Ladies and gentlemen: we have achieved Kindergarten!

It's true, I can hardly believe it, but yes: Maisie has started Kindergarten.

Yesterday (Wednesday 8/29) was her first day. The night before she said "You know what Mom? I'm scared and excited and nervous. You know why? (whispers) I have school tomorrow!"

But we talked about everything that would happen, Aaron helped her practice making friends and sitting on the bus ("Can I sit with you?"), and she got ready: she packed her lunch (grapes, pretzels, yogurt, a jelly roll-up, and pickles) and laid out her clothes (Hello Kitty shirt, flowered skirt). I was worried that she wouldn't be able to get to sleep, but she was out cold about five minutes after bedtime.

Wednesday morning, she woke up bright and early, before the alarm even went off. Got dressed, brushed teeth and hair, and was Ready! To! Go! by 6:30! Unfortunately her bus isn't until 6:57, so we had a little extra time! When it was time to leave, she was halfway up the block before anyone else was even out the door!

She was happy to see another kid waiting at the bus stop - an older girl, maybe 5th or 6th grade, who was very sweet to Maisie. For all her nervous and scared feelings, excitement had really taken over at this point!

When the bus pulled up, she hesitated for a moment, and looked back at me... I nodded, like "yep, this is your bus" and off she went!

She found a seat near the back and waved and waved as the bus pulled away.

Maisie reported a good day on her first day: her classroom is a little hard to find, and she didn't eat much of her lunch. But she made "four or five" friends, including one girl on her bus, and enjoyed music class and playing red light-green light.

She also came home with a definite opinion - she wants to eat hot lunch at school. I said that maybe we should pack a lunch, just in case she doesn't like what they are serving. But she explained that you don't have a choice; if you bring lunch, you can't choose to eat hot lunch instead. So she's buying lunch, at least occasionally.

This morning was similar - very excited to get up and go! go! go! She wanted to make sure she'd be riding the bus, and we weren't going to drive her (no worries there), and that I didn't pack her lunch, so she could buy it. I can't wait to hear about her day!

I'm so proud of Maisie. She's been at Sunny Hollow for three years, since she was not quite three years old. More than half her life! But she's handled this transition like a champ. There were a few tears shed, but that's to be expected. I know she's going to do great at her new school. I can't wait to see it.

Food I made that my kids won't eat.

I made three different dishes this weekend that I thought were really good. The kids disagreed. So I am going to tell you about them, dear reader, and you can tell me what a great cook I am.

1. Cabbage salad: pretty easy and basic. Shredded cabbage, chopped carrot, and chopped green onion (all from the farmer's market), mixed with broken-up ramen noodles, then topped with the Salad Girl's honey-ginger dressing. I thought it was delicious. The kids refused to try it.

2. Red potato and green bean salad: basically this recipe but with a vegetable mix of about 2/3 beans, 1/3 potatoes because that's what I had. Potatoes, beans, garlic, onions, and basil from the farmer's market. Maisie even helped me trim the beans. The dressing (for those who don't want to click through) is a vinaigrette with olive oil, balsamic, lemon juice, and dijon mustard. Maisie took one teensy nibble of a potato and started crying; Ella wouldn't go near it. Aaron's not a huge vinegar fan so he isn't in love with it either. I like it a lot, which is fortunate because there's a lot of it for me to eat.

3. Lazy Italian Chicken: a crockpot recipe that's allegedly kid-friendly. In your crockpot you layer the following: Potatoes, 1 tsp Italian spices, 1/2 c Parmesan, 1/2 c low-fat Italian dressing, boneless/skinless chicken, potatoes, 1 tsp spices, 1/2 c Parmesan, 1/2 c dressing. Cover and cook for 8-10 hours on low, or 3-4 on high. The girls deigned to eat some of the chicken but perhaps due to the above salad, refused to allow a potato onto their plates - even though I showed them that these potatoes had been cooked with (and therefore would taste just like) the chicken they were eating. Aaron & I liked it fine; nothing special but it's easy and hopefully with time, the girls will forget the horrors of the dijon vinaigrette and actually try the potatoes.

So that was my attempt at feeding my family this weekend. (insert eyeroll here) Next weekend, I'm going to stick with PB&J, pancakes, and mac & cheese. Not so exciting but at least I know the kids will eat!

Almost over now...

It's hard to believe, but the summer's almost over. Only 3 more weeks until Maisie's first day of Kindergarten! Holy cow, I can hardly believe it.

Since last weekend the weather's gotten a lot better. High temps are more reasonable - mid-80's instead of upper 90's, and not too humid - so Aaron and the girls have actually been able to get outside!

They've been going to a little park near our house to run around. We have a kid's sized soccer ball, and Aaron's teaching the girls basic soccer skills - how to kick, how to pass, how to stop the ball. Ella's still working on it, but Maisie's picking it up really quickly. On Monday after work we went to the park, and I taught her how to throw a frisbee (turn your body so you throw across your body, look where you want the 'bee to go, flick your wrist like this) and she picked that right up, too. By the end of our little outing, she was throwing confidently, and getting the 'bee where she wanted it to go probably 50% of the time. I am super impressed!

Yesterday they went back to the park - here's some of the pics that they sent me...

Ella resting, post running-around:

(It was still in the 80's, hence the very pink cheeks.)

Picnic lunch time:

Aaaah! Apparently Aaron packed a seafood lunch!!

Oh, did you notice Maisie's new short haircut? It's funny because she's such a girly-girl in a lot of ways, but she really loves having short hair. I like it too because it means fewer fights about combing out tangles.

Overall it's been a good summer. I know Maisie's excited about starting K in a few weeks but I'll be sad to see the summer over. I did take the Monday of the last week of August off work so we can all go to the state fair together - it'll be our last hurrah of the summer - school starts that Wednesday. Just 3 weeks away!

Star Wars Art

So over the last month or so, Maisie has become a real Star Wars fangirl, at least to the extent that a five-year-old can be. She's watched all 3 of the original movies, and plays Lego Star Wars - both with actual Legos and the Xbox game. She told me the other day that for Halloween she wants to be Jango Fett - I was like, I don't even know who that is.

So I guess I wasn't totally surprised to get home from work yesterday to find that she'd drawn some of her favorite Star Wars characters... can you tell who they are?

If you said 1. Darth Vader (she says "Dark" Vader, which is adorable and also kind of apt), 2. Princess Leia, and 3. Luke, you're right!

Not bad, hey?

Bottlecap magnets

Another craft post, since Aaron and the girls are out of town so I don't have adventures and cute pics to share.

At CONvergence, one of the crafts they did in the kids' area was making necklaces out of bottlecaps. It was pretty cool and something I thought we could replicate at home. But as I didn't want to drill tiny holes in the bottlecaps for the jump rings, we did magnets instead!

(Yes that is a Halloween-themed tablecloth. It was what we had that was plastic, and I was pretty sure that things were going to get messy!)

I used a 1" hole punch to get circles that fit perfectly inside the bottlecaps. (I got a whole bunch of bottlecaps for free from the Rusty Taco, which sells bottles of Jarritos and Mexican Coke. They let me just scoop them out of the little collection box. They weren't perfectly flat but they worked just fine. We just needed to wash them!) Then I brushed on some Mod Podge and the girls filled in the circles with beads and sequins.

We used all kinds of beads, both regular little seed beads and some larger shaped ones. We also had snowflake-shaped sequins as well as regular colorful circle ones.

When the girls had their bottlecaps the way they wanted them, we filled in the caps with this crazy stuff called Mod Podge Dimensional Magic, and let them dry for 24 hours. The Dimensional Magic dries clear and holds everything together... it was super easy!

The only thing I didn't care for was that reviews online suggested that it would not shrink down as it dried, and it totally did. It shrank sort of weirdly, too, and some bubbles seemed to appear when I was super careful to pop any bubbles before we let them dry. So it wasn't the exact effect I was looking for. But still, it worked just fine to hold everything together.

Once the Dimensional Magic dried, I used rubber cement to glue 3/4" magnets on the back of the caps.

The rubber cement may have been overkill - the magnets were actually adhesive. But I wasn't confident that the adhesive would be strong enough, because some of the caps were really very full of beads.

So once that dried, voila! Final product:

The girls are super proud of them! They like to play with them on the fridge, and also gave some to beloved neighbor Beth for her birthday.

I think they look great! I will say that the ones that the girls did that are completely full of beads and sequins look way better than the ones I did that were a little more sparing with the decoration. So, lesson learned: this is a craft for making over-the-top decoration.

It was fun and definitely something we'll repeat!

Time (again!) to eat the donuts.

One of my new favorite things is food trucks. (That sentence seems weird but I don't know how to fix it. Food trucks are among my favorite things, perhaps? anyway...) There's been an explosion of food trucks recently. It's not just hot dogs any more! Tacos, sushi, bahn mi, kebabs... you can get almost anything from a food truck in downtown Minneapolis. One of the first food trucks I knew about was the Chef Shack. It's so awesome. It does the farm-to-table thing, using fresh and local ingredients to make its delicious, delicious food. I particularly love their Moo Me sandwich, which is like a Thai spiced meatloaf sandwich. Yum yum yum.

So on Saturday we were going to the Mill City Museum. But the girls were hungry, and we were early, so we swung over to the Mill City Farmers Market. And when I saw that big red truck I knew I had to stop by! I got some delicious breakfast tacos with eggs, beans, cheese, and a crazy good salsa. Maisie had french toast (yum). But Ella wanted only one thing:

Mini donuts.

Ella was so focused, I couldn't get her to look up for a picture. But with good reason: Chef Shack's mini donuts are the best EVER.

Go get some!

(Ha! I just realized I had written an identically-titled post last month, also with pics of Ellie chowing down on donuts. She is quite the donut conniseur!)

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

My employer sponsored the Rembrandt exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, so employees got free tickets. So off we went on Sunday to the MIA, despite the girls' protests that "I only like museums where I can touch things" and "I think that sounds boring."

The line for Rembrandt tickets was really long and slow, so we decided to go through some of the galleries and come back for the tickets later. As promised, the girls didn't enjoy very much of it. They liked the period rooms, but otherwise found the older art pretty boring. They also don't like naked people or anything depicting anything scary, which is honestly quite a lot of the collection.

They were a little more taken with the more contemporary art, like this piece, Panda, by Takashi Murakami:

(another view and some further info on the artist here.)

Maisie was very interested in Cy Thao's work. We found a little video that told his story - born in Laos, escaped to a Thai refugee camp, immigrated to Minnesota, became a legislator for 8 years, and now an artist. The museum has 9 of his 50 paintings in his "Hmong Migration" series. She watched the video and looked at his paintings and said "He's really talented!" Yep!

We next found a please-touch art cart, with Native American items from the Pacific NW, that the girls liked. There was a doll, some beautifully woven fabric, jewelery, and other objects that they could handle.

They also really liked this installation by HOTTEA, letting go:

(more info on it here.)

Oh, how was the Rembrandt exhibit, you ask? Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. It had timed admissions and our tickets were for 2:00. But everyone pooped out and melted down and was basically done 45 minutes before that. I ended up giving our tickets to someone who was in line to purchase them.

So, oh well. It was a pretty hit-or-miss excursion, but all in all I think it was a success, even if we didn't get to see the Rembrandts. At least we did show the girls that the art museum isn't all boring.

Hot.

Oh man, it's been a hot summer. Hot hot hot hot hot. Heat records are being set all over the country, and Minneapolis has been no exception (87 records have been set so far this year!). Because we don't have central air, we spend a lot of time going from museum to restaurant to other air-conditioned venue. Lately we've tried to include some movie theaters.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I took Maisie and Maya to see Brave when Maya & family were visiting. Maisie was really freaked out by it, but she came away saying that she liked it.

Well, a few weeks later we decided to try to go see it all together, all four of us, as a family. Poor Maisie could. not. handle it. She cried and we had to leave. A week or two ago, the same thing happened - this time at Ice Age 3. Auntie Laura and Dylan stayed with Ella through the end of the movie, but I had to take Maisie out. Today, we considered going to see Pirates! Band of Misfits. Ella and Aaron both wanted to, but Maisie was dead set against it. So those two went, while Maisie and I hung out in a coffee shop.

This isn't limited to movies, which can understandably be overwhelming, with the huge screen and surround sound and all of that. Sometimes even watching a TV show, she finds whatever minor conflict there is to be so intense that she has to leave the room. Seriously, I never thought that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic would be too frightening for her, but it's driven her out of the room more than once!

It's kind of frustrating. She knows that the show/movie/whatever isn't real, and she knows that it'll be fine in the end. Goodness knows she's seen enough kids' movies to grasp the happy ending concept! But in the moment, she gets so worked up that she's unable to pull herself out of it.

Sigh. So, we're obviously done with movies in the theater for a little bit (although we might keep trying, at least for $2 matinees at the second-run theater). Anyone have any ideas how we can help her remember that it's really just a show, and that there will be a happy ending?

Ella's birthday party

About, oh, a month ago, we celebrated Ella's third birthday. I mentioned it briefly here and promised a recap, but never delivered. I am the worst mommyblogger! Auntie Clare even blogged it before I did, and with better pictures, too - here's her writeup and gorgeous pics. Go check it out. Her pics are just lovely.

The party was awesome. We had it at Edinborough, an indoor play area in Edina. It's a pretty sweet deal, if any Twin Citizens are looking for an indoor place to host a birthday party - the park is owned by the city so it's really not expensive.

Here was our little party area:

The park sets it up for you and provides all the paper products, along with a shirt for the birthday kid. They also handle cleanup! yay!


Here was our cupcake cake, made of cupcakes!

Seriously, so much easier than trying to slice up a regular sheet cake or whatever. Everyone just gets a cupcake! Less cleanup, too. We got it at Target... this was seriously the birthday party of convenience.

This is what occupies the kids and where they run off the sugary cupcakes you fed them:

It's called Adventure Peak. You can't really tell from the pic just how enormous this is - it's hard to get a good perspective. According to their website, it's 44 x 44 x 37. The oak tree thingy on the side is 30 feet tall. Huge, right? There's slides and ladders in between the various levels. There's also a little bounce house on the lower level, and a toddler area for the littl'uns. Then there's a separate gym that has balls and rolly slidy toys.

We had so much fun with all the friends and family who came to celebrate. It was great to see everyone. Ella had a wonderful birthday party. Thank you all!

(I stole that picture from Clare. Isn't it great?)

And finally, here's a pic of Maisie and Maya, who I took to see Brave on Saturday afternoon, post-birthday party.

Maisie got pretty freaked out by the bears. Maya kept reassuring her, "Maisie, it's just a movie, it'll be fine." Ha!

Easy DIY Cape

So as I said, we spent the weekend at CONvergence. A big part of the scene there is costuming, as you could probably tell from a few of the pictures I posted. Because the theme was Wonder Women, I decided that the girls needed capes. But because I decided this at the last minute - like, on Thursday morning, the day the Con began - I needed a quick & easy, no-sew DIY cape. Here's what I came up with!

First, I stole an old t-shirt from Aaron that he doesn't wear any more.

I turned it inside out and drew my cape pattern on there. I did the wider part at the bottom, along the hem, and the skinny part at the top. Then I cut it out, keeping the shirt's collar attached, and snipped the collar in the middle to create the ties.

We ran to Michael's and picked out iron-ons to decorate the cape, and we were done! Easy-peasy, no sew, upcycled kids' capes.

Back view:

And a front view of Baby Panda Superhero, showing the tie around the neck:

I did make capes for both girls. Maisie opted not to wear hers, instead dressing like a ballerina (Thursday), a sun princess (Friday), and some other kind of princess (Sunday). But Ella wore hers all weekend, and ran around saying "Me a SUPERHERO!!!" which delighted just about everyone who saw her.

CONvergence Con!

It's blazingly hot out this weekend, so we're getting our geek on at CONvergence, a huge (6000 people!) all-things-geekery convention: Sci-fi, fantasy, science, games, etc. We're all having a blast, girls included! Full recap next week but here's a few pictures to give you an idea until then...

These are a few of our favorite things

Strawberries...

These are from our garden. I attempted a pectin-free jam, but it didn't set. So they became strawberry sauce that's really yummy over ice cream.

Cupcakes...

Especially 24 cupcakes that are covered in a ton of frosting and smooshed together to make one GIANT cupcake!

Orange soda...

at the movies, with cousin Maya.

Strawberry soda...

and ice cream...

both on the patio on a beautiful evening at Pizza Luce, the girls' favorite pizza restaurant.

Apple pie and chocolate milk...

at the coffee shop with toys - you can see the toy room in the background. It also has great coffee and free wi-fi. It's a family favorite.

And finally, raspberries...

2-3 cups of them picked from our neighbor Beth's canes with the intent of making jam... but somehow none of them made it home!

Pride!

Last weekend was again very very busy, with lots of fun adventures. We celebrated Ella's third birthday on Saturday with lots of friends and family, and had a great time! That's going to get its own post at some point in the not-too-distant future. I wanted to get a quick recap up of our Sunday adventure, though - the girls and I went to the Pride parade!

We joined my college friend and neighbor Jo, her wife Jen, their two boys Tristan and Eamon, Jo's friend whose name I forgot (oops!), and his little girl Estella. First of all... thanks Jo for scoping out a great spot to watch the parade! The kids pulled up some curb and we were on the shady side of the street the entire time, which was especially fantastic, considering that we were there for nearly three hours.

Here's Ella, Maisie, Estella, and Tristan being a total ham. Eamon was in a stroller next to Ella and I couldn't quite get him in the picture.

There was a huge Carleton contingent at the parade, of course! A woman wearing a Carleton Pride button ended up standing next to us, classmate Erin Keyes (with her partner Liberty and their adorable little girl Ivy) were in the parade on a pro-marriage float, and Carleton had an official group marching in the parade too. But Macalester wasn't left out...

 those bagpipes are really something. And that mascot's adorable. Go Mac!

The kids had a ton of fun at the parade, admiring the "pretty ladies" (drag queens) and scooping up all the candy, necklaces, and other little items being thrown from the floats. Halfway through the parade, the girls looked like this:

By the end of the parade, they were covered in stickers, full of candy, and Ella was completely exhausted. She asked me to carry her to our bus stop, and fell asleep in my arms before we even got a half a block. She slept through the bus ride, and only woke up when we got off and I handed her to Aaron, who met us at the bus stop. It was exhausting... but so fun! The girls really love parades and festivals. We're looking forward to more on the 4th!

Time to eat the donuts.

We had grand plans to take the girls camping this weekend, but the weather interfered. Who knew that Minnesota had a monsoon season? Anyway, we basically spent the weekend inside, and now it's Monday morning and I'm tired and just not feeling inspired by any of my pictures to write a really thoughtful post.

So instead, here are pictures of Ella eating a sticky donut and ice cream, and giving you monster teeth.

Negotiations

Last weekend we went to the Children's Museum. It was beautiful outside, so we went with the explicit goal of playing on the rooftop art park... which we did, and it was fun. But this isn't a post about painting on the rocks with water...

and it isn't a post about how the girls climbed in the "treehouse," Maisie helping Ella, until they both got to the very top.

 

 

This is a post about negotiations.

The girls love the Children's Museum, so it can be hard to get them out of there. But it was close to lunchtime, and Ella's naptime, so we had to go. Maisie was doing chalk drawings when I told her, "two minutes!" She asked "How about five minutes?" I said, well, okay... then she drew this:

And then I said, well, if you can write eight minutes (even if it's spelled "8 minits"), you can have that extra time to stay and play. :)

But since then, she's gotten really interested in writing numbers. She can count past 100 and is going to be able to write them soon too. I might have to amend my "if you can write it you can have it" policy!