Megan is 6!!

Megan turned six years old on Thursday.  I can't believe how fast it's gone by!

She picked cheesy scrambled eggs for her birthday breakfast.

I surprised her with a trip to Barnes and Noble to get her (free) birthday cupcake.  She picked red velvet because she remembered that that kind of cupcake won in an episode of Cupcake Wars (a Food Network show).  She liked it!

I forgot to snap a picture of lunch, but she picked Trader Joe's vegetarian chili from a can.  I thought it was weird, but whatever.  It was her day, and she really enjoyed picking every meal!

Chris, Jessica, and I got to go to the kindermonkey classroom for about 30 minutes in the afternoon.  Megan explained "All About Me" and did a great job.  It was purple day, so all the kids got to wear non-uniform purple clothes.  Megan's outfit was one of her birthday presents from us!

For her school "party," she picked strawberries for the snack, and a Jan Brett book for me to read aloud to the kids.  They loved both!

For dinner, Megan picked out grilled spicy chicken, spinach, green beans, and spicy fries.  Oh - and Coca-Cola to drink - a real treat!

Megan's birthday haul from today.  Katie picked out the books, Jessica picked out the dinosaur capsules and the popsicle maker, Erica got her the awesome sparkly shoes, and we got her the garden gnomes.  She loved everything!

For dessert, Megan wanted "strawberry rhubarb" (cobbler) with vanilla ice cream.  Yum!  What a great spring dessert!

Chris played a birthday game of Jenga with her.  Their towers get taller and taller as they get better and better at the game!

Megan enjoyed a really special day, and she deserved every minute of it.  She is such a sweetheart!  She is having a friend birthday party at a gymnastics center on Sunday, so be on the lookout for more pictures to come!

Easter!!

Here are a few pics of our Easter fun!!

Megan hunting for Easter eggs all over the house.

Jessica was a good little hunter.

Megan gave up candy for Lent, and picked a Peep for her first piece of Easter candy.  Yum!

Megan and Katie with their Easter stash.  They organized and counted everything, to compare with each other, of course!

Jessi organizing her Easter goodies.

Cute girls in their beautiful Easter dresses.

Our family cleans up pretty well, huh?!!

More playtime with Bram.

I love his argyle socks!  He loved the bunny rabbit...perfect for drooling on!

Whole Kennedy family after brunch.

Uncle JoJo wrapped up each of the girls like a burrito.  He is VERY good at doing a tight wrap, since he is the swaddling expert for Bram now.  Megan couldn't get out for a long time!

The girls played "Boxcar Children" (aka live on your own) under the pool table with Tashi, Uncle Chad, and Auntie Erin.

We all slept well that night, after two days full of fun and excitement.  On our last day of Easter break, we hung out at the house with everyone in the morning.  We all went to Portillo's for lunch.  We need to educate the girls on the culture of Chicago - the famous Chicago-style hot dog!!

It was a wonderful trip, and we were so glad to see everyone and spend so much time together.

Before Easter

I took a zillion pictures over Easter weekend and our trip to visit the Kennedys, so I'll break them up into two posts.  The girls had Friday and Monday off, so we enjoyed a wonderful 4-day weekend break!  We left early Friday so we would have time to stop at a museum in downtown Chicago again.  This time we picked the Garfield Park Conservatory (aka botanical garden greenhouse).  I was in heaven!!  This place is soooo gorgeous!!  Here are two of the many, many pictures I took there:

On Saturday, we went to two Easter egg hunts.  Well, we were too late for the first one, but we got to meet the Easter Bunny there as he was leaving the scene. 




Then we hopped in the van and sped over to the other Easter egg hunt.  It was on the grounds of a beautiful mansion.  There were hundreds of kids, but there were plenty of eggs and it was a ton of fun for the girls.

After the egg hunt, we walked around the grounds.  There is a military museum that is really nice, and lots of tanks around the museum.  Climbing is encouraged, so the kids climbed almost all of them!

Climbing tanks wasn't enough, so then the girls started climbing trees:

After all that excitement, we went back to the house to meet Bram again.  He is 4 months old now, and has changed a LOT since we saw him last.  He is so interactive, and he has the best giggle/laugh ever!  The girls fawned over him all day long.  Poor guy needed a break from all the in-your-face entertainment!

We decorated eggs that afternoon:



Then we enjoyed a delicious dinner at home, and had an early birthday party for Megan.  I didn't get any pictures with our camera, but I'm sure Chris took some with his iPhone.  It was a busy day!

Daddy-Daughter Dance

Our first week back to school after spring break was a good one, it was easy to get back into the usual routines.  Katie had a field trip to the Detroit Historical Museum on Friday, so it was essentially a 4-day week of school for her.

On Monday, while I took Katie & Megan to children's choir practice, Chris stayed home with Jessica.  She was acting naughty, so he sent her up to her room while he made dinner.  She didn't come downstairs after a few minutes, so he went up to check on her, and look what he found:

Tonight (Sat) was the school's Daddy-Daughter Dance.  This is Megan's first year at Holy Family, so it was her first time at this dance.  She has been soooo excited about it for sooooo long!  Here are some pics from his iPhone:

Chris took the girls out to dinner at Kruse & Muer before the dance.

Katie danced the night away with her friends!

They did occasionally dance with Chris, too.

The highlight is always the chocolate fountain!

Jessi & I had a not-so-exciting night of housecleaning and shopping at Staples & Meijers.  We did crank up the iTunes to dance a little at home, too!  The girls got home from the dance at 9pm, still sweaty from all the dancing.  They will sleep well tonight!

Spring Break - Day 10

Our last day of spring break was bittersweet.  The weather was fantastic - 84 and sunny - the only nice day of the whole break!  We sure took advantage of it!  After church, we drove down to Belle Isle (a beautiful island park in Detroit).



Picnic lunch by the Detroit skyline.





Girls outside the Great Lakes ship museum.



(funny side note...Katie has learned about Commodore Perry -named on these cannons- in her school social studies work on Michigan history.  She remembers him mostly because he has the same last name as Katy Perry, her favorite singer!)

(another funny side note - after talking about Katy Perry, Katie said she'd like to invite her to dinner sometime.  Megan said she'd want to invite Kesha to dinner.  Jessica said, "but where would I sit??", very distraught!  We thought she'd pipe in with Pink or someone else, but she was worried about not having enough room at our kitchen table!  Ha ha!)



Megan and Katie inside the museum, where a real ship cabin
looks out over the Detroit River.  It was fun to watch the
freighters go by right outside this window, and pretend
to steer the ship!



Girls in the Belle Isle Conservatory, always my favorite place.

Feeding the albino deer at the Belle Isle Nature Zoo.



After a long, fun day on Belle Isle, we headed home and prepped our bikes for our first bike ride of the year.  Can you guess where we went?  DQ, of course!!  :)

What a nice staycation we had for Spring Break 2011!

Spring Break - Day 9

On Saturday, we were a little more low-key.  We went to the gym so Chris & I could go to our favorite yoga class.  We took the girls to the pet store so they could see all the hamsters/mice/reptiles and pick their hypothetical favorites.  (Chris is a firm NO on all pets)  They priced out all of the equipment they would need to have a pet, which was quite eye-opening!  And they got information sheets about each kind of pet, and were surprised that most pets were recommended for 8 and up or 14 and up!

We went to Dick's so Chris and I could pick out new walking/running shoes, and the girls ran laps on the indoor track the ENTIRE time we were there.  They were seriously sweaty by the time we left!

We had an early dinner, and then walked to DQ for our first family trip of the year.  (I've taken the girls a few times already - hee hee!)

We played lots of games before bedtime...Jessica's favorite is Hisss, Megan's is Jenga, and Katie's is checkers.

Megan making a move in a record-breaking Jenga game!

Spring Break - Day 8

Friday of spring break was yet another rainy, cold, dreary day.  But that didn't stop us from having a fun day!  After Katie's allergy shots, we went to see the movie "Hop".  Then I surprised the girls with Taco Bell for lunch (they're SO easy to please!).  We went to the library for a kids book sale, and walked out with 20 books for super cheap.  We fed our friends' pets and played with Chuckles the hamster for a lonnnng time.  After dinner, we went swimming.  I'm good at cramming a lot of activities into one day, aren't I??!!  :)

Spring Break - Day 7

Today was the only non-raining day of the week, so we headed to the zoo for the day! We packed our lunches and had a great time on our first trip of the year. Jessica didn't remember much from last year's visits, and it was so much fun to watch her reaction to everything like it was the first time! "oooh, look at all the butterflies!" Girls climbing on the frog sculptures outside Amphibiville: Girls in the seal/polar bear tunnel: Girls in the prairie dog exhibit: Girls on a rock by the lion exhibit: Katie and Jess on the tiger sculpture: Chris took the afternoon off and met us there after lunch. The girls got to pick one "must-see" animal each...Katie picked the horses, Megan picked the prairie dogs, and Jessica picked the zebras. How do they know to pick the animals at the far corners of the zoo??? We did a lot of walking, and a lot of stroller-pushing, and we were all worn out by 4pm. Megan and Jessica passed out in the van on the way home, and continued their nap in the garage (still in their carseats). After dinner, the girls played outside for an hour, then I took Katie and Megan to the gym to do some rock climbing. They climbed til it closed at 9pm! I'm always amazed at how much energy they have!

Spring Break - Day 6

On Wednesday, it rained all day long, so our options were limited once again. We went to the mall and had Katie's 9 year old portraits taken, we went to Sam's Club, and we met friends at a McDonald's play place for lunch and 2+ hours of playing. The highlight of the day was going to a friend's house and feeding their pets while they're on vacation - we're pet sitting two goldfish, a newt, and a hamster. The girls LOVE feeding the pets, esp the hamster. They realllllly want one now! After dinner, we all went to the gym so the parents could exercise and the kids could run off some energy in the play area. It worked - we wore them out on a rainy day!

Spring Break - Day 5

I forgot the camera today, so no pictures. Sorry! Katie is very active in teaching "Katie School" to Megan and Jessica - aka let's boss around the little sisters. She is teaching them math, handwriting, reading, religion, science, etc. and she's very good at it! So we phrased today's activities as school field trips - gym class was ice skating for 2hrs, library was a field trip to the Bookmobile, and recess was visiting a new park to play on the play structures. It was fun! After dinner we watched "Tangled" (the new Rapunzel movie) and enjoyed a double batch of popcorn. We're having lots of fun despite the crummy weather. It was 40 today, very windy, and there were flurries off and on. I'm kind of over the snow at this point! Here's hoping we can make it to the zoo sometime this week!

Spring Break - Day 4

Monday was museum day! We braved the rainy, stormy weather and took a trip to downtown Detroit to visit two museums. First we went to the Detroit Science Center: They had a special exhibit called "Dinosaurs Alive," and we liked it so much we went through it twice! Some dinosaurs were on motion sensors, and would growl or move whenever someone walked by. Others had a control panel that the kids could use to move the dinosaurs themselves! The girls loved making the dinosaurs swing their tails, move their arms, shake their heads, open their mouths, and of course growl! Here's Megan controlling the Allosaurus: Here are the girls being paleontologists and searching for fossil footprints and bones: Here's Katie by a pair of fighting dinosaurs. These are interesting b/c we have seen this pair twice before...at another science museum last year we saw the rare fossil of these two preserved in mid-fight (the Protoceratops was biting the Velociraptor's arm!). And at this DSC museum we saw an Imax movie with an animated depiction of the fight, and then the fossil. It was neat to see the scene depicted as fossils, as a movie, and in life-sized figures. We finally tore ourselves away from the dinosaur sections, and ventured out into the rest of the museum. Here's Katie as a couch potato in the nutrition area: Here's Jessica enjoying the electric sparking ball: Here's Megan making a tornado in water: Megan and Jessica volunteered to help sort recyclables at the "Go Green" presentation. They are recycling experts. Katie helped in the composting part of the presentation but I didn't get a picture. We went back to play with the dinosaurs one last time before leaving the museum. Megan (the budding paleontologist) could have stayed there all day! Next we went to the Detroit Children's Museum. We had never been there before, and we really enjoyed it! It was small, but perfectly geared towards children. The girls wanted to stay and play for hours, but we were all getting tired (especially me!) and I wanted to beat the traffic home. We got a family membership that works at both museums, so we'll be back! PS- I don't know why the formatting is all wonky...it looks fine when I type it all out! Any hints, anyone?