Libby and the Sewing Machine

Libby has been asking for a sewing machine for a couple of years now. She turned 7 in October, which I thought was still kind of young and she tends to have a low frustration tolerance. :p
She got a sewing machine from Santa this year. Since yesterday, she has made two bags and a pillowcase and she is working on an ipod case for daddy.
The first two, I sat on the couch while she worked and told her what to do next and helped with pinning only. The second two, she has done completely by herself. :D
She looks like she was born at the sewing machine.

Caroline got a Christmas Card

Caroline got a Christmas card from Ursula today. Ursula and her husband are the ones that run the Alpine Dancers. She is in charge of the children's group.
This is what the card says:

Dearest Caroline,
I would like to tell you how special you are to all of us!
When you read the Santa Claus story to us at the Chrismas Party, it seemed a Little Angel had appeared! You did such a wonderful job!
I am so proud of you!
Thank you so much!
I enjoy watching you dance and having so much fun. Stay sweet!
All my love,
Miss Ursula

So, what do you do when you have seven kids ranging in age from 6-19?

You arm them all.
I had Ken make 10 of these (7 for the kids and 3 for wannabe kids) for Christmas Eve when we will have 18 people at my house.
I wonder how many bags of mini-marshmallows I will need.
Notice the advanced laser sighting devices on some of them. ;) I found LED rings at US Toys for 89 cents each.

Shepherd's Feast Menu

This will be our menu for Chrismtas Eve. We will be having a Shepherd's Feast again this year, but with a few more people! We will have the six of us, my parents, my sister Jackie and her husband Eric, HIS parents and I believe his grandmother and my other sister, Barb, her husband and three kids.
That's quite a crowd for a gathering of Reed's. ;) (Have we EVER had that many in one place at the same time?!)

Artichoke
Olives
Pita Bread
Hummus
Oranges
Pomegranate
Figs
Dates
Almonds
Feta Cheese
Wine

(we will also throw in Summer Sausage, Cheddar Cheese and crackers for those that can't survive without meat or "regular" food).

Jackie, do you want to take care of the wine? My challenge last year was finding wine from that region. :p Maybe you will have better luck.
Mom, why don't you bring the "regular" food.

Grumpy Santa Claus

Caroline read a Christmas book to the party goers at the Alpine Dancers Christmas Party. This is especially significant because she is the one that is timid in crowds and with strangers. She LIKED reading in a microphone!

A public apology to Holly (and my father)

I am so sorry Holly. Joseph thought he was emailing his cousin (which is really weird because he has never HAD his cousin's email address ).
He was sharing the fact that my dad (his grandfather) had three enemas today at the hospital.
This is what the email said:

Bill Gets A Tube In His Bottom

Sorry dad.

New Blog

I created a new blog for the Big Head pictures, so if you want to see anymore of them, you will have to check that one out. ;)
Big Heads

This is amazing to me

Libby asked for help on how to make a cursive "r" and "s" because she hasn't learned those yet. And she asked how to spell "small".
What amazing progress in 3 months!


(It says: The dog is small. The cat is big. The cat ran. The dog ran.)

Alex has new wheels!

Alex's dad called on Thursday night to tell him that he was going to be in town on Friday and he would take him to CarMax and buy a new car! This is a pretty big relief for all of us. The Lincoln has been leaking oil all over the street and it's automatic inflater thingies had stopped doing there thing, which led to a lot of bottoming out, which in turn led to more oil on the street. :p

So, he came home with a 2008 Toyota Yaris with 6,000 miles on it! Congratulations Alex!

Dallas Cowboys at Scottish Rite Hospital

Photobucket Album

Dallas Cowboys

The previous post is a an entire album. If you click on the picture, you will be able to see all 20 pictures from the Cowboys visit to Scottish Rite today. There were 9 football players and 4 cheerleaders there today!

Plano Christmas Parade

Today was the Plano Christmas Parade and it was a total family event for us. :D We don't have many chances anymore for all six of us to be in the same place at the same time....just take Thanksgiving. :p
We did a Polar Express theme for our "float". The kids wore their pajamas (which caused a lot of comments and exclamations from the parade watchers), drank Hot Chocolate and had giant jingle bells for the "first gift of Christmas". We played the Polar Express song on our old boombox (which Alex tells me no one calls it that anymore.)
Here are the kids getting ready to go. It was our three and our friends Alex, Alia and Ben.


Another view (and this one you can see our driver ;))....


The Heard Museum let us borrow their flatbed pick-up truck and one of their employees for our big day. He even wore the engineer cap.

The Trash Tree

Well, maybe the Recycled Tree would be a nicer way to say it.
This is our tree for the Plano Christmas Parade tomorrow. All of the ornaments were made out of recycled paper (Williams-Sonoma catalog, Christmas cards, paper towel rolls, etc.)

The Wall-E "Tree"

We bought Wall-E last week and I submitted the information online to get the little "tree" and it came today.
It looks like someone snipped off a 6 inch branch off of a Christmas tree (and put it in a little tiny burlap sack).
It got here in less than a week! And a holiday in there!
The kids thought it should be in a boot. ;)

Early Christmas?

Today at Scottish Rite, while Joseph and Caroline were hard at work on their math, one of the Child Life people approached us to let us know that there was an event up in Child Life. They had a bunch of members of Texas Auctioneers up there, a ton of toys and piles of monopoly money. They gave the kids money and let them bid on toys like a real auction.
My kids were a bit intimidated at first because of the auction chant, but they still managed to get away with some great stuff. ;)
Joseph got a digital watch and he got an IDog for Libby. Caroline got two little journals, a hair doo-dad kit and some kind of electronic game.
I have a feeling that this won't be the last time this month that we end up with a pile of stuff when we come home from Libby's school.
Because of how Scottish Rite is set up, whenever there is any kind of event, they are always begging us to attend (it is set up as clinics, so on a daily basis they never really know what kids are available for the fun stuff). So Joseph and Caroline get to reap the benefits of Libby being in class.

Joseph's Head

I got around to doing Joseph's head this weekend while Ken was hard at work on our kitchen floor (which is very close to being complete!) I am so lucky to have such a handy husband. :D



And here is the whole big head gallery to date.

I used the 50% off coupon from Michael's to get a projector

So, of course, I had to try it out.

Our Last First Lost Tooth!

A few weeks after Libby lost her first tooth, Caroline has lost her first tooth. That's our last first tooth in the family!
Just like Libby though, the big tooth came in BEHIND the baby tooth, so there is no gap.

Another big giant head picture....

I finished Caroline's painting the other day. I used a lower value on the posterization and the photo was a lower resolution. The result was that Caroline's was much easier, but the results are very different.



Here is the original photograph that I used...

The Capitol

I teach a class at our co-op for Joseph's age group. Actually, it is two classes in one. Half of the time we are doing a literature unit (The Whipping Boy) and the other half we are doing American Government.
Today, we talked about Capitols and looked at pictures of the capitols in Washinton and Austin then I had the kids make postcards of whichever one they wanted. Joseph's has some major detail!

Frobscottle

The kids are reading The BFG, by Roald Dahl for school right now and loving it. Today, we made Frobscottle (the drink of giants) for them to drink. The initial reaction was "OOOOOH GROSS!! I'M NOT DRINKING THAT", but they love it.
Roald Dahl describes Frobscottle as:
And oh gosh, how delicious it was! It was sweet and refreshing. It tasted of vanilla and cream, with just the faintest trace of raspberries on the edge of the flavour. And the bubbles were wonderful

The recipe for Frobscottle, should you want to try it, is:

1 cup of milk
1 1/2 cups of Sprite (we used Ginger Ale)
1 T. Raspberry sauce (we used a Triple Berry ice cream topping and I used more than the recipe called for)
1 tsp. Vanilla

We put it in the blender and added ice.
Joseph also decided we needed to add green food coloring since it was supposed to be pale green.

Letters to the new president

Joseph and Caroline wrote letters to our new president-elect today for National Handwriting Day.

Joseph's reads:

Dear Mr. Obama,
I think you should send the soldiers back home.
Joseph R. Davis
P.S. I can't wait 'till you write back.


Caroline's says:
Dear President Obama,
Help the world! You can do it, we can help.
Love,
Caroline Davis

(Apparently, Caroline's world can be fixed by Home Depot.)

I painted a picture today

Alex showed me how to do a technique that he learned at school.
Here is the photo:



and here is my painting (the upper right hand corner is not finished yet because hair is a pain in the butt!)


The picture is 24x30".

Monday, Monday.....

No pictures today...my memory card is missing (Alex is still looking for it).

Today marked the day that the official "Take Flight" curriculum started at Scottish Rite for Libby. The last nine weeks they have been working on phonemic awareness. Her homework up until now has been only to read to her for 15 minutes per day.
Now, though, she has to practice her cursive handwriting, do her RAP (which has nothing to do with the music genre ;)) and practice her sight words (but they have a different term for them). Today, she practiced writing lowercase p's and b's in cursive. She is very proud of herself for learning cursive before Joseph. ;)

Oh, on the way to SR this morning, Joseph vomited out of the blue with no warning. Luckily, we were earlier than usual so we had time to stop at Target at Cityplace and buy a new tshirt and blue jeans. Joseph's comment, "I never knew that something so cute could come from something so gross." (He liked his new Madagascar 2 tshirt.

Pioneer Dresses

I will post more about what we did today later on, but I wanted to share these little dresses that I made last night for the girls. They were SO simple! Ken and I went out to dinner, ran some errands and then I came home and made them.
The girls love them and they got TONS of compliments today.
Miss Madeline Peasant Dress

The Nasher today

Head with Blue Shadow, originally uploaded by Chris Inside.

Can I just tell you how much fun it is to have a 6,7 and 8 year old?! This morning, Ken had to leave REALLY early (6:30 maybe?) to attend some scout training all day long. When the kids got up, they asked what we were going to do today and I had nothing. I checked some of my email newsletters to see what events were scheduled for today and remembered that the Nasher Sculpture Center has free admission on the First Saturday. The kids got dressed and we headed down...totally spur of the moment.
The Nasher had all kinds of things for the kids today. They had a Scavenger Hunt (which was a huge hit with my guys especially since it involved a prize when your turned it in at the end), activities, demonstrations and it was a gorgeous day!
The kids RAVED about the museum. We haven't been in a really long time and I guess it was all "new" again. Joseph loved Lichtenstein's "Head with blue shadow".
The girls declared the four Picasso pieces (2 sculpture and 2 paintings) their favorites.
It was really fun to take them today. They had thoughtful things to say about the art and really enjoyed going.

Trick or Treating

We went over to the Eades Family's new neighborhood to ToT with them this year. Here is our annual picture with all of them!


and one of the Gypsy, General and Pirate

Costumes

I took some pictures of the girls this afternoon while they still look 'put together'.

This one really got Libby's eye color (which I have never successfully captured before!)


and a close-up of Caroline (who has a loose tooth!)

Halloween at the Heritage Farmstead

The kids had a great day!
Friday afternoon we had a class at the Heritage Farmstead about the history of Halloween. Joseph told the class all about the Celtic history of Halloween (courtesy of Brainpop).
When we got there though, Joseph thought he would try out making gravel angels.




Listening to instructions about making a Celtic noisemaker.


Caroline making noise her own way (along with every other kid there)


Joseph and his best buddy Cameron doing the Victorian Apple Fortune Telling Game


Then they went into the house and listened to a 1920's Halloween radio show which they said was "boring". ;)

Halloween at co-op

My friend Chera took this picture of the girls and I at co-op on Thursday. I was dressed up all day long (we had Scottish Rite first and then co-op). My feet were completely freaking out about being in real shoes for an entire day. I couldn't dress up on Halloween. Not until Birkenstock makes Victorian boots!

Finally! The Raingutter Regatta

Tonight was Joseph's Raingutter Regatta (which is why I was at the AG Fashion Show by myself...Ken was in charge of that event).




This year there was a category for siblings to compete. ;) (One of the benefits of daddy being the Admiral of the Regatta)








And remember that super loose tooth at the beginning of the day? It fell out this evening!


She doesn't have that gapped look though because the other tooth came in behind the baby tooth. Caroline's is doing the same thing. :p

Ooops....Blogger posted before I was ready. Here is Libby

Here is Libby on the runway...
She is modeling one of the contemporary fashions with a jumper that can double as a skirt, berry leggings and an American Girl tshirt.


















Finally, all of the models came back out for the finale.