ballet

this year, as in the years past, hana is doing ballet camp. but the exciting part for this year is that brooke is doing it too!! it is fun to watch them dance around all dressed up in their ballet outfits! they will have ballet "camp" for 3 more days. at camp each day they learn basic ballet, read stories, and do a craft. then friday they have a performance to show off what they have learned :) so fun.
now time for pictures of the cute girls!

pre-camp hugs :)the whole group (they are on the left... brooke is the small one :)learningdancing with scarvesbrooke making her scarf dancea hana dancefun!

swim swim swim

the girls have been swimming pretty regularly since we joined the wac in march. i just don't blog about it much... the whole nice camera + water thing. well this week they had swim lessons on and off. i say on and off because while we had them scheduled for the whole week, we got rained out twice... and rained on once. so today we did a make up day. and since it was nice and sunny, i brought my camera along to document their progress. hana learned a lot! she can swim! she can lift her head out of the water to breathe... and when she keeps her legs straight she can go pretty fast! brooke also made a lot of progress. she can now swim underwater about 4 feet. at the beginning she didn't even want to put her head under. now she can jump in and swim.

hana swimming with the noodlelifting her head (she can do it without the noodle too)brooke going underunder some more :)
after swim lessons...
brooke playing in the waterhana diving under to get a water toymadeline standing on the edge :)

thanks for teaching them lessons hilary!

check out their improvement from the last 2 years. last year 1. last year 2. two years ago 1. two years ago 2. man they have grown over the last 2 years! time flies!!

brooke busts

as we were coming out of the pool (here, not on vacation), brooke trips and falls flat on her face. her mouth was bleeding quite a lot... this is the result :) a post-vacation nap for daddy and brooke :)

our first EVER family vacation

i have wanted, for a long time, to take a family vacation. i enjoy making memories with extended family, but i felt it was very important to start making memories of our own! a couple of months ago i got an email with a great deal for a hotel in myrtle beach... so we decided to take a family vacation! i had pretty high expectations for the trip :) i know for sure the girls had a wonderful time. they loved loved all of the pools! they swam and swam and swam. we had planned to go out to diner thursday night, but they chose to stay in and get takeout so they could swim some more.
for the parents of the trip, however, there were some stressful times. not knowing exactly what to expect or exactly how to plan, we overlooked a few things. so when we do it in the future, we will be better equipped. and we do plan to do it for many years to come. this may not have been the best year, but we had to start some where!

here are a few pictures, i didn't take that many since all they did was swim and i am a little leery of having my expensive camera near water. which is why they are wearing the same bathing suits in all but one of the pictures, i took them all this morning! :)

playing at the beach
(we spent thursday morning on the beach)
brooke decided to poop on the beach... uh huh nice (there are no pictures of that!!)getting ready to swim in the indoor poolloving it!
brooke playingstill swimmingmy favorite pool... the lazy river!hana enjoying the lazy river :)lest we forget... madeline was there too :)

i guess i could sum up the time by saying, it was a training vacation for the vacations to come!

hana graduates :)

... from pre-k.


they had a small program in their room on the last day of school. then a fun day! what a great way to end the year! be prepared for picture overload!!

singing in the class programhana and her "diploma"hana's best school friend... avabeautiful hana!then off to fun day! there were a lot of outside stations they were able to rotate between.

the water table...the bouncy house...bubbles...picture station (a half second after this picture, hana pulled down the banner and fell :)waiting for the bean bag tosstossing...

an underwater adventure!

i can't believe this year is over!! i feel like it just started!! my little baby is ready for kindergarten!

new happenings :)

i realize that it has been over a week since my last blog. this is just how things are sometimes. it goes for a while with nothing "blog worthy" then i will have a lot at once. the latter is what is happening now. there are a couple of things coming up in the next week that i will be blogging as well.
so this weekend a lot was going on...

• saturday, i ran in the morning. i haven't been running as much over the last few months. i picked it back up a couple of weeks ago. i have been working out. but since we have joined the gym, i haven't been running. i have still been doing cardio (and weights and pilates...) so i thought it wouldn't be that hard to pick back up. my first 30 min run back i thought i was going to die!! so i did a couple of light interval days to get back with it. and that worked pretty well because saturday was my first longer straight distance and i ran 2.9 miles (just what the course allowed) in 27 minutes... not too bad ;) i hope to run some more races in the near future.

• then we went to a pool birthday party. it was great! i have no pictures, so you can't see how fun it was. but trust me... fun times!

• a not so fun thing happened saturday evening. i got stood up for a photo session... more on that on my photo blog!
  

• sunday we did another no-tv sunday. it is going well. not as strict and stressful as the first weeks. the kids enjoy it :) we played candy land and took a walk/ bike ride.

shots from candy landonce someone wins, the people get to eat all the candy in candy land!2 pictures from this morning

brooke pushing madeline in the swing

that is all for today, more to follow later this week :)