Awesome fall weekend

What a perfect fall weekend! Friday night the girls both had friends over for a sleepover. Saturday Caroline and I started in on making homemade applesauce after her friend left while Margaret continued to play were her buddy.

Saturday afternoon the girls and I went swimming while Jeff was at the Husky game, and we all regrouped at home for pizza night. Sunday we made our annual trek to the pumpkin patch, complete with petting zoo and hay maze.




Sunday evening was the pumpkin carvin' party. Both Margaret and Caroline did almost all of the cutting & carving themselves this year! Very impressive, although a little bit scary...

Fall Recital

The girls had their fall piano recital yesterday. For those of you who might be interested in a taste of their performances, here is a clip of one of each of the girls' songs.

Margaret played two duets with her teacher. This one is called "Shepherd's Song"



And here's Caroline

Soldier it is!

The cast list went up today at noon, and Margaret is quite thrilled to have gotten cast as a soldier again this year. She has three classmates from school who will all be mice, so the odds are good she'll get to pair up with one of them for at least part of the fight scene. The only bad news in all this from my perspective is that our carpool buddies, who were both a couple years older, have graduated out of the fight scene and into a different rehearsal schedule. Sigh....

Gotta do a little bragging...

We're about a month into school, and still a couple weeks away from our fall parent/teacher conferences, but we're just so pleased with how both Margaret and Caroline are doing in school this year that we had to boast a bit. Margaret has shown huge progress in taking on the extra responsibility that comes with 4th grade--she gets her homework done mostly on her own and without complaint, and is doing awesome in all subjects (even her least favorite math). She just finished her first book report --which she got to type on the computer--and is rightly very proud of it. Caroline continues to breeze through the 2nd grade assignments but is beginning to learn what it's like to have a bit of real homework to do each night. You should see the list of challenging spelling words she has each week. She and one other girl are on a separate track for spelling, so instead of words like "over" and "under" she's getting words like "oceanarium" and "characteristics"! She also started her PATS program this week, where she spends 1 day per week at a different school in a class of 8 doing some great advanced & enrichment activities. So far she's LOVING that.
Both girls seem to be enjoying Girl Scouts this year-and are each doing more interesting and exciting activities since they've moved up a level from last year.

Here's a picture of Caroline in her Brownie troop getting ready to make music with water glasses.

Here's a picture of one of Margaret's early art projects/writing assignments this year.

Nutcracker Auditions 2.0

Here we go again...

Waiting to go into the audition.

Roles will be posted next weekend. Mouse? Soldier? Or perhaps Toy? Which will it be? Stay tuned...

Not too old for dress up yet...

When I came home from work Friday afternoon, I found Margaret and Caroline off in their imaginary neverland--a place they haven't gone quite as often now that school has started. Caroline wouldn't pose in her outfit, but Margaret was more than happy to share her "baby elf princess something-or-other"

Watch out Chuck Norris...

Here comes Caroline! Caroline started Tae Kwon Do last week at the YMCA and got the much coveted uniform this week. We're still not entirely sure what sparked her interest, but it seems to be quite a passion already. She's doing great and really seems to be loving it.