I know it’s already February but I finally got the Christmas pictures posted. We had a great time and enjoyed having all the family here.
Author Archives: Derek
Caroline’s 1st Days at School
Jen started teaching a couple of days each week tutoring small groups of kids to help prepare them for the statewide assessment tests that happen in a couple of months. To do this we’ve put Caroline in school a couple days a week. She’s actually in the same preschool that both Alex and Andrew attended.
We were a little nervous about how she would be leaving Jen for the first time since the boys had a hard time. I can’t even count the times that Alex was in tears after being dropped off. Well, not Caroline. She had her Elmo backpack, lunch box, sleeping mat, and she was ready to go. The very first day she just walked right up there and that was it.
I dropped her off the other day and as we pulled into the parking lot of school she got all excited and started yelling, “dool, dool”.
Here’s her picture from the first day
Yesterday she also came home with her very first piece of artwork. I guess they were talking about all the snow we’ve had the last couple of days. She was very proud of the white paint she did because she would point to it and say “paint”.
North Texas Snow
Yesterday we got about 4 inches of snow which is really quite a bit for North Texas. (If you were watching T.V. you would have thought we were in for about 20 or 30 inches the way the news channels here cover it.)
After it had finished we bundled up the kids and let them play outside for a bit.
Mother Goose
I was putting Caroline to bed this evening and was sitting in our big chair reading some stories with her when I picked up Jen’s old copy of “The Real Mother Goose.” It’s old and fragile, pages are starting to fall out of it since the binding glue is drying out, but every now and then I pick it up to read a couple with her.
Tonight I opened up to a page and saw a picture of an old guy jumping in the bush and thought what’s this all about.
THE MAN IN OUR TOWNThere was a man in our town,
And he was wondrous wise,
He jumped into a bramble bush,
And scratched out both his eyes;
But when he saw his eyes were out,
With all his might and main,
He jumped into another bush,
And scratched ‘em in again.
Really, scratched his eyes out!?
There you go Caroline, stay out of the bushes or look what can happen, scratch your eyes right out, and don’t listen to any of that nonsense about scratching ‘em back in ’cause that’s not going to happen. Sleep tight, don’t have any nightmares tonight.
Merry Christmas
Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and hope that you are enjoying time with the ones you love.
Horse Art
In honor of the Andrew’s exciting time at horse camp I thought I would post his parts of the horse art that he did a school last month. You can actually see it in the bottom right corner of the art wall in the picture that Jen took.
Thanksgiving Pictures
Christmas is quickly approaching and before it’s too late I thought I had better get the pictures posted of our Thanksgiving trip to New Orleans up.
I’ve got pictures of horse camp, the Saints game, a couple from down in the French Quarter, and from opening night at Celebration in the Oaks. You can find them all here.
Horse Camp
While in New Orleans we were looking for things for the kids to do and Jen’s Dad called the house at 8:40 in the morning with news that at the Equest Farm in City Park they were having a Thanksgiving horse camp….starting at 9:00. Alex had just got out of bed so we had to do the flight of the bumble bee to get the kids dressed for horse riding, a lunch packed, and out the door to the stables in time.
Andrew was really excited and jumping up and down about being able to go but Alex wasn’t as excited but we didn’t give him the chance to argue about it and zoomed him out the door before he could object too much.
Amazingly we got there in time and while I was signing all the waivers and other papers Alex leaned over and whispered to me,
“Dad, Dad, I think this is the wrong camp.”
“What, no, this is the only horse camp at City Park, we’re in the right spot.”
“No, I don’t think we are, you need to ask, this isn’t the right camp.”
“Why do you think we are at the wrong camp?”
“We’re the only guys! It’s all girls!”
After I looked at the ten or so other campers who were gathered I noticed they were in fact all girls.
Bob called shortly after I left them to check to see they got to camp ok and I said Alex was a little uneasy about it being all girls he said “Oh, he should look at this as his great opportunity.” I’m not sure he saw it like that.
When I picked them up in the afternoon they were both very excited and had a great time so apparently they got along well with all the other girls.
Lacrosse – Halloween Shootout
I’m finally getting around to putting these pictures up but over the Halloween weekend Alex took part in his first lacrosse tournament. They played three games over two days and ended up winning two of their three games. I thought that the played really well and in the first game he scored a goal.
I took a bunch of pictures over the weekend which you can find on the website.
The Blue Tiger
Over the weekend we went to the McKinney 3rd Monday Trade days to see if we could find a piece of furniture to sit in front of the computer desk. We were looking for something that was big enough that we could put a bunch of the kids stuff in, close the door, and not have to look at it.
As we were wandering around we came across a face painting booth and Andrew really wanted to get his face painted. We agreed, but only if we weren’t able to find a piece of furniture. We never were able to find anything that was suitable so we consoled ourselves with a funnel cake and then went back to the face painting booth for Andrew.
He decided on getting the Blue Tiger makeup which took about 10 minutes to do but when he was done it was really good. We didn’t see any of the process on how he was transformed from mild manner boy into the blue tiger since he was facing away from us but when he turned around it was really good.
I only had a cell phone with me to take the picture so it’s not a great quality shot the ones we took later that night are still on the camera but here’s the final product
Caroline wasn’t so sure about it. At first she put her hands over her eyes and would peek out at him but when we got back to the car and she had to sit beside him she just lost it.
(I’m so mean, laughing and taking a picture of her so upset.) It took her a couple of hours before she was convinced that it was really Andrew behind all the make and wouldn’t break out into tears every time she spotted him.