Princess Stories V

Hey - who loves Cheez-Its?
Piper: I do!
Lucy: I do!
Dad: I do!
Mom: I do! When I was a very little girl I remember eating Cheez-Its with my grandpa Christianson. My grandpa always had Cheez-Its at his house.
Piper & Lucy: Who's grandpa Christianson?
Mom: He is grandma Deb's dad and he is in Heaven.
Lucy: With grandma Bea, grandpa Claude, grandpa Stern, and grandpa Rick?
Mom: Yep. And grandma Evelyn and grandma Jeanne.
Lucy: What does Heaven look like?
Piper: Heaven is a big big big big big big big field, and it has mountains and some shrubs, and there is a HUGE chair in the middle of the field for God to sit in, and he lays sleeping bags all over the field for the dead people, and he planted trees next to the sleeping bags to give them shade.

What!?! Preschool Graduation Already?

Little Miss Piper has graduated Preschool!!!

Piper and her graduating classmates wore construction paper caps and received Preschool Diplomas! They had a cute processional and very sweet ceremony. Afterward, we took photos and had refreshments. Piper has a thing about her hair (I wonder where she gets this from?) and will only wear a headband. No barrettes, no pony tails and certainly not a construction paper cap with a yarn tassel! As you will see in the pics, she is the only one not wearing the hat and when I made her wear it just once - she was not thrilled.

It almost seems that she has become a Little Girl overnight. At five years old, getting ready for kindergarten, she is no longer our baby, our toddler, our preschooler.
She is our little girl.
Our sweet, beautiful, strong-willed, intelligent, sensitive, witty little girl.

I remember when she was just a few days old and I didn't want to think about her going to kindergarten because it was too far away. In just three short months my baby is going to kindergarten and I wish I was still rocking her to sleep in her nursery.

Puppy Clouds

Yes, I am guilty of using the dvd player in the van as a babysitter. Yea, yea, yea - before having kids I would see soccer moms tooling around in their minivans with their rug rats zoned out watching Toy Story and think "That's Crap! When I was kid ~ my brother, sister and I were crammed into the back seat of dad's piece of shit car with no air conditioning, crank down windows, fighting over who had to sit on the hump, while listening to WCCO. And we survived just fine".
Now that I have children and the luxury of the dvd play - hell yea I'm using it - because as a parent all we want is five minutes of peace and quiet!
Yesterday however I was 'Mean Mommy' and turned the movie off and made everyone listen to a little Acoustic Sunrise on Cities 97. There's nothing better than cruising along on a bright Sunday morning with a hot cup of coffee and Neil Young Long May You Run on radio.
While cruising along, Lucy hollers out "A puppy! There's a puppy out my window"! Then Piper says "It's a poodle"! I quickly look around to see if I'm going to hit the poor little thing and say "I don't see it girls". Lucille then say's "mom he's in the clouds by the hamburgers". I looked up and sure enough the clouds did look like puppies and hamburgers. For the rest of our trip we looked for cloud animals and played the alphabet game and say songs ~ kinda like when I was I kid in my dad's piece of shit car.
I'm sure when the girls grow up they'll remember how they had to sit a spacious minivan with their own seats, and their own temperature controls and automatic doors and windows with a dvd player and headphones and complain about how sometimes I would make them listen to Folk music!