School's Out!

School's Out For Summer! 

Yesterday was Paprika's last day of Kindergarten.  I took these pictures on Wednesday, her last "real day" of school since Thursday was just the class party.

Anyhoo- I had to document the wake-up process one last time.  The picture above pretty much sums my whole year up. Ha!

If Violet wakes up before her sisters, she races upstairs as fast as she can (which is pretty darn fast) - and gleefully jumps into bed with Ginger.  If Paprika were on the bottom bunk, she'd jump in bed with her, too! 




So, Paprika tries to stall the wake-up as long as possible:



Then the big girls try to go back to sleep on the couch. On this morning I told them that this summer I will never wake them up before they're ready to get up.

When I told them that, you would have thought I'd said Santa was coming!  They were so excited!

Sleepyheads:




This is Paprika on her last day of Kindergarten with her AMAZING teacher! 



And another one of Paprika on her last day of Kindergarten!  They combined all the kindergarten classes for the party, so it was crazytown in there!



After school, Paprika and Ginger sat right down to work on Ginger learning how to read!  Haha!  It's true- Paprika is teaching Ginger to read, and it's actually working!  It's amazing to watch older siblings teach the younger ones things (and sometimes the younger ones teach the older ones, too!)




On Wednesday, Paula had us over to make a special cupcake cake for Ginger's birthday!  Ginger had been looking forward to it for weeks!  Paula is a great baker (and I am not!) - so we were all excited that Ginger would get this special experience, since she wasn't going to be baking a cake with me (this birthday, at least).  :-) 






Paula and Ginger putting the cake in the oven:




Ginger and Violet waiting for the cake to bake and playing with Paula's sweet doggie, Riley:





The finished product - back at my house!  I should have put something up to scale in this picture, because you can't tell how enormous it was!  It was HUGE!  Which of course, made it all the more fun for Ginger!  Haha.


Paula let Ginger pick out the sprinkles- and she picked out three different kinds. Why not?!




We sang Happy Birthday to the birthday girl again!  She was so happy!




So, phew!  It's summer!  I feel like I'm slowly starting to exhale from a whirlwind year.  It's going to take us some time to decompress and I'm trying to leave margins in our schedule and give us lots of downtime.  As much as I love to go, go, go  - the girls really love time to wander, dream, and relax!























So, here's to the first day of our low-key summer!  I'm going to hold off on to-do lists and all that and just enjoy the moment because there will never be another summer like this one!

xoxo,
Erika

P.S.  Today (June 21st) was Ginger's Due Date and of course, is the first day of Summer and the Summer Solstice!  She came three days early - but I still always think of today as one of her special days...  :-)