We survived Christmas!

It's hard to believe another Christmas has gone by and we are into 2017.   I am happy to report that we all managed to stay healthy through the holidays this year - thankfully.  The school break was only a week long, but we managed to get in some fun times!

We started the season with our annual trip right after Thanksgiving, to the Festival of Trees.  Jocelyn asked Santa to "Surprise" her this year!

Jocelyn's Girl Scout troop was busy!  They watched the Nutcracker on Ice, went to see the play Mary Poppins, and sang Christmas carols at a local nursing home.

We decorated the tree and topped it with Grandma's special angel.  Santa sent Jocelyn her Christmas letter.  This year she read the whole thing on her own!

Last year we were so disappointed to miss out on baking Christmas cookie with our friends, but this year we were able to make it happen.  The cookies were very yummy, but our friends are very messy bakers.

On Christmas Eve we made our usual preparations.  We put out the snacks for the reindeer - exactly 9 peanut butter balls, 9 baby carrots and some oats.  And Santa got yummy cookies and milk!  Christmas morning included lots of Minecraft, but that's no surprise (stay tuned for birthday preparations!).

The rest of our winter break was focused on fun times with friends.  The kids had a pajama and pancakes party at Ms. Nicki's house on Wednesday...

And we celebrated an early kid friendly New Years Eve with the Millers and the Haas Families, complete with games and play time and ringing in the new year at 8:00pm!

These families have been our dear friends for many years now.  We met in the MOMs club and have continued to share special times together.  We're so lucky to have them in our lives.  Happy New Year Everyone!!

Busy Fall

I'm not sure how we got to the first week in December.  Time has flown since school started and I'm honestly not sure where it went!

So I guess we'll just play catch up with a few random photos of the last couple months!

Some of my favorite moments with Jocelyn and her Daddy.














Halloween!  As always, we had fun picking out and carving pumpkins.  Jocelyn wanted to be a Minecraft Ocelot for Halloween this year.  Of course there is no such costume, so I made this one for her and she loved it!  I started out with a white sweatsuit, dyed it yellow and then painted about 50 squares on it.  Anything for my girl!
We trick or treated with friends this year.  Colin and Lily and Jocelyn have been buddies for most of their lives.  I love that they are growing up together!  They had so much fun trick or treating and then handing out candy!

Girl Scouts is becoming a big thing in Jocelyn's life lately, and mine!  I am now co-leader of her Brownie troop.  Maybe that's where some of my time has gone...

The girls went to Scouting Day at the Days End Rescue Horse Farm.  It was a lot of fun!  And Officer Barnie got really spoiled with all that loving!  He is a retired Police horse from Baltimore City.  He is huge, but so sweet!

Once a year there is a GSs Uniform Day and the girls get a patch for wearing their uniform to school.  This is Jocelyn with her 3rd grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Incavido.

This was one of my favorite moments of the Fall.  Jocelyn's school started the Hero of the Day program.  I loved being the Hero and Jocelyn loved having Mommy around!  Can't wait to do it again!

Part of the last couple months has been dealing with my own issue in life.  Early in October I injured my knee.  Walking down the hallway at school - that's it!  Walking! - I tore the meniscus in my left knee.  It took a few weeks of testing and limping to figure out what was wrong, but eventually I had surgery on November 10th.  I'm doing much better.  I'm still hobbling a little, especially after those brutal PT appointments!  But I'm happy to be well on my way to having a normal knee again!  Hubby has had to step up a lot to take care of everything around here, so shout out to him for being amazing!

For a final wrap up, here is my goofy kiddo.  I love how she makes me laugh.  We're getting ready for Christmas!  Let's hope it's much less eventful - and much more fun - than last year!

First Day of 3rd Grade

The time has quickly come to send my little one off to school again.  I can't believe she's in 3rd grade.  We are two weeks into the new school year and still working on our routine.  But I have no doubt she will do well as always.  These are photos from the first day of school August 29, 2016.

Jocelyn has Mrs. Incavido this year.  She seems to really like her.  There are lots of changes in 3rd grade and more responsibilities.  It's going to be different.  

Jocelyn has a different technology teacher for the first time since Kindergarten, so I'm thinking I'll focus on volunteering in her homeroom class more this year.  I'm also co-leader in her Brownie Girl Scout troop, so I'll be doing that on top of the things I do at school.  Lots of changes for both of us, I guess.  

Welcome to 3rd grade!!

Off she goes again

Summer Trip to New England

The highlight of our summer was a trip to New England.  I say New England because we hit every state except Rhode Island!!  It was especially fun to check all those new states off for Pat since he had never traveled that area before.

Pat's family rented a house in Maine for a week and since we were going all that way, we decided to make a couple other stops along the way.

We first headed to Connecticut to visit with Joye and family.  Jocelyn loved this part of course, because she can never get enough of the kids and chaos.

I think we've been adopted!

Jake and Grace are huge!  And fun!

After a day and a half in CT, we headed to NH to visit my side of the family.  I haven't seen any of them in years - in some cases decades!  I had no idea how many of my family would stop in that day.  I was so surprised and it was so great to see everyone!

By this point, we had already been traveling for 3 days, but now it was off to Maine for the remainder of our vacation.  We stayed in Winter Harbor Maine.  It was a very beautiful area, but still pretty far from things, so our traveling continued.

Here are just a few of my favorite photos by the water.  We were very close to a part of Acadia National Park where we could watch a beautiful sunset.  We went there a couple different nights.

Definitely one of my favorite photos from the trip!

My two favorite people

I love these photos with Jocelyn and Grandma!  They're so cute together!

Pat's new friend!

At the top of the Penobscot Narrows Observatory

Family!

It was a long trip and we clocked 2000 miles on the car, but we had a lot of great fun and saw so many family and friends.  It was a great trip!  But after 10 days, we were also very happy to be home.

End of 2nd grade

As usual, I'm going to be playing blog catch up.

The end of 2nd grade came on June 17th because of yet another year with way too many snow days.

The last few days included awards and a class picnic, and then we said goodbye to another year.

Fabulous Friend!

Saying goodbye to Mrs. Kozi and Ms. Darvish her teacher and class Intern

And Ms. Reed

The 2nd grade class of 2016!

Jocelyn came so far this year!  Her reading is wonderful and she loves Math!  There will be lots of changes in 3rd grade - letter grades, lots of writing, and higher expectations and responsibilities.  My baby is growing up!