Kindergarten Arden!

Monday was Arden's first official day of Kindergarten! She was a little bit nervous but mostly excited. I would say 96% excited, 4% nervous. Here she is, all ready to head out:

At orientation, her teacher said she needed a BIG backpack, and she was more than willing to get a new one. After much deliberation at the local Target, she chose this one:

She was watching me put on some makeup before we left and wanted me to put some on her. She was a little mad that I wouldn't play along. But seriously, how beautiful is this little kindergartner? No makeup necessary!

She asked if she could get some makeup of her own someday...like maybe when she turns 6. ***sigh*** I sense a recurring battle coming on.

We drove to the school and found where her class lines up. Dax tried to sneak into the line, but his attempts to sneak into the kindergarten room and play with the dinosaurs were thwarted by his mean mom (more on Daxton's first day of preschool later). Some of the other kids were anxious and a couple were crying a little, but Arden was more than ready to head in and get started. I am so proud of her and how brave she is. (And it made it a lot easier for me to not cry too.)

I didn't realize how much harder than preschool kindergarten was going to be...for ME. But I have carpools pretty much figured out and have now learned where I am supposed to drive to pick up and drop off the kids. I have signed up for various volunteer activities (class parties, help with treats, fieldtrips, etc.) I have joined the PTA. We completed our first homework assignment tonight and it is safe in her backpack hanging by the door, all ready to go back to school. But there is a TON that I still have to learn about how to have a kid in elementary school. Like how can I stop it from going any further? I have come to terms with kindergarten, but I have decided that this is as far as I want to go. First grade is just too loooong to have Arden gone. And I remember elementary school...it isn't all sweetness and rainbows. Kindergarten is going to be awesome, but I don't want to have Arden have to deal with all that comes after that. Drama with friends. Braces. Mean kids. Cliques. Long division. Nah, I'm good right here. Experienced moms, who do I call to let them know I want off this train? The principal? PTA president? School counselor?

On a side note, Arden started soccer again. She put on her new uniform, so Corbie wanted to wear her old one. Can you tell who Cora's hero is?

Unicorns and Hearts

Here is a picture that Arden drew the other day. It made me smile because when I was little I was forever drawing unicorns. Must be a phase little girls go through. (This is a unicorn, in case you couldn't tell...a very smiley unicorn that loves you.)

Lagoon (Late)

We drive by Lagoon on the freeway pretty frequently. For the past few months, every time we drove by that big Ferris wheel, Arden would ask about when I would take her there. Arden had never been to Lagoon before since Dax and then Cora were too little in the past few summers. Actually, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have been to Lagoon since the day I quit working there (I worked as a lifeguard at Lagoon A Beach during high school). One day in the spring, we drove by Lagoon again and Arden asked: "Mo-oooom? Are we eevvvvver going to go there and ride on the Ferris wheel and roller coasters? ***sigh***"

I thought back to when I was little and how I thought that Lagoon was the funnest place EV-ER. Feeling a twinge of guilt, I said something like, "maybe we could go to Lagoon sometime this summer." Arden took that to mean, "We will most certainly go to Lagoon as soon as it is summer." I kept putting it off and putting it off until summer really was almost over. But, true to my near-promise a couple of weeks ago, we made our First (probably) Annual Zaugg trip to Lagoon.

After handing over the cash, (luckily we had coupons, but it still hurt), we headed to the good old carousel. Dax wanted to ride the zebra:
Cora chose a black horse, and Preston rode next to her. Arden somehow ended up on a vampire pig (seriously, check out those teeth):

After that we headed to the little kiddie rides and rode them ALL. I was surprised at how many of the rides I remembered riding on as a little kid were still there. For example, this used to be my favorite ride:

Look out, aliens! Well, really, look out Arden, cause Cora is really excited to shoot you. She kept yelling "I shoot Ahdin! I shoot Ahdin!"

There were a bunch of new rides too. Cora rode this ride with me, though she didn't enjoy herself much the first time because she was VERY concerned about the dolphins and whales that spit water. Luckily, I am an excellent fish-driver and we stayed pretty dry.

Preston, on the other hand, let Dax drive and got spit on by a whale every time around.

We met up with some season-pass holding cousins part way through the day. Cora LOVES her older cousin, Hailey. Can you see how excited she is to be riding with her on the plane? Hailey looks a little less excited. Right before this picture was taken she was informed that she is too tall and this would be her final ride on the kiddie rides. Poor Hailey.

My dad came up to help wrestle kids and we took him on the train ride. Here are the weirdos we had to face all during the trip:

Lagoon has quite a few impressive animals this year. They had some Siberian tigers, and four white tigers. They had a couple of lions too. Hogle Zoo doesn't even have lions! How does Lagoon have lions when the zoo doesn't??

Arden was a little afraid to go on the roller coasters...until her cousins wanted to go on one. Then she was suddenly over her fears. Ah, the joys of peer pressure. While everyone else rode the new Bombora coaster (even Dax was tall enough for that one), Cora and I headed over to an equally thrilling ride...Bulgy the Whale:

Whoo! Right about this time my camera's batteries ran out, but we stayed ALL DAY.

After she got going, Arden was very brave. She rode Bombora a few times, and even rode the Bat. The Bat is one of those roller coasters where your feet hang free, and she was very concerned about losing her flip-flops, but she came through with her footwear intact. Turns out she is about an inch too short for any of the other big roller coasters.

We rode the carousel a few more times, and rode the big Ferris wheel. We also rode the sky ride and the log flume. We had ice cream in Pioneer Village (along with every other person in the park), and everyone but Cora and I went on Rattlesnake Rapids. I think my dad suggested this ride hoping that it would get Dax wet enough that it would wash the ice cream off of him and make him less sticky. Dax got SOAKED, and he was a lot less sticky...but his teeth started chattering after a while. I wrung out his shirt and luckily had some "just in case" shorts in my bag that he was able to change into to stop his teeth from chattering.

After a few more little kid rides and one last ride on Bombora (Arden and Dax's favorite ride), it was 8:00 p.m. and time to head home and go to bed. Considering that we were there for about nine straight hours, the kids did amazingly well and we all had a great time! I will start saving my pennies for next year.

New Kids' Bathroom

As you know, I am ever-so-slowly redecorating my house, one room at a time. My latest project has been the kids' bathroom. It has been fun to do, though it took longer than I thought it would for such a small room. My kids spend most of their lives (at least for now) at home, so I want that place to be fun. Here are some befores and afters:

Before #1:

After #1:
Before #2:

After #2:

Before #3:

After #3:

And here are just a couple more shots of the pretty-much finished product:

I am thinking that the front room is next....

Vroom Vroom

We spent most of last couple of weeks trying to find a new car. We have been squeezing the kids into our 5-passenger Escape for a couple of years now, and we decided that it was time to find something bigger, especially with kindergarten carpools looming.

After hours of searching the Internet, hours of test driving, hours of negotiations, we finally have a new member of the family:
Phew! The last time we bought a car was nearly 9 years ago, I had forgotten what a pain it is. He looks a little bit mean, doesn't he? Preston liked it that way. It is a Dodge Durango, and it has all the things we needed. (Well, NEED is a subjective word. Do I really NEED a DVD player for the kids? Yes. Yes I do. It is essential to my sanity on long rides. Preston NEEDED it not be a minivan.).

We took the kids with us to the dealer once and let them look at the Durango before we bought it. Arden liked it right away. "I don't like this car anymore," she informed us as we drove home in the Escape.

A couple of days after we bought the new car, we sold our Escape. A dad bought it for his 16 year-old daughter, so the Escape will be having lots of fun with the teenagers. I hope it doesn't get too banged up! Even though Arden didn't mind seeing it go, it made me a little sad. We have had that Escape since 2002. We brought all our kids home from the hospital in that car. Lots of memories. Cora missed it too. The second day after we sold the Escape I was driving the kids somewhere in the Durango, and Cora burst into tears. "I want MY car! Dis not MY car!" Change is sometimes hard. But we are warming up to the new one:

One of the first places that I took the kids in the new car was the park. It had SAND. I made the kids take off their shoes and shake them off and then I wiped off their feet with wipes before I let them in the car. Preston refuses to let them eat crackers or any other crumbly food in it. Somehow the floor is already dirty anyway.

And I had to stop this one from coloring on it with chalk right after the above picture was taken.

Poor little Durango has no idea what it is in for.

More Summer Silliness

Summer is in full swing and we are trying our best to eat it all up and then lick the bowl clean. We got brave a couple weeks ago and tried the camping thing again. This time we did Little Deer Creek campground. It was actually pretty far up the mountain on a dirt road from Deer Creek , but it was in a really pretty, remote location and it met my requirements (i.e. flush toilets). We drove up on a Friday night and got going on the smores as soon as possible:

We had fun exploring the forest nearby, but we were up so high in the mountains that as soon as the fire got low we retreated to our nice, warm sleeping bags and told more scary-ish stories.

The kids did better going to sleep this time. It was cold enough that Cora wanted to stay in her sleeping bag...after I convinced her that I was NOT going to let her sleep in my sleeping bag with me again. She still talked for a while after everyone else had quieted down, but after a few repeated requests she took it down a notch and just whispered. Everyone else quickly dropped off to sleep, but I was right next to Cora so we had a long whispered conversation in which Cora talked about all sorts of things and I asked her a few dozen times to please stop talking. She eventually obeyed and contented herself with zipping the zipper on her sleeping bag up and down (and up and down and up and down...) until she drifted off to sleep herself. It was all good until Preston started snoring from the other side of the tent. Luckily he didn't keep anyone except me awake. He was too far away to kick like I usually do when he snores.

The next day we drove part way back down the mountain to Cascade Springs. I had never been there before, and it was BEAUTIFUL! There were lots of little waterfalls, crystal clear streams, flowers and butterflies. There was even a wedding or two going on up there while we were hiking around. Here is Dax, pulling his "I am so cute" pose in front of one of the little waterfalls:

After our hike, we went back to the campsite for lunch and some more exploring. We then packed up and headed down into Midway, where we did another short hike (the LONGEST one-mile hike ev-er. All three kids wanted us to carry them. Last summer that was nearly doable, but now they are just too big for that). Dax doesn't usually want to get carried, but he wasn't feeling very well, which he later demonstrated by barfing on his shoes outside of a fast food place in Heber. We decided to head home after that.

I have been trying to take the kids to some fun places about once a week this summer. We have been to the zoo a couple of times, to Wheeler Farm, to the new splash park down the hill, and this last week we went to the airplane museum at Hill Air Force Base. (see the kids down by the tire?) The kids loved it. I cannot tell you how long they stood there and spun the wheel of this airplane. SO exciting:

It was fun to watch them looking at the airplanes, and it was fun for me to see some of the planes that were mentioned in a book that I had read for book club a few months ago (Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand). One of the nice volunteers that work there even let the kids go inside of one of the big helicopters, and they were so excited to sit inside there and pretend they were really flying.

Another thing we do in the summer is go to the park once a week with our friends from the neighborhood. It is also a tradition to come home and cool off with a Popsicle afterwards. Dax MUST have green. Silly kids:

This week Arden and I had a pretty bad summertime cold, so we spend most of the first part of the week at home in the house. Dax and Cora had to remember how to entertain themselves in the playroom. They played "pirate" a lot, taking turns (okay, fighting endlessly over whose turn it was) wearing the pirate hat. Here is Cora taking her turn:

ARRRRR MATEY! is her favorite pirate thing to say. We are all feeling better now and looking forward to another fun summertime weekend.