First Day of School (and other happenings)!

The past few weeks have been very busy for us, so I have a ton of pictures to share today.  The most noteworthy thing is that about an hour ago, we dropped Rebecca off for her first day of school!  We've been wanting to enroll her in a pre-school for a while now so she could get exposure to other kids, learn some things, and give Mike a chance to do some contract work at home.  So, we did a lot of research and dropped her off today.  I'll admit, it was a little heartbreaking.  I do think we chose a place that will take good care of her, she'll be safe, and she'll learn good things...but I do worry that she'll be sad and think we left her.  Hopefully, the good experiences she'll have will outweigh the bad.  Here's a picture of her outside the house before we left.  Note the brand new Minnie Mouse shoes!

Her language skills have been picking up quite rapidly in the past few weeks.  We've added words like ice, purple and oval to the list.  She's funny because she doesn't say some of the common first words like milk or water, but she says cheese and teeth and oval!  and she knows what they mean.  This morning, for the first time, I heard her put two words together.  We were driving up to the school and I said "Rebecca, there's your school can you say hi to the school" and she said "hi school"!  So CUTE!!

She's also amazingly smart at identifying letters and their sounds.  I think she knows about 2/3 of the alphabet by sight now.  I think this is a direct result of all the LeapFrog stuff from Auntie Sheila and Uncle Blair!!  She knows most of the colors and shapes too, but doesn't say them.  

In the past 2 weeks, she has also begun two new classes through the city parks & rec.  A dance class and a music class.

The dance class is not going as well as I hoped.  First, it is called something like "Parent/child ballet tap combo"...so I assumed that I would get to dance too.  I ordered myself some tap shoes and was SO excited.  Well, I got to class on the first day and none of the other moms planned on dancing.  So, I was too embarrassed and left them in my purse.  Then, to top of my disappointment, Rebecca was not so much feeling it.  She did anything but attempt to follow the teacher's direction.  She even was the leader of a revolt at one point.  All the girls were supposed to be standing against a wall waiting for the teacher.  Rebecca makes a mad dash for the other side of the room and 3 or 4 other girls follow her.  That's my girl!

Here are some pics:

Luckily, she seemed to love the music class!  It was singing and hand motions and then the kids got to play some different instruments.  She loved it!

A couple of weeks ago, Mike went out of town for a few days, so I got to be a stay at home mom for a little bit.  It was exhausting, obviously, but also a lot of fun.  Here are a few of the things that we did while Daddy was away:

Making collages

Watercolors

I took her in to my office to fill up some of the time.  She ruled the place!  

Sitting at Mommy's desk looking very perplexed!

Picnic!

Wee!!!

And last but not least, two weekends ago we had some miserably hot weather...way too hot to go outside.  So, I threw us a family indoor picnic...complete with feeding the ducks in the bathtub, games and other fun...it was a blast!