November Update

  Amid our usual craziness of Girl Scouts, Mom's Group, Mission Friends, and school we have had many accomplishments in the month of November.

   Gwiny is now at a 4.3 reading level.  (4th grade, 3rd month) and has developed a love for reading.   This makes me a very happy mommy. She still loves to wear clothes that are too short and too tight, which is a very big challenge for all of us and has become worse now that the weather has turned cold.

   Izzy got all E's and S's on her progress report and has kept her behavior on super star all month!

   Emma developed a love for T.V. and just wants to cuddle and watch Dora all day.  This is a huge struggle for me.  I don't want her to watch T.V. all day but it is so nice getting to cuddle my baby while she still wants me too.

   We shared a great thanksgiving with both sides of our families, and while I tried not to over eat, I'm pretty sure I failed miserably.  I bought a new washer/dryer on black Thursday?  and for the first time in a long time a DRESS on Friday. And then was cursed for my too much shopping too little sleeping with horrible ear infections that are letting me give in to Emma's desire to lay down and cuddle all day.

   And I opened an etsy shop.  You can check it out at www.etsy.com/shop/semprastudios.  If you know any one that you may be interested in purchasing some Harry Potter stuff for Christmas let me know.  I will change my shipping rates or give you a discount or something.  I'm still learning how all of this works.  I guess I should have done more research before jumping right in to this.  But that is far too rational for my life.

I also upgraded my mac from Leopard to Snow Leopard which doesn't let me preview my photos before inserting them into things.  So I think I am just going to throw some randomly numbered photos in here and see how that turns out.  ( surprisingly not terrible )
 

Making Strides Against Breast Cancer

  This past weekend we had the ability to join my mother's team in the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk.   This is the second year my daughters and I have participated and again had a wonderful time.   It started with a dance warm up, followed by the walk, a little time on the playground, and lunch at hooters.

My Grandma made a fantastic bra for my mom that is two cupcakes and every year she has been cancer free they add another candle.  This year marked her 4 year anniversary of completing treatment. 

Mom in her cupcakes, Grandma with some ice cream. And my girls and me in zebra print. Gwiny and Emma both have theirs on under their jackets. 

  

I also should note that my Izzy walked the entire length of the walk, 3.5 miles!  Gwiny accompanied my dad to walmart and lowes because he was injured and couldn't participate.  And Emma rode the whole length of the walk in her stroller and fell asleep at the 3 mile mark. 

  

 

Awesome things my girls say

   Because I feel like we have not done anything particularly interesting or noteworthy in a couple weeks.  I am going to make today's blog about the awesome (and not so awesome) things that my girls sometimes say. We will start with Emma:

  Yesterday we took Isabel to the ENT for a 4:15 appointment.  One thing I love about our ENT's office is that they have a room just devoted to kids.  It has a plastic picnic table and Highlights magazines and toys and a TV that plays the disney channel.  So waiting to be called back is never an issue.  But it all changes when you get in the room and have to wait 25 minutes that seems like 2 hours of all three of your children and yourself trying to sit still and wait.  So I decided I would make up a story to tell them.  And they specifically requested a scary story, of which I will give you an abbreviated version.  All daughters were visited by a scary monster on Halloween and he told them that they would have to do a ritual before midnight otherwise monsters would roam the earth.  But the girls called the cops and the monster ran away.  So the next morning monsters were roaming the earth and they had to make a golden bullet out of their blood and a ritz cracker.  Then they had to find the scariest monster and mommy had to shoot him with the golden bullet and all the monsters would disappear. So they went to the scariest place they could think of, Walmart.  And when they found him he turned in to glitter and then all the other monsters turned in to glitter, so the girls scooped up some monster glitter and went home and made a craft.   
   At some point in this story Emma yelled really loud " I would get my knife!"  I was shocked, I guess I shouldn't be sense I was talking about shooting Monsters and all, but I immediately had to stop my story and talk about how we don't actually want to hurt people or monsters and that this is just a pretend story and how she isn't even allowed to touch knives.  Still not my best parenting moment, not my worst either, but I probably shouldn't tell stories about shooting things. 



Gwin:

 About 10 minutes after the story I was letting them watch videos of themselves on my cell phone and her doctor walked in, apologized for what his hand looked like and assured us that it was a burn and not contagious.  He then proceeded to talk to me throughout the whole appointment and even as we walked out the door he was still talking.  I have never heard a doctor say " Well, I better let you get going" before. Especially this doctor. Izzy has seen him 4 times and he was the one that performed her surgery.  He has always been very professional bordering on curt.  Anyway, after we left I said to the girls " That was weird."  and Gwin was like " Yea, I bet he was talking to us like that so he could get a sponsor so he could get some burn medicine."   I was like " Gwin this isn't the Hunger Games!"

Izzy: 

  Today Izzy had a pajama party for the letter P at school.  So Izzy picked out special pajamas.  She walked out of her room saying this "  Puppy and Peace sign Pajamas for Pajama Party 'P' day"  
Like a boss. 


 

The case of the missing Izzy

There are lots of things I should be blogging about like :

 The Gwiny/Israel birthday party. 

Our family trip to Universal Orlando 

My eldest daughters intense interest in becoming a supreme court justice today.

But the most pressing and most hilarious issue in our lives right now is how often Izzy has gone missing in the last two weeks.

   I realize I am being a little Izzy heavy having written two blog entries about her in a row, but what can I say, she gives me a lot of material.  Usually she does enough crazy stuff on her own but this time she has a cohort, her school.

   I am going to preface this with a disclaimer.  I love our daughter's school.  They are both very happy to go to school every day.  They love their teachers, they begged me to bake muffins for their (former) bus driver, they really enjoy going to school every day.  Which makes me a very happy mommy, considering we moved out of the city to be in a place (we could afford) with a good school. In fact our school only does one fundraiser a year and that is what I am baking the 6 cakes for, making it possible to contribute in ways other than buying junk from a catalogue or requesting large sums of money 3 or 4 times a year (both of which we have experienced).

  On Monday of last week the girls came home on bus B which was unusual because they have ridden bus A since the first day of school.  Oh well, they got home.

   On Tuesday of last week, bus B drove by, stopped, and my daughters were not on the bus.  The bus driver radioed the other buses and it was found that my girls were on bus C.  The bus driver assured me that bus C would drop them off at home.  So I walked back from the bus stop and by the time I got home bus C had stopped and off came my girls not knowing anything was wrong.  I asked the bus driver why they were on this bus and he said " I don't know, I am just a substitute."  Okay.

  On Wednesday the girls came home on bus B and we were told by the bus driver that this was their new bus.  They should always be on bus B.

  On Thursday Gwiny came home on bus D and the bus sped off before I noticed there was no Izzy. Gwiny was hysterical because Izzy was not on the bus.  She said she had told the bus driver that her sister was missing but the bus driver was too busy and didn't hear her.  I called the school and they were able to track her down on bus C.  Bus C brought Izzy home and when I asked the bus driver what had happened she didn't know.  She said she thought Izzy may have gotten on the bus because it looks like bus B.

 On Friday I wrote a note in to the school that the girls would be car riders for that day and all of the following week until I was able to contact someone who could tell me what bus the girls were supposed to be on.

 On Monday I talked to the school office.  They told me that they had no idea what bus routes had changed and that they are contacted at the end of every day if there are any bus changes.  I told them I planned on calling the bus depot and that I would find out if the girls bus had changed or if there were just substitutes.  They said " If you find anything out let us know."

 On Tuesday (today) I called the bus depot.  They told me that the girls were to permanently be on bus B.  So I called the school and told them.  They repeated thanked me for being so nice about the whole situation and said they had had a lot of trouble with the bus situation and were disappointed with the way the bus system had kept them in the dark about a bus change.

  I felt a completion to my goal!  I now know that when they resume bus riding on Monday they will be on bus B, maybe.  Anyway, they will probably get her home.

  I go to pick up the girls at school today.  And there is Gwiny waiting for me..... with no Izzy in sight.  At this point I tell them, "umm... we are missing my other daughter."   They radio the front office ( the lady I have been contacting, which I am sad to say, I have no idea what her name is.) and she says, through the radio " Check bus B and bus A because Isabel gets confused."

  At this point I can't stop laughing.  How has my daughter ended up in the wrong place 3 times in 6 school days?  How much of this is her fault?  How much is the school to blame? What am I going to do with Izzy?

  Izzy's teacher brings her out and says that Izzy kept telling her she was a car rider this week but she wasn't listening to her, she kept saying " You are a bus rider!" She apologized and told Izzy she would listen to her from now on.

  Well Izzy has made it home all three times.  And later she smeared chocolate cake all over her face, so she must be feeling okay.

Bad Decisions

RJ:  What was that screaming about earlier? Who was that Izzy?  I thought we were going to have to take someone to the hospital.

Me:  Yeah, it was Izzy.

RJ:  What happened?

Me:  She put a stool on her face and then asked someone to step on it. 

   

Thats my daughter

and her pet snake. 

When Emma thought she saw a ghost

  What?! I know!  Two blog entries in a row.  This is not normal people, so don't come to expect this out of me.  To be honest, this one wouldn't be happening except I don't think I can make a facebook status that touches the amount of insanity that has gone on at my house today.  And I don't mean that I did a super amount of workout dvds.  

  The really crazy stuff started shortly after the girls got home from school. (Although RJ working from home is usually troublesome when I am trying to get a bunch of stuff done while they are at school.)  Izzy started with asking me to make muffins for her bus driver.  She has been asking me for about a week. Today I had over ripe bananas and told her I would make them.  I thought it would work out so perfectly, they could have banana muffins for desert, I could take them to moms night out, and we would pack a few for her bus driver.  So after I went through all the homework.  Showed them all what to do, I headed to the kitchen to make the muffins.  Well, while I was doing that, Gwiny did 2 pages of spelling homework that are due tomorrow.  She had about 3 spelling words to go before she was finished when she realized that she had done last weeks words, and our world fell apart.  She cried and cried and cried.  And I offered to help her with the new words and she refused, and she cried and said she was so mad at herself, and she started on her new words.  She got 13 words in to her ABC order and she realized she skipped a word that started with a B and then she cried and cried and cried and threw away her paper, and still refused help. This happened 2 more times and I decided that I was more needed here, helping with homework than going to my moms night out.  She soon pumped out her homework and by 6:30 she was finished.  Just in time for dinner that I had been making with the muffins. 

  After dinner, the girls each had a bite of muffin and they all went running separate ways to spit it out as fast as they could.  To which I get this fine quote, " These muffins taste like they have real bananas in them."  I'm not sure what kind of bananas they thought were going to be in them. And later as I was cleaning the toilet seat of a muffin and spit combo, this quote " I sometimes feel like I am living in a house full of alcoholic sorority girls." But nothing has ever come close to the devastation that hit Emma about 30 minutes post muffins.

  My girls have done some pretty crazy stuff.  I mean they say and do some really weird stuff.  Like the time I had to tell Izzy that she wasn't really a mermaid and she didn't talk to me until an hour later when she went to the beach and didn't grow a tail.  Or the time 3 year old Gwiny tried to make toys come out of the catalogue and couldn't figure out why she couldn't just take them out.  Then she cried because it wasn't working the way she thought it should.  Here is my Emma story:

  Izzy and Emma were playing mother and daughter.  Izzy was the mom and had put Emma in her bed. When I walked in the room Emma said " My dad is hurt, he is in the kitchen."  I told her " I will go check on him and make sure he is okay."  When I came back about 2 minutes later I told her.  " He is just fine.  I checked him out and I saved him! He is eating cheese-its on the couch now."  So she and Izzy came running out of the room to check to see that her 'dad' was okay.  Izzy and Emma ran to RJ and said " You are okay!" and he said " Yep, but now I am a ghost" and gave the spooky "ooohh" and Izzy ran away laughing.  Emma on the other hand came running to me hysterical.  I couldn't understand at first why she was crying so hard.  Until I realized she really thought RJ had died and was a ghost.  She wouldn't look at him, she wouldn't touch him. She was terrified of him. We tried talking to her.  We tried telling her he was teasing and that ghosts are not real.  Finally, I forced her to touch his arm. Then he fed her a cheese-it which seemed to convince her that maybe he wasn't a ghost after all.  

Then we played uno and they all went to bed. As I tucked Emma in for the 23rd time she said, " Remember that movie Casper we watched at Grandma's house. He turned in to an egg and if he didn't have eyes, I would eat that egg. At Grandma's house." 

The End. 

     Who Ya Gonna Call?  

The Potty Train and other fun adventures

  Well the girls have officially started school.  In fact, they are about to start their 3rd full week.  So I am not doing so well with my timing again.  Ehhh, you know me, thats what I do.  Well, I am proud to say that I am the mother to one 3rd grader and one Kindergardener.  Every time I say that it makes me feel old, real old.  

   Gwin is doing great in 3rd grade, even though I am sure we never had to work this hard in 3rd grade.  She is currently doing a unit on spores in science, graphs in math, and learning vocabulary words like 'resistance'.   Yikes!  Aside from school Gwin is about to start girl scouts again and she has her 8th birthday coming up. She is still wanted to wear only tight clothes, so that is our fun challenge of the year with Gwiny.  Aside from the clothes fight, she seems settled in to her school and for the most part, willing to do her homework.  Even if it is just to get it over with so she can watch iCarly. 
    

   Izzy started kindergarten this year.  She has been having a bit of a hard time adjusting.  Some days she cries because she doesn't want to go to school.  Some days she comes home telling me she had the greatest day ever.  She has been getting a little extra instruction at home with me sense school started.  I feel like it is not right for her to get to run off and play while Gwin does homework, so we have been working on writing her numbers.  With any luck we will get her back in the swing of things and loving kindergarten as much as she loved her pre-k. 

  Emma started full time potty training the first day of school for her older sisters.  I told her that she would be going to potty school with me and we packed a backpack full of diapers, panties, and skirts that she would have to carry with her wherever we go.  The idea was that she would no longer wear diapers except at night, on long trips, and in a pinch if we couldn't find a bathroom.  She has been doing so great!  She is in panties full time now, again with the exception of those listed above.  But the very best part about the potty training so far was the first day when we got home after dropping the older girls off at school.  I told Emma, " Lets go sit on the toilet, it's time to start your potty training school." She put her hands on her hips and gave me a look similar to the one below, and said " That is NOT a train.  That is a TOILET.  I am going on a potty train."