These Girls

Boy where do I start? These two have been putting me through the ringer lately. I know it's nice to always paint our families in this perfect light on social media, but sometimes I feel like I need to be real about life. 3 has been a hard age for Vi. The last few months have been super hard with her. Moving from Michigan and then being in Utah and then down to Mississippi has really done a number on her. She is having a hard time adjusting with everything going on. We have been having a lot of battles and she has really been testing her limits with what she can get away with. I'm tired. It takes so much energy as a mom to try to do what you think is best and right and..... It's so hard. Vi has struggled a lot too with being too rough with Grace. As soon as Grace started walking their relationship changed a lot. I'm always shocked with how much Grace will put up with. I'm hoping the more we get settled the better her behavior will be. She doesn't like church right now and we are working on making new friends for everyone. It has been an adjustment, but I think things will get better. 

On a more positive note with Vi, she is really taking off with our preschool we are doing together. She goes to a coop preschool once a week, but she works with me everyday on letters and numbers and coloring. She knows all her upper and lowercase letters and we are just starting to learn how to write them. She knows about 75% of the sounds of the letters. She can identify 1-20 and can count objects successfully in those quantities. She is seriously amazing at coloring. She outlines all the lines and then stays completely in the lines. She is a really bright girl. She loves makeup right now and loves to play pretend and dress up. You can always find her with a purse and lip gloss. She is getting to be very independent. . She likes to put on her own clothes and shoes and buckle herself in her car seat. Things take longer, but I am glad she is getting more independent. She just started ballet this last week and is already loving it. She is really creative and very stubborn.

Gracie girl is a full on crack up lately. She tries to say almost any word and has a huge vocabulary. She asks for things in almost full sentences. She will follow Vi anywhere and always wants to be playing with her. She is loud, boy is she loud. This girl just likes to scream for the heck of it. Ughhh, it drives me nuts. It is honestly so freaking loud. I'm hoping that phase wears off soon. She is really such a good girl. She goes with the flow and gives snuggles all day long. She loves to read books and has her favorites ( Corduroy, Good Night Gorilla , The Very Busy Spider, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom) She loves to brush her hair and teeth.  She is down to one nap as of last week. She goes to bed at 7:30 and wakes up at about 7:00-7:15 in the morning. She loves Milk! She makes the funniest faces and has a lot of expressions. She is so much busier than Vi was. This girl will climb on things and try to get out of her highchair and is just running full speed. She wants to go down slides at the park and climb any and all stairs. She keeps me on my toes. She is also obsessed with flushing toilets. She is so funny and in one of my favorite stages. She is such a sweetie and luckily she is making this harder transition with Vi a little easier.

Flower Crowns

The flower crown tradition lives on. I love making these. my mom's garden is a dream and when those peonies are in bloom it is seriously unreal. Last year Grace was too little to really keep one on, so I was so excited to make her one this year. My mom also happened to make her the sweetest bubble that looked perfect with her crown. Vi was so excited and loved running around and playing in hers with Jayne. I hope this is a tradition we can keep up. I had wanted to make fairy wings for them too, but everything always takes longer than you think it will. Here are some fun shots of the girls.

Nothing a little cracker can't fix 

Dominican republic

I need to go through all of Mike's go pro pictures to add more to this trip. We had such an amazing time in the DR. It was my first time leaving my kids for a night. That part was super hard. They went home to Utah with my parent's after graduation and I had to say goodbye to them at the airport. We then rushed home to finish all the last minute packing that we needed to do. We said our last goodbyes and I cried some more. Then early the next morning we got on our flights. We got really lucky on our way to the DR and got on both of our flights with no problems. We landed and got our rental car. It took us about 40 minutes to drive to Casa De Campo where we would be staying. We got to the house and met Fransisca the house keeper. She was the sweetest, but hardly spoke any English. That made our conversations the whole week pretty funny as we all tried to communicate with her through our broken Spanish. We hit up the beach and the pool pretty much everyday. I read 2 books, which felt so good since I hadn't read a book in ages. We picked up the Blomquists on Wednesday. From then on it was pretty much a party on the golf carts the whole time. We went out to eat at so many amazing restaurants. We played games pretty much every night. One day we took a boat over the Catalina island and did snorkeling and just hung out on the beach. The water was so warm and clear there. You could see all the fish so easily. We spent a lot of time at the pool, where the boys came up with all different kinds of diving and racing games for us to play. The boys got to do a gold day on Teeth of the Dog, a top course in the Caribbean. We went into La Romana for church on Sunday, but got there late because we had the wrong time online. They were super nice and blessed some bread and water for us after the meeting. We took the missionaries out to lunch and hung out with them for a bit. We drove around La Romana a bit, but the driving there will scare you. Everything is a suggestion. People are driving down the wrong side of the road and going through red lights. It can give you a bit of a panic attack. We did a little bit of site seeing at some ruins near where we were staying. The boys once again had lots of fun being goofs everywhere we went.

Our trip home did not go so smoothly. I got stuck in Atlanta for almost 2 days and Mike had to go to JFK. It was a bit of a headache, but we made it home to our girls and I was so happy to see them. I missed them so much. 

Graduation

We did it! Mike graduated from Dental School on May 6th. It was such an amazing day. My parents both flew out . Greg and Sherril flew out and Joyce and Allison. It was so great to have them all come and celebrate Mike. We obviously missed out on a lot of family things over the past 4 years because we live so far away. In many ways it was really hard on us to not be a part of so many things. So this meant a lot to us to have all those people there and for them to see everything Mike had done. I don't think anyone really knew the amount of work and time he put into those 4 years until his ceremony. They had wonderful speakers and they really let all those parents and family members know just how amazing of a program this is. They graduated from the number 1 dental school in the country and the number 2 in the world. I had many proud moments during the whole thing. We are just so excited that this stage in his education is complete and that he had such an amazing experience! My amazing friend Raegan watched Grace during the ceremony so that we wouldn't have to deal with a crazy child. I started crying when I saw her after the ceremony. I think one of the hardest parts for us will be leaving our friends. The tears pretty much just kept coming all weekend.

We attempted to get a picture of all the kids but a domino affect happened and most of them ended up on the ground. We started dental school with just Dexter and Violet wasn't born yet. We ended our time there with 8 kids and one in utero.

This would be right as Dani and I started crying. I think it just hit both of us at that moment. This would be the beginning of many tears that weekend.