The move and our first days here

And back in time:

We pulled out from Zachary on Friday March 7 and our movers got here on March 10.  Also on March 10, I went and enrolled the girls in their new school but they were not able to start until that Wednesday.

 A family selfie on our drive up....as we were stopped for hours on the interstate.

 The girls playing out on the interstate.  Not sure what Brooke is doing.

 This was as we were actually entering Illinois but I did not get a picture of that sign as I was turned around taking a picture the other way!  In my defense I had never seen the arch before and it looked super cool!

 The girls seeing our new house for the first time.  They were super excited to finally get here and see it!

 It snowed about 6 inches overnight - the night before the girls were to go to school on that Wednesday.  So D and the girls had to get out there and work to clear off the driveway.  Fortunately, D went and bought the only snow shovels that he could find that night before it got too bad.

 The girls on their first day of school - Audrey wanted to wear this shirt because it would be easy for everyone to know her name! (total aside - this snow pile by the front of our house is in the shade and it did not melt until April!!)

Clearly the girls are southern as they were fascinated by the giant icicles hanging off cars - and they were breaking them off in parking lots!

And back to April in IL...

We moved to IL after what we have been told *repeatedly* was the worst winter EVER!  And even though we moved in March, we still have had several snow episodes.  But it was RIDICULOUS that it snowed in April.  TWICE!

I mean this is on April 15!  And again we are probably the only people in the entire state out playing in the snow before school!

Brooke got to bring home the class "pet" Buddy.  We wrote in his travel journal and took pictures of him as he spent his days with us.  Here he is at Panera Bread.

Here is Buddy eating dinner with us...and here you can see our new kitchen table and if you look closely you can see the new bar stool in the background. (not the offending stool that smashed the cookie's toe)

We have bunnies that come visit our yard pretty much every night around dinnertime.  We have seen as many as three in the yard at one time, but not sure how many there are in total as they all look identical.  There are two in this picture.

 Here are the girls recreating the stuffed animal scene from ET....though they do not know that movie at all as I still remember being traumatized from it.

So that led us to matching up all of the animals into pairs!  Though some of them are just friends and not boyfriend/girlfriend :)

It's So Hard to Say Goodbye!!

(Clearly I have not gotten everything up here and have certainly not gotten it in order.  I will move the dates around at some point to put it chronologically)

Moving this time was super tough. We liked our house.  We liked our neighborhood.  We liked the schools and teachers.  D liked his job.  I liked doing PTO.  We liked the small town (though really a Chipotle and a Noodles added into the mix would have made it perfect-o!).  We liked our church.  We loved our group of friends - both our adult friends and our kids' friends.

Like I said.  Super tough.

Here are some pics of some of our goodbyes.  Didn't get to get pics of everyone since we moved at the end of the Mardi Gras break so some friends were harder to see!

 The girls with sweet Ella Grace!

 Slumber Party Shenanigans!

 Our House

 Saying goodbye to Audrey's teacher Mrs. Knecht

 Saying goodbye to Brooke's teacher Mrs. Thorne

 More slumber party fun with Lauren their best BFF

 Me and Mel

 Me and Hollie

 Me and Dana....and baby boy

 Me and Aimee

 Me and Elizabeth

 Awwwww.  They are so sweet!

 Sweet hugs from Lauren and Robert

The girls with the Musselwhite boys

Spring Break

I am skipping ahead to real time-

The girls had their spring break recently - March 31 - April 4.  The weekend before spring break we had our first playdate with a little girl from Audrey's class.  I am so bad about asking people to do stuff - I really prefer to just be invited all the time.  But apparently in a new area, I was forced to be the person doing the asking.  So I emailed a girl from each of their classes to see if they could have a playdate over the spring break.  Here is what a learned - EVERYONE in IL (and probably all cold climate locations) goes out of town for spring break.  However, the little girl from Audrey's class was able to come over the Saturday before.  The three of them played very well and she seemed so nice.  Her mother also seemed quite nice - sad for me, but she works so I am not sure how much I will see her.  Though she lives just one street over - close enough to walk to when the weather is nice.

As an aside - that is one great thing about going to a small, local elementary school.  Everyone in the school lives in the neighborhood.  So any kid that they want to play with is going to live in our neighborhood. Woot Woot!  (especially for us cause we don't know anyone else!)

Here is our spring break:

 We went to see Mr. Sherman and Peabody.  The girls really loved the movie. In fact I was really surprised as I am sure that they did not get any of the historical references. At. All.

 The girls at Noodles and Co with their new purses.  They are loving them....and I am loving them as they now carry around their Kindles in them when we go out to dinner.  Here is another aside...these purses came from a silent auction charity event that we went to the previous Sunday.  The girls really liked the babysitter and that went very smoothly - thank heavens they are so adaptable!  And each purse in the basket came with a mystery gift card.  What a thrill to find them all - and all were to places to eat, which is right up our alley!

 We went to the Children's Museum one day.  The girls really spent over 45 minutes at this water feature. They had an intense focus on measuring out various "antidotes."  They enjoyed the time there but I feel like they are pretty close to the upper age range for this place.

They also spent a considerable amount of time arranging all of these pieces in a pattern. They put every single piece up on the board!

We learned how to Rainbow Loom over the break!  I can not imagine how any person is able to do these without YouTube.  They started at the single chain and moved up to the three chain and then the fishtail and finally did the starburst.  That one was a challenge!

If you don't want to be grossed out, stop your reading of our spring break adventures!

Wednesday night Brooke pulled over one of our bar stools onto her big toe.  It was AWFUL and I have reaffirmed that  I am a total weenie about blood.  It was super clear that we needed to find an ER ASAP so I googled it and found the closest one. She and Darren headed out.  Overall the trip took about 3 hours.  Most of the time was spent waiting for the x-ray results which were fortunately negative. Here's what basically happened: the top of the stool landed right near the end of her big toe causing her toe nail to be levered out like a catapult and the front end of her toe to explode out sort of like squashing a grape.

Brooke was so funny about the experience though.  She came home so excited to "freak me out" by showing me her toenail....which she did.  Then she was telling me how brave she was and that she did not cry at all.  Which according to D is actually correct.  What she does not mention is that while she did not cry, she was screaming bloody murder when they gave her the numbing shots in her toe bed.  But no crying!

She has done great with it all though.  Getting the two stitches out was a bit tricky but after more screaming and tears it was all done.  Now we are just waiting on the tip to heal up.  But she is super excited that she gets to go back to PE today (4/14).

Here are the gross pics:

The aforementioned toenail that she freaked me out with.  How gross!  And look at all that unpainted nail that was UNDER the skin. 

 The toe.  So so so gross.

Getting Older....

Both me and the girls!  This post is really just some cute mis-sayings that the girls have that I think are so adorable!!  And since they are getting older - which I totally realized last weekend when we were at the mall and the girls were CLEARLY the oldest kids on both the merry-go-round and the kids play area.  and I then I really remembered when I took the girls to the mall when they were itty bitty and I had such mean thoughts aimed at the parents of the giant kids running around trampling the little kids.  And suddenly I realized that I was that parent!! Gosh.

As I was saying - since the girls are getting older, I know that these cute little mis-sayings are going to be replaced with the correct words so soon.  But not by me!  I refuse to tell them that they are wrong.  And since I am getting older, there is no way that I will remember them at all unless they are recorded somewhere.

The girls call Hershey kisses - Horseshoe kisses.

They call their underarms their under-pits.  Such a cute little combination of underarms and arm pits.

For some reason they both say Famember instead of Remember.  I certainly want to famember that!!

They also say esspossed to instead of supposed to.

Brooke especially says erways rather than always!

I am sure there are some other cute ones but I certainly can't remember them now.

Mardi Gras - Kindergarten style

Every year the Kindergarteners put on a Mardi Gras parade.  Each class has a specific krewe theme.  The kids dress up and decorate a wagon based on their theme.  The parade has some of the ROTC from the high school, some of the band, and kids from middle and high school pulling the wagons.  It is a pretty big affair.

The wagons ranged CONSIDERABLY in quality.

I will preface these pics with a few thoughts.  The girls loved their wagons and had a blast decorating them.  To them, they were perfect.  Now in real life, it is clear that I have good ideas but am a fail as far as the actual execution goes.  Audrey's Krewe was the Zoo Krewe and Brooke's was Busy Bees.  We thought - oh a cute cage for Audrey's and some flowers for Brooke (Mrs. Thorne had bee outfits for the kids at school).  Audrey rode with her friend Ella - they were a zebra and a flamingo.

To illustrate this point I will offer these pictures (though I must toot my own horn about my cute text that I added!)

So I am looking pretty good at this point. 

Now here is what it looks like with these same ideas but someone who really excels at execution:

yep.  And here are just a few others that were totally crazy....and I may be just a tad jealous!

Cutie Kids

Here are some random pics that I have yet to get onto the blog.  These are from January to mid February.

 The girls with the J's - looking at the Christmas photo book.  Maybe I'll put this pic in next year's book!

 On a free dress day, the girls decided to be twins!

 The girls with their owl Valentine's boxes....technically only Brooke was required to make one, but Audrey wanted to do hers as well.

 They had crazy hat day as a good behavior reward - how cute are they?

Valentine's Day - they really thought that the shirts were hilarious "I mustache you to be my Valentine."

 Brooke had to do a poster and presentation on a LA animal.  She selected the deer.  She worked so hard on this and did great.  They were given 4 questions to answer - what do they look like, how does their appearance help them, what do they eat, and what is an interesting fact.

 Here are the girls pogo sticking with their friend Ella.  They all got the same pogo stick for Christmas!

For President's Day - Audrey's class did shadows of themselves.  And what a sweet little message she wrote to us!!