Growing Up

"There are three things that are important in human life. The first is to be kind.  The second is to be kind.  The third is to be kind."

"Be kind because although kindness is not by a long shot the same thing as holiness, kindness is one of the doors that holiness enters the world through, enters us through -not just gently kind but sometimes fiercely kind."

Frederick Buechner, "Growing Up"


Happy Friday

Molly is FIVE

I was on the verge of tears about a million times today because of this kid.  

 She made me a mom 5 years ago today.  She is a source of absolute pure joy in my life.  Sometimes when I watch her try new things or just be her everyday awesome self it hurts because of how much I feel for her.  As she gets ready for Kindergarten to start next week I have all kinds of anxiety that I never thought I'd feel.  I don't want to let go of her, not even a little bit.  I can't stand the thought of not knowing what she's doing and sharing in all of her wonderful moments throughout the day.  

I hope that she is always as full of joy as she was today.  That she always loves "her" day as much as she did even though it didn't totally work out the way we thought it would.

I hope we will always have fun moments like today even when she's older and I'm totally not cool to her anymore.

As if today wasn't exciting enough, she topped it all off with losing her first tooth.

and then her and Violet laughed and played together at the pool and crashed on the way home.  

they are literally my whole world.

Update

Lets face it... I haven't written in this blog for ages but in an effort to organize my life and reflect on progress in all areas I thought I might start writing a bit more.

First of all... our kids, they're growing like fricken weeds.  Today Violet cried for almost 20 minutes because she didn't want to grow up.  It was heartbreaking and hilarious all at the same time.  I had to convince her of all the wonderful things that happen when you become a "big girl" and she kept on saying she didn't want to be a big girl and wanted to go back to being a baby.  Let's face it if I didn't feel like I had to be the parent in that moment I would have been crying right alongside of her.  

We went to finding Dory over Nels' holidays and it was SO FUN.  Violet might have been a tad young  (she's 2 weeks short of being 3) but Molly is a breeze at the movies.  

We also did our second annual baseball game in Okotoks on Father's day.  The kids did awesome and it was fun to be with lots of family.

Our yard is coming along so well this summer.  One day if I have time I'm going to take a million pictures so I can remember what this summer looked like.    We planted more trees, landscaped the front and seeded some more grass.   Here are a few pics of early spring after some planting.  

I can't really do a yard update without mentioning the garage that Nels built in the fall.  Not only has it been awesome for storage and for the cars... it's made our yard look much more complete as we wait for our trees to fill out a bit more.  

In the early spring I figured one of our first "yard" projects should be painting our play structure.  It looks great but it was a terrible process.  It basically took almost 2 full days by the time we got every little corner.  I am super happy that it is done and it looks awesome.

My theme for the inside of our house this year was "Let it go".  Being busy with work and kids and family and friends allowed me to really pull back on house projects and it was actually really fun to just enjoy what we have and not obsess over things.  I thought I'd add a pic of one of my favourite things Nels built this year.  I got the idea from here and after having it pinned for months Nels whipped it up one afternoon and now the kids have some awesome storage for their dress-up clothes. It looks so cute and we've recently added a homemade frame on the other side of the couch that looks awesome.  I'll share that later.

Ok, I'd say that's a semi complete update of our lives:)  Happy July!!