Mommy and me

I made myself this top a few weeks ago but had enough to make a little one. A few night ago I decided to foolishly going to bed in a decent hour and made it. K decided we both had to wear it for her class breakfast and so we did. How fitting too since she read her paper about how I am the greatest mom. How ironic that it comes during the week I've been alone with the kids (Daddy is on a business trip), a week that I will admit that I've been the opposite of being the best mom.

Matching with me made K very happy. I think she feels very mature.

I love you, K.

We can't look alike!

A couple of weeks ago, J got a shorter haircut. She loved it and she said everyone else loved it too. Daddy and I thought for sure that no one would mistake them for each other and people would appreciate that.

This week K finally got her haircut. We tried to make it different, like no bangs, but really, how different can we make the haircut without cutting drastically ? 

J got mad and said, "Mommy, she looks like me!!!" 

The next day Big M confided to Daddy quietely that he now has trouble telling them apart. Daddy told him to keep that fact to himself or his sisters will get upset.

On another day when I took the younger 3 out, they were running around playing.  Little M needed to quickly get J's attention so he yelled out , "J! J! J!" After the 5th time and J wasn't turning to face go , he realized he must have been mistaken. So he yelled out instead, "Sister! Sissssssssssterrrrrrrrrr!"

more christmas eve choir

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The first mass for Christmas was 4pm on Christmas Eve. We were supposed to be there 30 minutes before in order for the choir to have a quick practice. I thought that was enough time to get seats, but apparently most everyone thought the same because by the time we got to church people were already standing. We ended up separated but thankfully, the girls were able to sit in the choir area.

Children's Choir

J and K have joined our church's children's choir that began in mid-October. They practice for just a few minutes right before our mass starts so it's completely no pressure for the kids. This is the Christmas  Eve mass. We are a very proud!

class breakfast and 1st grade paper

Miss K's class had a breakfast for the parents where each student read their first paper. Little M and I made it and listened eagerly. K wrote about the excitement about her 6th birthday where she described the party, presents and a surprise visit from her Nana & Papaw. We loved it! 

sewing for my twins

I made these 2 monkeys peasant tunics and asked them to pose. They shall be models when they grow up.

Holey smile

Nothing happened for a long time after K lost her 3 bottom teeth. But then #3, #4, #5 came out in a week and a half. We are pretty sure the tooth fairy is now broke. Oh and yeah, we can't take K seriously now.

Drama

Yet another accomplishment for K and J was their year-end production "Paradesia". Two weeks before the show their teacher approached me and asked if they had been practicing their lines. I sheepishly admitted that we haven't been practicing at all. After that we practiced several times a day. On the last class practice, their teacher again approached me and said not only did they know their lines, they knew other people's lines as well. Yay K and J !!! I am very proud of them.

The performance was awesome! Hey said their lines "loud and proud" and we had no difficulty hearing them. Not many people know the hard word that was put into it, but worked very very hard. I was grinning from ear to ear while watching. 

Again, the medal they received at the end was such a reward for them. Bravo!

recent pictures

Miss K with her new dress I made for her.

Daddy & Mini Me (Little M)

Daddy & 3 kids.

Little M was put on time out. "Again?," he asked. Yup. Again.

mortality and 5-year olds

Once in a while J is preoccupied with the subject of getting old and dying. She has equated old age to near dying, so she comes up to me and sometimes says, "Mommy, I don't want you to die." She really means to get old and die. I have explained to her that everyone dies, but she doesn't understand that yet and it doesn't help her. So I've gone to saying, "Mommy will live long so I can take care of you." That answer she is happy with.

Today, K same up to me after we were cleaning up our little craft. She looked at the big pack of crafting gems and said, "Mommy, when you die I want to keep these. You have a million of them!"

These girls are identical twins, yet so different from each other. They keep me on my toes.

Look out, world. The Collins brook is taking over!

I can hardly believe that 3 of my children are off to school. My girls in kindergarten, who would have thought. I remember the assembly-line process of changing and feeding them as infants, and now they are in school. I can't even remember the in-between.

K, Big M, J looking like rock stars! They were all excited.

We were outside waiting for the bus about 10 minutes before our scheduled pick-up. Of course we knew that buses would be late with parents trying to figure things out and taking pictures. Little M had to have a backpack too. What he didn't know was that he wasn't going in the bus, so it was a big tantrum. He "wand machu, dodo and tatie!" Then he cried and cried after Daddy left for work. After that he started asking for everyone, like his Nana!

Little M and I headed to school for the parent coffee, but we arrived there much earlier than the kids. I got to see K find her class. She saw me and waved with a big smile in her face.

Then I saw J. She is all smiles here but as they marched to their classroom, she wanted to make sure that I could pick her up from school. I had to remind her that she is riding the bus but that I would be waiting at the bus stop. She had the saddest look in her face after waiving goodbye but she marched on. She is wearing a picture necklace of her and me, and Daddy and her. I told her she could look at the pictures when she felt sad.

After running some errands, Little M and I had lunch together at a local restaurant. We had Bacon, scallion, spinach quiche and sweet potato soup. He loved the food. He was a handful, and it took a while for him to stop asking for everyone but we did enjoy our meal together.

Playmates

These 3 have been playing together a lot lately. Little M has become the girls' boyfriend, baby, and whatever else they need him be. Little M will miss them terribly, and miss his big brother a lot when school starts next week.

Incidentally, this picture was right after K's pinky (she's on the left) was pinched in the door when Big M closed it. Yup, the door was fully closed. Half of the last segment of her pinky was black after I scrambled to open the door. After a few minutes, it turned dark red. I was doing good, panicking by myself and the kids for a while until the red wouldn't go away. I finally called Daddy and he drove home. He was thankfully not busy or had just finished what he was doing so he decided to come home in case I needed to take K to the urgent care.

It's not obvious but K is holding a bag of peas to the side.

Strawberry shortcake

K's bedroom has strawberry shortcake wall decals so I wanted to embroider one for her. Using a t-shirt I found on clearance at Walmart, it is a very personalized shirt. I printed a coloring page from the Internet, scaled it, and traced it into a tear-away shirt stabilizer. I then hand-wrote her name on a separate sheet of stabilizer and voila!

spring garden

We are a little late with our flower garden this year. The kids planted some perennial flower seeds and hopefully this will be a success like last year. It was so successful last year that the marigold grew to 3 feet. I'm not well versed with plants, but I don't think marigolds are supposed to grow that big.

I also planted a couple of my Mother's Day roses that surprisingly started growing! It would be great if they flourished and make that special day even more memorable.

face painting at home

J and K loved their face paint so much, they kept asking me to check if it was still on or whether it has disappeared. After a billion times, I told them to check with each other instead.

The girls also asked me to paint another one on Little M after his was completely rubbed off. And this is what happened when I showed it to him for the first time.

Thank God for keeping us safe.

At around 11 today, I decided to try to fry wings which I have never done before. I even looked online on how to do it. On a small sauce pan with about 2 inches of oil, I started frying the first batch of wings....frozen. It wasn't a problem until I put in a 2nd batch and trouble started. It started bubbling and immediately ignited very high into the cabinets. I grabbed the pan out of stove but the fire continued. The fire was so big, I knew there was no way for me to put it out. But I still thought about it in the seconds the followed. I thought about wetting a rag and draping it over the fire, but just as instantly as the thought came, I knew not to use water on grease fire and electric fires.

In the instant that fire ignited, I must have yelled fire because my smart sweet daughter, K, opened the door and  went outside and behind her was J. While the fire alarm was yelling, "Fire, Fire, Fire!", I saw the flames get smaller and smaller until it was gone. I got my daughters back in, and then started running around opening windows. There happen to be gardeners right outside our window that were oblivious to the fire alarm until I opened the windows. They stared at me, so I yelled, "It's ok! I was cooking and fire ignited and now there's no fire but the alarm is going!"

When the alarm finally stopped, I checked my little 2-year old on the monitor still safely napping upstairs. I was ready to grab run up and grab him but thank goodness it didn't come to that.

I am so very proud of K leading the way to go outside. I didn't ask her to do it, but she did it. That on it's own probably lessened my panic a bit, since I only had to grab Little M if I had to. Thank goodness for the grease fire dying down on it's own. Thank God for keeping us safe.

With the adrenaline rush going down a little bit, I found myself shaking. I finally picked up my phone to call hubby (he took Big M to his soccer game). The problem was, my phone turned itself off and wouldn't turn back on. What an unreliable phone I had!! Not good, especially for not having a land line.

After reassuring me, hubby "scolded" me about frying something cold/wet. He reminded me that I had once told him not to ever do that, and then here I was doing the same thing. The problem was, I had let my guard down. After the first batch of wings without a problem, I didn't think that the oil was now much hotter.

Thank you, God! Thank you, God!

I have soot to clean out from the cabinets and the wall, but there isn't any damage. The fire was big, but it was so fast, and died fairly quickly.

I am so very proud of my daughters!!! We had only talked about what to do in case of fire probably two times, since we moved here 3 months ago, and yet that was enough.

my little beauties

Before we left Texas, we've already paid for their dance recital costumes and the recital fees. The girls' teachers were nice enough to ship the costumes to us to at least be able to play dress up with them. K and J are both bummed about not being able to dance at the "show". They both love dancing and have already asked me if I am looking for a new dance place for them.

Sick kids and the dutiful littlest brother

Last week Big M came home sick and missed 2 days of school. Little M kepy him company. Today K came home sick, and Little M is keeping her company too.

Murphy Maize Days

We took the kids to a community festival, Murphy Maize Days, mainly because I LOVE corn and so we just HAVE to be there. I had a grand plan of eating anything and everything corn. Thankfully they also had a lot of fun stuff for the kids.

This was a fun shot with all the scarecrows. At the end of the shot, J and K went to inspect the old lady scarecrow (the one Big M is standing next to) and inspected it. J then started squeezing what would have been the boobies. I had no idea what she was doing and why. 

They also had fun inspecting the fire truck. (J is wearing a flower shirt).

Not too long ago, Big M was obsessed with fire trucks. While he still enjoys them, he couldn't answer me when I asked what kind of fire truck this was. I guess fire trucks are a thing of the past for him.

J heads up the trek all the way up this Gorilla bounce slide.

K screaming all the way down.

This is Little M attempting to climb this wall. He never really made it up but a few feet because he couldn't coordinate both his arms and legs to climb up. He was using his arms mainly which tired him out within minutes. K and J were in line at first too because they really wanted to climb. But after seeing a small girl being stuck because she couldn't climb up anymore and yet she was too light for the rope to get her down, I decided the girls shouldn't try this one at all.  

sewing for my girls

The girls are in a ballet/tap dance combination class and they love it. They need to take both shoes with them to class so they needed a little bag. I looked into some cheap bags but then I saw a pattern for a cinch bag that was so easy to make. So instead of buying them bags, I made one for them.  I also had to make one for Big M, but not too girly of course. For Big M I used a Navy military pattern fabric. That was a big hit.

J is on the left with the flower bag, and K is on the right.

Weeks later, I found a very simple skirt pattern online so I used the remaining fabric. So cute!

But then I had to make them a pair of shorts from a very thin liner fabric so that they didn't show their souls to everyone while wearing the skirts.