Kindergarten (Preschool) Graduation!!

School is out for the summer, and I'm so excited! Even though Lily only went to half-day preschool this last year, it feels like such a relief to all be home together and have our days to ourselves. I love it! But before summer vacation, Lily graduated from preschool! The class she was in this year was half Kindergarten, and half Preschool, so half of her class is moving on to first grade, and the other half (including Lily) will be in Kindergarten next year. I loved Lily's school and teacher this last year, and part of me would love to keep her at CCS, but private school just isn't in the budget, so we're going to go with the Kinder Center next year. The public schools here are good from what we've heard, and I know Lilypie will thrive wherever she is!

 Lily was excited to get to wear her fluffy dress for graduation.

Clementine was pretty stoked as well.

And Goo likes to make goofy faces.

Mrs. Rude leading in the Kinder class.

My little sweetie pie!

Lily is between her two bff's, Mallory and Julianna. I think what I'll miss most about moving her to public school is her not being in school with these two sweet girls.

They sang a few songs, and Lily and Mallory were goofing off just a tiny bit.

Mallory telling what she learned in school this year.

Lily said that she learned "all about worms" in school this year. Reading? Sure! Writing? Of course! But the important part was the worms!!

Julianna telling what she learned.

Merit (another church buddy) saying what he learned.

Elijah (the last of the 5 church kids in her class) telling what he learned. This is the boy that Lily has decided she's going to marry when she grows up. I told her she has a long time to think about it, but she always says, "I don't need to think about it! I've already decided!" (Kind of reminds me of THIS video, except that Elijah says he's going to marry Lily too.)

Hi Mom!

Getting her diploma from Mrs. Rude.

Shaking Mr. D's hand.

All graduated!

Besides the Kindergarten graduates, there was one lone 8th grade graduate, our good friend, Katie. She bravely gave a very sweet speech about her time at CCS. It may have brought a tear to my eye. :)

Post graduation cake!

On the last day of school, there was an awards ceremony where each teacher gave an award to each of their students. Some of the teachers did academic awards, but Lily's teacher decided to do character awards. Lily got the Kindest Classmate award, and we are so proud of her! One of Lily's best qualities is her kind spirit and how she wants everyone to be included in everything. I'm not one bit surprised that she got that award, because I know what a sweet girl she is, but I am very proud! She also got the Tabitha award, which is a character award given to a few students who display outstanding character. We're so proud that she is growing into such a sweet young lady who is kind and caring to her classmates!

Mystery Craft Project

So here it is! My newest Mystery Craft Project. I've been wanting to make one of these for a long time, but never really had an occasion. But when I decided to make something for the CCS auction, I thought, "Hey, I can make whatever I want, so I'm going to make a Diaper Cake!!" If you've never heard of a diaper cake (I hadn't until my sister-in-law, Holly, made one for Lily's shower) they're really cool. You roll up diapers and form them into the shape of a cake, and then you can decorate it with little gifts or toys or ribbons or whatever you want. Then you bring it to a baby shower as a centerpiece, and the mommy-to-be gets to go home with a ton of diapers and little toys and whatnot. So it's a decoration AND a gift. I have to admit that I was inspired by my friend, Corina's, beautiful creations, that you can see HERE. Corina was a friend of mine back in high school and she is now a military wife and stay at home mother of three who creates all sorts of beautiful things in her spare time (which apparently she actually manages to find!) So anyway, here is a little tutorial on how I made my first diaper cake. It's not perfect, but it was fun and I learned a lot. So if you have a baby shower coming up, it's a great idea for you to try. Or I'll be happy to make one for you!

So you start with a large bottle of baby shampoo or lotion or whatever you want. Then you get a zillion little rubber bands and size 1 diapers that are all white on one side. Then you roll each diaper up so that the white side is on the outside and secure them around the middle with a small rubber band. Then you put a larger rubber band around all the diapers to keep them in place around the shampoo.
For the first layer, you make three rings of diapers, securing each ring with a big rubber band around all the diapers.
This is the first ring of the second level. The second level will be two diapers deep.
Here is the second level complete. It's a good idea to make all of your rubber bands at the same height so that they'll be easy to cover up with a ribbon later.
And the last level is just one ring of diapers that fits right on top of the shampoo bottle top.
So the next part of the project was making burp cloths. I bought some pre-fold cloth diapers from Target and some ducky-themed flannel from Hancock. Then all you do is iron down the edges of the flannel into a shape that fits right over the middle of the diaper, and then sew that strip of flannel to the middle of the diaper with one line of stitching all the way around. Don't wash them ahead of time or they'll be all wrinkly. :)
So then I wrapped two burp cloths around the bottom layer and one burp cloth around the top layer of the diaper cake. This proved tricky and I ended up using a bunch of little safety pins to keep them together and then had to cover the seams with decorations. I might have to think of a better way to secure the burp cloths. But you can't really tape or glue them because you don't want tape or glue all over your burp cloths or diapers.
Then for contrast, I used a ribbon around the middle level. On the bottom level, you can see that I used a smaller ribbon and put a ducky right where the two burp cloths meet to cover the seam. Once again, I didn't want to glue anything to the burp cloths or diapers, so I pulled the ribbon tight and hot glued it to itself, making sure it was tight enough to stay put, but being careful not to get any glue on the cake part.
Then I used a smaller ribbon to secure little baby shampoos and lotions to the ribbon. These I just hot glued right on, because who cares if there's a little chunk of hot glue on your baby powder? :)
Then on the top I put a rubber ducky that is also a bath temperature indicator. I also had some crinkle paper that I put on at the auction, but I didn't want it to all fall off before it got there.

So anyway, that was my most recent Mystery Craft Project, and it was really fun. I think with some practice I could get good at this!

P.S. Maybe the reason I had so much fun was that I did the bulk of the work while I was watching High School Musical...

P.P.S. This is an amendment to the original post since people were curious about how the auction turned out. Overall, the auction was a fantastic fundraiser for the school. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the goal was to ear $15,000 and they ended up earning $18,000. Woo hoo! I don't know what price my cake fetched. When we got there, the table it was on was closed, but there wasn't a paper by my cake that recorded the winning bid. I assumed that meant that it hadn't sold, but Katrina told me that she knew it did sell, but didn't know why there wasn't a paper there when I was there. We didn't stay for the live auction where Jim's bed was auctioned off, but I know that my friend, Jen, ended up winning it! Her daughter, Julianna, is about Lily's age and I'm sure will be buddies growing up. I like the idea of them having sleepovers and one day saying, "Hey, I have that same bed!"

New Endeavor

Yesterday I embarked on a new endeavor. The Christian school that is housed in our church building is having a bit of a difficult year. With the economy the way it is, the enrollment has been down (and the construction near our church building that reroutes traffic doesn't help either). Because of the dip in enrollment, the school wasn't able to afford a teacher for some of the 7th and 8th grade classes and the students had to choose between going to a different school or doing online academy while staying at CCS. Several of the students opted for online academy and so when classes started last week, they logged on and started learning. Some subject are easy to self-teach and others are more difficult since it often takes someone to explain difficult concepts. So I volunteered to come in a couple of times a week and tutor the 7th and 8th graders in math and science, since those are subjects in which I have some experience. So on Monday and Wednesday afternoons this year I'm going to tutor the 7th and 8th graders. When I volunteered for this, my stipulation was that I needed something to do with Lily during this time, and I wondered if the school's preschool would be willing to take her on for a couple of hours a week. My friend, Jen, is the Kindergarten teacher and she was happy to keep Lily in her class for a couple of hours a week. The school does most of their instruction during the morning Kindergarten session, and then in the afternoons they combine Kindergarten with preschool and have a less-structured, more restful class time. So it's nice that Lily isn't interrupting the hard-core Kindergarten curriculum. I'm also excited that she's going to have the opportunity to spend some time with other kids during the week, including her buddy Julianna who also spends the afternoons at CCS (Jen, the teacher, is her mom.) And I'm extremely grateful that Jen was willing to take her on so that I have the opportunity to help the 7th and 8th graders.

So yesterday was our first day, and it went really well! The students are just beginning their studies for the year and they actually didn't need my help yet, so I helped Marci prepare some of her curriculum (i.e. I ripped pages out of workbooks) :) Lily was only slightly nervous when I dropped her off, but since Jules was there and since Jen is her bible school teacher, she was fairly comfortable and didn't cry. When I finished up, Jen was on recess duty and Lily was out playing on the playground with the other kids, having a great time. (Jen's sons were out there and they're GREAT with little kiddos since they have a little sister and they were helping Lily go down the slide.) Jen said she did well in class, so I think this is actually going to work! My only problem is that I plan on going during Lily's usual nap time, and we all know she can be pretty picky about her naps. So I'm hoping to stave off her nap until 10:00 on Mondays and Wednesdays, that way she wakes up at 12:00 and can eat lunch before heading out the door, and hopefully she won't be too fussy for Jen.

In other news, my parents are coming this weekend! They had planned on coming this weekend a while back, and then Dad found out he had a business trip. Well, I guess the trip was cancelled at the last minute, so the visit is back on! Yay! We are having friends over Friday night to watch th BSU game, but I'm sure my folks won't mind watching a little football!

Speaking of football! The Patriots' first game of the season was last night, and boy was it a nail biter! It was a Monday night double header Patriots vs. Bills and then Chargers vs. Raiders. We have some church friends who are Chargers fans, so we invited them over to watch the games with us. We thought it would be a fun, light-hearted evening, but it was stressful. Both the Patriots and the Chargers were either behind or tied the whole game until the very last two minutes. And then (in both games) the other team had a little time on the clock at the end of the game with a potential to score and either tie it up or beat our teams! Both of our teams ended up winning their games, but neither were very pretty victories! But it was fun to see Tom Brady back in action, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the season.

In Lily news, we are realizing how much we need to watch what we say around Lily since she is starting to repeat everything! Yesterday I was in the car listening to the radio, and the DJ's were reading an email or something that had swear words in it, and they were replacing the swear words with "bleep bleep bleep". Well apparently it was a pretty colorful email because they kept saying "bleeping bleep bleep bleeper" etc. when suddenly from the back seat, I hear "Bleep bleep bleep." Lily was bleeping at me! Well it's a good thing the email was 'edited' but it really did make me realize that I need to watch what Lily hears!

In case you can't get enough of the chicken, here is the note Lily sent her daddy yesterday.

This Day in Lily History: September 15, 2008, Lily loved floating on her tummy...
...and sleeping with CareWorm (still does).