End of gymnastics season

Emily and Elaine have both been doing gymnastics for over a year now, and have really come a long way! Last week was their end-of-the-year show, and I was so proud of how well they did! I didn't get many action shots because I was trying to keep Rebecca off the tumble track and from spilling people's Starbucks (which I failed at preventing her from doing both of those).  Here are some pictures of my sweet gymnasts though!

Mother's Day 2014

This was one of my favorite Mother's Days ever!  The kids were so sweet and all gave me such heartfelt cards and gifts. Nothing was store bought, but everything was perfect. 


I love this letter that Daniel wrote to me.  He is grateful to me for buying milk! Ha! He also loves my cookies and signed it Daniel (your only son). I love that boy so much.


Elaine's poem also made me smile.  "Mom, mom, you live in West Palm and like lip balm. Your so hot you put my food in a pot.  Mommy, mommy, your so sweet your balmy your so calmy. Mama, mama, your a llama comma I did not mean that. Happy Mother's Day."


Lexi gave me these shells with messages on them--I love you, amazing, perfect almost, your my whole world, loving, I like your eyes, you clean up stuff that we do, caring, and hard working.
I don't have a picture of it, but Emily gave me a notebook with pages for each child to write messages to me in.  It's like a scrapbook that they're making for me. So sweet. 

Elaine and Lexi's 9th birthday

We had a family celebration at home for the twins' birthday this year, then had a party with friends the following Saturday.  They invited 6 friends to their party--4 school friends and 2 church friends.  They are such a sweet group of girls!  The kids had a 1/2 day that Saturday for a snow day makeup, so we drove some of the school friends home at lunchtime after school.  We had pizza for lunch, then the girls painted canvases. It was perfect weather to be outside, which worked out great for painting in the screen room. Then we had cake and opened presents, and the girls played some more. It was a perfect little party to celebrate our sweet girls! 

At their 9 year checkup, Elaine was 51 pounds (about 10th percentile) and 50 inches tall (15th percentile). Lexi was 47 pounds (3rd percentile) and 47 inches (3rd percentile).

Strawberry picking, May 2014

Our May visits to Springs Farm are one of my favorite traditions.  There is nothing like a fresh-picked Springs strawberry.  For our first picking trip of the year, we had a busy weekend and had to be at the field to pick at 8am in order to fit everything else in! Each time we go, we get 12 pounds of strawberries and they're gone within 48 hours. Rebecca calls them "cha chas" and at dinner every night she repeats "More cha chas! More cha chas!".

Spring break in Florida, part 3

Since we were just a couple of weeks from Elaine and Lexi's birthday, we had a surprise celebration for them at Grammie and PopPop's.  I love their faces when they walked in and saw their presents and cake!

The girls had picked out these stuffed animals at Costco, but didn't know that Grammie and Emily had snuck out to get them as a surprise.  So much fun.


My mom took off the week that we were there, so we got to do SO many fun things together! Some other highlights of the week were: lots of swimming in the pool, dressing up for a day at the mall, going to see the fish tank that was on an episode of Tanked, eating lots of popsicles, ice cream, and cake.


Another highlight was meeting up with Angie and her 5 kids at a fun park.  It's so crazy that we have been best friends since birth and now we each have 5 kids! We managed to get all 10 in a photo with us. :)


We also dyed Easter eggs, went to several parks, the girls went for manicures and had sewing lessons with Grammie, and the kids spent a ton of time playing with old toys in the garage.  What a fantastic week for all of us!