Birthday cupcakes at daycare

I love that I get out of work at 3:30 (hypothetically speaking - it doesn't always happen every day) because I was able to be at Raegan's daycare during cupcakes for her birthday last Thursday. My mom and I found some great tutorials on YouTube for making Sesame Street cupcakes, so I decided to make the Cookie Monster ones for her daycare celebration.

Gah! Beyond adorable, right? :)

Waiting to sing Happy Birthday. Raegan was chowing down on her apples (regular snack) while she waited. She actually ended up finishing her apples before she even started on the cupcake. What a girl!

Angie got Raegan a Mrs. Potato Head for her birthday.

"Thanks, Angie."

Nomnomnom, good cupcake!

Here you go, Mom!

Going back to daycare sure does wear a girl out!

Update on my smarties!

Whew! Another busy week over. Between that and no internet (or cable) from Wednesday through Friday (ugh!) I haven't had a chance to blog. Lots of updates though.

Zane finished his math state assesments this week. He did the reading ones about a month ago, and got an exemplary (highest category you can get) on those! We should find out his math score pretty soon. This week in band, his teacher told him that he had the potential to be the best trumpet player in the class. There are 11 trumpets in the sixth grade band, so that's a pretty high compliment. Zane took this to mean that he doesn't need to practice as much anymore (ha!) Teenagers and their logic sometimes....

Zane's science fair is on Tuesday. He and one of his classmates made an air cannon. They aren't allowed to actually shoot it off at the science fair (thank God!) so we have to videotape Zane and Ajay shooting it at home and then load it to YouTube so that they can play it on a laptop at their display table. I'll post the video once we take it.

Raegan still doesn't care to watch cartoons on television (which is just fine with me!) but she was absolutely fascinated when I was watching a little bit of Dancing with the Stars last Monday. She said "Whoa!" and stopped to watch, then started twirling around in circles. Twinkle, Twinkle has been replaced by Itsy Bitsy Spider as her favorite song. She does these hugely exaggerated movements for "down came the rain" and it's adorable. She also loves playing Ring Around the Rosy, especially if the whole family will join in with her.

Raegan knows many body parts now. She names eye, nose, mouth, teeth, and knee, and she can point to all of those, plus ear, hair, neck, hand, arm, foot, leg, and belly. She loves showing her belly! :) She knows the noises that a horse, bear, lion, bird, dog, cat and sheep make, and she loves reading any book that has animals or babies in it. Raegan's big obsession right now is babies. A six month old girl started at daycare a couple weeks back, and Raegan is CRAZY about her. Raegan already says her name, and Angela said that she likes to give her pats on the back and always wants to give Angela the diaper when she needs to change the baby. Yesterday when we went grocery shopping, Raegan kept asking "Baby?" and looking around every aisle we went down. We only saw one baby in the whole store, but she sure was looking.

Pictures and videos to come.....

Another zoo trip!

Yesterday, Raegan, Zane and I met up with Raegan's daycare at Rolling Hills. I was excited for my first field trip with Raegan's daycare, and it turned out to be a lot of fun! I had never been to the museum there before - it's very nice. They've changed things so that the admission price covers the museum and the zoo, so we were able to do both. Zane did an awesome job of helping with the little kids and he made himself some new admirers. ;)

Raegan with all of her daycare buddies. (You can click on it to see it larger!) It warmed my heart how happy they all were to see her when we walked up!

 Raegan loved the little counting bears in the play area. One of her new things is to count, but she always counts, "two, two, two" as she points to objects. :)

Zane enjoyed the computer game where you could put different animal parts together to make a new animal. He entertained a couple of the older girls with that.

Raegan did the nervous lip biting thing during most of the museum. She's always kind of shy at first whenever we go to a new place.

Okay, that's the extent of the pictures I'm going to share, because every time I try to upload another one, it says that there is a server error. Oh well. I think you get the jist of the good time we had!

A request

There's a boy at Raegan's daycare who is only a month or so younger than Raegan. A couple months back they discovered a mass on his liver, and after further testing they determined that he has a rhabdoid tumor. If you click the link or google "rhabdoid tumor" you can learn more about it, but in a nutshell it's a highly aggressive malignant tumor that's very rare. It's believed to be genetically passed, and it only occurs in very young children. Apparently it's very resistant chemotherapy, and the prognosis is very poor.

I've known about the mass for several months now, but our child care provider updated me last week to let me know that this is pretty serious. At this point he's going to be at Angie's very infrequently because they are going back to Children's Mercy to do more chemo. If they still have no success, they will be going on to St. Jude's to look at other options.

My heart just breaks for this family right now. It really hits close to home for me, because (1)he's one of Raegan's "friends" at child care, and (2) he's pretty much the same age as Raegan. When Angie was telling me about the poor prognosis for this type of tumor, I was holding Raegan and I could feel myself just start to hold her tighter. I cannot even imagine how I would cope with something so horrifying. I honestly don't even want to imagine a scenario like this.

So all of this being said, please keep this family in your thoughts and prayers right now. If you would like to read about the efforts in the community to help the family, you can go here. If you are local and are reading this, please consider attending the auction and dinner that is being held in Brookville on Sunday, January 30th. If you read through the whole article I linked to above in this paragraph there's more information about the dinner. This family is facing a long uphill battle and even the seemingly smallest bit of help would be beneficial to them.

Back again!

Long time, no blog. It's been another hectic week at work, and I've been tending to veg out in the evenings. My goal to run a 3 mile race on Thanksgiving morning is being challenged by my laziness, so I need to start getting off my butt again. Tomorrow. :)

Tonight was Family Fun Night with Raegan's child care. I didn't get any pictures, which I am majorly disappointed about, but the camera fell out of the diaper bag and was out of commission during the festivities. Angela said she does these a couple times a year, and she just rents out the Friendship Center here in town so there's enough room for all of us. She had a bean bag toss, corn and scoops, ink and stampers, flashlights and a sheet in a dark room, some puzzles, and a table with a train track. Raegan mostly wanted to practice her fabulous walking skills, but she did spend a lot of time at the corn and in the dark room walking back and forth through the sheet. We decided it was time to go when halfway through eating some crackers and cheese she started bawling hysterically. (It was almost 7:30 at that point, which is her typical bedtime.) You know there's something wrong if Raegan is crying instead of eating! hahahaha

So instead of pictures of Famly Fun Night, I'm posting a couple pictures of Raegan coloring at the desk my mom found at a garage sale. Raegan decided today that she LOVES coloring. She was quite put out when it was time to go back upstairs because she was having so much fun.

Ouch!

Another milestone today, although not as great as other new things....


Raegan had her first accident at child care. :( Really her first accident that left much of a mark. The kids were using the tumbling mat because they couldn't got outside this morning, and a little boy flipped Raegan off of it when he tried to crawl underneath it. She's got a little rug burn, but it keeps looking better as the night goes on. I really hope it's gone by Sunday or we're going to have to reschedule her one year pictures.

Almost....

Tomorrow my baby girl turns one. Has it really already been a year? A year ago right about now I was really starting to get into the painful part of things. Don't miss that time at all!

Raegan's birthday party with family won't be until Saturday, but I am taking cookies to her child care provider tomorrow for her to share with the kids. I didn't want to take cupcakes, because I don't want her first cake experience to be with someone else. :) So here's what I was working on this evening.....


They never quite turn out like I want them to in my head, but I was fairly pleased with the finished result. I'm going to ask Angela tomorrow is she can take a picture of Raegan eating her cookie for me. She's never really had very much sugar before, so hopefully she doesn't go crazy tomorrow afternoon!

Another week done

Well, Zane made it through his first week of school, and Raegan and I through our second week of child care/work. Zane's only had a little bit of homework so far, but next week it's going to pick up, at least in band. He's supposed to be practicing 100 minutes a week, which is a pretty significant jump from 60 minutes a week last year. In attempting to *nudge* my husband into being more responsible for Zane, I'm leaving all trumpet practice and signing of practice sheets up to him. I really hope that both Zane and Luke can keep up with it, and that Zane's grade doesn't suffer too horribly. :) I started this new trend over the summer, and Zane practiced maybe once a week, and you can hear it in his quality of playing these days. Hopefully now that he's back in school they will both be on the ball a little more.

Raegan is adjusting really well to child care. Yesterday and today she leaned out of my arms to go to Angela, which while that's a really good thing, it did make me sad for just a moment. At the end of every day though she's very excited to see me, and that's a really nice feeling. I love the fact that they go outside every day (in the early morning and she has a very shaded backyard), and they went on a walk whichever day this week was cooler. However, I'm pretty sure Raegan will always love her Granny Nanny the best. :)

Raegan's first day of child care

I finally got those pictures uploaded, so here's Raegan on her first day of child care:

August 9, 2010

My baby is growing up. *sigh*