps).  So moral of this paragraph is that Ella is not ready for a real Aggie game day.  Addison was good to go though!

 Addy was decked out in her Aggie dress and pink Aggie hat.  

 Ella got a little restless and we had to break out the iPad for a short while.  

 Ella was very anti-photography today.

 Biggest bucket of popcorn in history!  The girls LOVED it.

Cuteness!

Easter 2013

 Addy made a mad dash for the big egg in hopes that it was full of swimsuits!

 I realized that I didn't get any pics from Easter when the girls were out of pjs!  Ella had been awake for a bit when this pic was taken, but Addy had hopped out of bed maybe 4 minutes before.  

I kind of lost count of how many pieces of chocolate that Ella ate Easter morning.  It was probably way too may considering it wasn't even 9:00 yet. 

Auntie Amy Visit

We were SO excited when we found out that Amy and David were coming in town Easter weekend!  We went down to the Klein's on Friday to hang out and went over to the Kemah Boardwalk for lunch.  Was very fun catching up!  The girls were super shy when we first got to the Klein's but then Murray pulled out all of the toys and Andee had cupcakes, so the girls warmed up super fast!

Was a gorgeous day on the boardwalk, Amy and David were enjoying the warmer weather after lots of snow and cold in Chicago.  We made the mistake of taking the group pic with the sun in our eyes and Ella was about done for the day and wouldn't look at the camera, but the moment was captured!

Denson - Schroeder Weekend

We had a super fun weekend with Dottie, Fred, Dave and Vicki!  I think that we determined that Dave and Vicki hadn't seen Ella since she was maybe 7 months old, and it had been a couple of years for the Schroeders too.  We had a great weekend eating, drinking and just hanging out.  Uncle Fred won uncle of the weekend award.  We still aren't 100% sure what they were talking about, but at one point he was sitting with Addy on the swing in the backyard and they talked for a good hour it seemed.  Apparently at one point someone overhead Fred discussing the national debt and Addy loved every minute of it - that is our Uncle Fred!

I should have taken more pics, but here is one of the silly kids on the swing!

Kolter Spring Performance

Addy had her first school performance today.  K, 2nd and 4th kids all put on performances.  The bigger kids had different skits and dances they did in the foreign languages they are taking.  The kindergarteners all sang "Its A Small World" at the end of the show.  They sang it in English, Spanish, Chinese and French. 

The kids were supposed to wear an outfit that represented their heritage.  I was a bit puzzled at what in the world Addy could wear until I remembered this random yellow shirt that has Germany on it...not sure what else it says or where it came from exactly, but it worked I think! 

Spring Break At The Beach

 Just like I remember it when I had spring break, bright and sunny and surprisingly chilly.  We still had a great time and the girls were very excited to be running around in bathing suits and digging holes in the sand again!  Other than pjs at night, Ella pretty much had a swimsuit on the entire time.  Girls and Michael were even brave enough to get their feet in the water, which was very cold.  Addy managed to fall and get more wet than planned, but didn't seem to mind too much. 

And there were even ducks in the lagoon!  The lagoon is still pretty nasty, but apparently the ducks can find what they need.  Maybe the turtles will make an appearance before the summer is over!

Addy's 1st Official Spring Break

It was a bit hard to get back to the old routine today, but I think that Addy had a fun Spring Break last week.

Things started with a trip to the zoo with her friends...

Then her first official trip to the rodeo...

A few days with Granddad and Meme and then a weekend relaxing at the beach...