June gives up the paci

Poor June, never did a child love a pacifier more. She LOVED(S) those things! With Willa, we were pretty good about just having it for naptime, but June always managed to haggle for more time with hers. I didn't want to take it right when she turned three, then it looked like we were getting the house and I wanted her to have a comfort for the first bit while we moved. Finally, it was getting ridiculous. She had pet names for them all and would give them little personalities and sometimes make us talk to them. She was also very particular about which one she wanted when.... You get the picture.

There is a Build-a-Bear by Ryan's work that we were walking past one day and as she looked in the windows I explained to her that she could pick out one of those bears when she gave up her pacifiers. She totally understood and totally decided that it was something she would do LATER. There was a character from Paw Patrol there that she couldn't stop talking about. How has she even seen Paw Patrol and known this character's name since we don't have cable, I have no idea. Actually, I do because I pressed her on it. Apparently, it occasionally comes up on Youtube Kids when I let her watch for a bit.

So she kept talking about Sky (the puppy) and finally she decided one day that she was ready. So we gathered them all and went to do the deed. Here she is posing with her bag of pacifiers.

 One last suck and good-bye (though, I was the one who told her to do that - I swear, I wasmore sentimental about it than she was).

 Warming the heart

 Ta Da!

 The main disappointment was that they don't let you put the pacifiers inside anymore! The worker said it just became policy down from the top a few weeks before we came in. It was kind of sad, but I gave the worker the bag of pacifiers at the end to "pay" for the pup. I'm sure it's a liability thing. These things are seriously the most expensive plush animals in the world. Unless they've woven gold thread into the fur, they should really let you fill it with nails or sharp knives if you want to. So that was a bummer, but June was resilient and then it was extra nice to walk straight up to Daddy's office to show Sky to him.

June has been doing well without pacifiers. She definitely understood that they were gone. A few times she has said that she misses them (even recently she's brought it up), but overall it's gone well. She dropped her afternoon nap for a while and would just play in her room and I was going bananas because she normally wakes up before 6 am and was so tired, but one day I forced her in bed and laid on the floor while she went to sleep. It kind of jump started her back in the habit for them. So now she does nap most days and is a much pleasanter little girl because of it!

Lost teeth!

Willa lost her first tooth sometime in October. I'm not sure when, I just remember it was wiggly for her birthday party and since she refused to wiggle it or let anyone touch it, we just let it hang there until it fell out on its own - which it did in the middle of the night. Luckily, it woke her up and she came running out of bed with it. I knew she was coming up on this milestone and had had friends lose teeth, but it just seemed so early and that there was no way it could be happening to her. I mean, all the teeth in her mouth looked extremely secure in there!!

Thar it is! You can see a giant tooth coming in behind it. A few weeks ago, we noticed that her other bottom permanent tooth was coming in. It was so far back that the baby tooth didn't get wiggly for several days. Then, it was the same old story where she wouldn't let anyone touch it. So, I just patiently waited and hoped that no one was looking too closely or judging me for allowing my daughter to go around with two rows of teeth like a little baby shark. I think that was the biggest gag for me, the shark teeth.

Like the other tooth, it fell out on its own, but this time while Willa was watching t.v. She was like, "Mom, my tooth just flipped out!" And sure enough, it had flipped out of her mouth and bounced somewhere in our enormous high-pile rug. When I say high-pile I mean serious HIGH-PILE. I love this rug, but I'm starting to regret it because it's almost impossible to care for. We broke some glass in it and even with the vacuum's hose we couldn't get down to the pieces at the bottom. What were the chances of finding a teeny wheeny baby tooth in the similar colored rug? Well, we looked and we batted and finally we pulled the couch apart and turned the rug completely over and batted it over and over again. We found a few Legos, toy money from the cash register, and the tooth! Seriously, so much can hide in this carpet, it's a little disturbing when you turn it over and toys start falling out of it.

Halloween 2016

First of all, we went to a real-live orchard to pick our pumpkins this year. I don't know why we have never gone before! I think maybe I thought the entrance fee was expensive... but it was also far from the old house. We live much closer to it now and had the best time. It's actually free to get in (right on budget!) and the pumpkins ended up being way cheaper than grocery store pumpkins too. The orchard was actually a real, working orchard - not just a field where they set out pumpkins. You could also go there and pick apples, squash, beans, and other produce.

Luckily they had these cute little wheelbarrows for getting your pumpkins. I wheeled both girls for quite a bit of the trip...

We took a little tractor ride around the property.

 

Carving pumpkins

 Last year we broke one of our carving knives, which of course I KNEW I'd remember and get new ones for this year, but then of course I didn't. It just seems weird to buy new Halloween stuff when Halloween is finished. So we suffered through it all and I got new knives at a post-Halloween sale. Still, what we had beats my childhood when we had to carve in the freezing cold garage with kitchen knifes. It was so cold and the pumpkin innards made your fingers freeze!

We started trick or treating and went first to our next door neighbors who have six kids. Two of the kids begged to go with us, so they quickly changed into their costumes. It was so fun to have them come along. Having next door neighbor kids and the friendships there is the childhood Ryan and I grew up with, but that we didn't think our girls would get a chance to have in Las Vegas. We love it.

Jay the Hamburger stole the show for me. He's four, but very small and would toddle after the other kids trying to catch up and yelling, "Don't forget this cheeseburger!!" It got me every time. Willa wanted to be Belle for the ward party and her school dress-up party, but by that night she decided to go full Elsa. I asked her several times if she wanted to go look at costumes at the store, but she said she wanted to wear her princess dresses. Easy for me :).

Willa turns 6

Willa turned six in October. Hard to believe it! She wanted a Lego/Princess party and was adamant about invitations and the whole shebang. It was my first time really doing this type of thing, so I was a little nervous. I'm not good at being creative or any kind of editing. I found a stock Lego photo online, cropped it a little, and uploaded it to Costco's greeting card site. Badabing, badaboom. The whole process probably took me an hour longer than the five minutes that was probably necessary.

I wasn't sure who to invite. School had just started (and she was ADAMANT about doing the party on her actual birthday, which is the middle of October) so she didn't really have a lot of school friends she knew well enough to invite. Plus, I was nervous about needing to invite the whole class. I didn't just want to do friends from the old neighborhood because we don't see them hardly at all anymore and sadly, it's mainly the memory of friendships with some of these girls. In the end I emailed two or three parents privately from the kindergarten class (only one could come), I invited her two best friends from preschool last year, our entire preschool co-op from the year previous, the girls in her new Primary class, and of course Bridgett. So many people couldn't come, we ended up having the perfect amount of girls. (Though, I'm just going to say shame on people who don't respond to RSVP's! Even if you can't come, you should still respond with regrets. This party made me determined to do better at that myself.)

Zappos just happened to be having a sample sale the day before, so Rebecca showed up at our house with a lot of brand new adorable dresses for the girls. This party dress was to die for, I was so happy she wanted to dress up in it for the party. It was perfect.

Pin the hair on the Lego.

I wanted to keep things really simple because I just knew if I tried to do too much I'd be frustrated and frazzled. The girls would mainly want to play, anyway. I had Ryan draw a Lego figure and then we played "Pin the hair on the Lego." The girls LOVED it. I had a table set up with crayons and some Lego Friends coloring pages, and another area set up with some Legos to play with. I thought about having a little contest where we could see who could build the tallest tower in 60 seconds, but it didn't fit into my plan to simplify. It was the perfect amount of structure/activities to keep the party on schedule as well as feed all the girls dinner and have time for cake and presents.

Present opening was so adorable. My friend took a video and posted it to Facebook, but I can't figure out how to download it to my computer so I can post it here. Basically, Willa happy-screamed her head off and jumped up and down for each present. I need to do better and my own reactions to gifts. It's fun to see someone get SO excited about a gift. Plus, her friends were sweet, thoughtful, and generous with their gifts.

 For the cake, I can't quite remember what I did. I think I made a cake in a 9x11 pan, cut it in half and frosted it double layered. Then I baked cupcakes. I took four cupcakes, cut off the tops, and then stuck the bottoms into the top of the big cake to make the cake look like a Lego block. It looked better in my mind (and on the internet), but she was pleased with it. I decorated it with some of the candy Legos and Willa added her princess Lego figures to finish it off. Let the record show that when I first baked the cake, I reserved enough batter to make four cupcakes. Then as I was putting the girls to bed the evening before the party, Ryan came home from work and one or two of my special four cupcakes had disappeared by the time I came back downstairs. I had time to whip up another batch of cupcakes the next day and it was nice to have the variation. Truth be told, the first four were a little burnt anyway.

We are missing one or two in this photo, but it was a great little group of girls. Aaliyah, Paige, Willa, Maya, June, Bridgett, Hailey, Aria

 Aaliyah was the only little friend from kindergarten who could come. This was such a sweet picture of the two of them. It's my understanding that they get very silly together at school.

The party was listed to go from 5-7 pm. I fed them chicken nuggets, fruit, veggies, and rolls on Lego paper plates. Probably the highlight of the party was that we finished everything up at a leisurely, but constant pace and the last little girls were leaving around 6:50 pm. It's pretty exciting to set a schedule and stick to it! Willa had a great time and I still feel grateful to friends (and parents who brought their girls and helped pick out gifts). We are very well-loved. 

At six years old, Willa loves Fancy Nancy books, lots of reading, LEGOS LEGOS LEGOS, and princesses. She received several Lego sets this birthday and basically spent two or three days straight putting them together. She is super focused when she's on a project that she enjoys. She can do the Legos almost entirely by herself, but occasionally will need help understanding an instruction or if she's accidentally built something one square off. She's better at being a sister to June and they have lots of fun imaginary play together. She does not like to get her hair brushed or get ready for school. She can't wait for the weekend but also admitted to me the other day that she's "beginning to like kindergarten."

June Starts Preschool!

Again, not knowing if we would be moving or not put a damper on preschool lists and preps for June. Ideally, I wanted to find another group of moms to co-op with (though my last group was so fabulous that I'm probably set for disappointment from now on). In our old neighborhood, there were a lot of little girls June's age but none of the moms were interested in doing a co-op. I didn't really push hard because I didn't want to organize everything and bail out if we moved. Instead, most of the moms there were signing their girls up at a cute home preschool of a friend, so I decided to go ahead and put June on the list as well. This is way back in January/February when you have to get on the list or else you're in no-man's land come September. My friend assured me that she'd be happy to put June on the list and if we dropped out she would have no problem filling the slot.

Excited to pick out a completely unnecessary backpack just for her.
 
As summer progressed and it looked like we were going to get the house, I called around to a few in-home preschools in the new area. Of course, they were all full and had been since January. They put June's name on a waitlist, but she was way down the list.

By the time we moved, I'd come up with a third option. The rec center that I love so much does little preschool classes. This is the rec center where we did gymnastics for $20/month, not the rec center where Willa did preschool, which would now be too far away. The preschool classes aren't quite full-on preschool, but they do work on letters and numbers and have a little structure. They meet twice a week and just for 45 minutes each time, so it's not like I'd be getting a huge break - and you're actually not allowed to leave the building during that time. But, they do have a workout room and gym, so I thought I'd drop June at preschool and get a little workout in for me just down the hall. So that's what we have been doing and it's been working great.

Honestly, if I could have picked anything, I would have gone with a great in-home preschool or co-op so that June could have a little longer class and I could run errands. But this has been a great compromise, it gives her the "preschool" experience this year, and then next year we are already on the list for an amazing in-home pre-k. Actually, this lady had a three-year-old spot open up about a week before school started this year and asked if June would want to come. I wanted to say yes soooo badly because it's such a sweet little preschool and I knew June would really enjoy it. The thing that stopped me was $$$$. Even though it's in home, it's expensive (at least in my opinion). It wasn't prohibitive, but the rec center was $35/month and it's hard to beat that.

If we hadn't moved, I think I would have done it, but with the new house there were/are more financial unknowns. We didn't know how much the pool would affect our energy and water bills, or what the price of chemicals would be each month. What would it cost to water the landscaped yard or to cool down this much bigger house? I mean, we had a general idea - but nothing specific. (When I called the utility companies before we bought the house to get a history, there was no way to get a clear picture of what the bills would be since it had been vacant and lot of the utilities hadn't been used or had been completely off.) I just wanted to give us a little cushion of time to get used to our new budget before I added a bunch of things onto it.

So preschool has been great, she has two teachers that she enjoys, Miss Donna and Miss Abby. They do cute activities, have circle time, and she seems to like it. It's a 2-3 year old split class, so that's a bit of a bummer because she's one of the oldest kids and there are some just barely 2 year olds in it who are so much younger at this stage. Still, the class is capped at 9-10 kids and with two teachers, it's been good.

Self-conscious smiles the first day because it's such a momentous occasion. Then she wanted me to take a video of her saying "Hooray for Preschool!" which isn't loading here and I'm too lazy to figure it out right now. 

Photo with Miss Donna and in the front of the class.

More Kindergarten

I thought I posted this photo earlier, but I don't see it now. Ryan wanted to take his own back to school picture with her. Finding the box with where these books were packed was a mid-sized challenge.

I'm so glad I took a picture of this because I totally forgot it had existed and it took me a few minutes to re-decipher it: "Willa McCall Daniels"spelled phonetically by its owner. McCall was my mom's maiden name and I really love and miss my Grandma McCall.

We had my first parent/teacher conference a week or two ago. It's hard to read, but basically, Willa scored 49 on letter fluency and the end-of-year goal for the kindergarten is to score 40. She scored 31 on sounds, and they want them to be at a 30 by December.

 I was a little intrigued and disturbed that her behavior was only a "P" for "progressing", but I'm pretty sure she can get extra silly when there are other little girls to be silly with. And now that I've photographed and documented all of this for posterity, I can throw everything away :).

Kindergarten

We moved into the new house on a Tuesday and Willa started kindergarten the following Monday. Life was crazy! I remember trying to pack all her school supplies in a certain school supply box, but then of course I'd come across something I'd forgotten and then that would get packed in a different box. Then, finding that special box somewhere in the house or garage after the move took some work. Suffice it to say, the classroom is short one box of large Ziploc bags that I was supposed to donate - but at least they got the extra paper, pencils, glue, and scissors.

For the past year or so I've thought about where to send Willa to school. The school by the old house was a title I school, there were several apartments and section 8 housing zoned for the school. So even though we'd heard the teachers and principal were excellent, the student body left a lot to be desired and the school was not a 5 Star School (which is a Nevada rubric). But, we had a good friend teaching there and I knew she would look out for Willa. I think it would have been fine, the kids on our street all went to school there and most people I'd talked to had had a good experience there.

Las Vegas does not have great schools, I think a large part of it is the transiency. When a lot of the population works in the service industry, people move around a lot, shows on the Strip open and close, etc. There isn't the same kind of permanency you'd find elsewhere. Where I grew up, people live in their houses 30+ years and send their kids to the same school and the same teachers are all there. My parents have been in their house 40 years and have most of their original neighbors. Here, even among church members, living in the same house 15 years is pretty rare. In addition, Clark County is one of the largest school districts in the country. They haven't figured out how to split it because the city of Henderson and the area of Summerlin could each be their own district, but then all those high-income tax dollars would be cut off from funding the poorer areas of the city. It's just a big tangled web. So there are good schools around, but there are lots of not good schools.

During this time I needed to decide which school, we were also unsure about whether we would get the house. The school in the new area was rated better, but still not 5 Stars, and what if we didn't get the house? I decided to put Willa on the list for two different charter schools. The first one, was by the old house. I only did that one because 95% of our old ward attended it, people in our ward had written the charter, opened the school, etc. But, I really wasn't excited about this school. It is very strict and I think they miss the point a lot of the time. For example, they assign up to an hour of homework a day for kindergarteners. One of their reasons for assigning homework is so that kids won't be idle. Seriously. That's their real reason. The school is really into building character, but for me it is a totally wrong-headed approach. One of my little piano students came to lesson. I asked how school was and she said it was good, but there were new words they couldn't say. I asked what the words were (thinking they were something like poop, or boo-boo butt). She said, "Well, because we are all at different levels, we can't say 'This is impossible.' or 'Piece of cake.'" Okay.... so what words can you say if something is hard? She said you could say, "This is exciting!"

I told Ryan that night that that school was like 1984. Words have meaning and we should allow kids to express that meaning and their feelings. It's like Doublespeak to force kids to say "This is exciting" about a hard math problem instead of honestly saying, "I'm having trouble with this, I find it hard." I also feel like it's a Socialist education system where they want to equalize everyone, they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. In real life, we all have different abilities, and kids need to learn that. Any way, I digress. As a caveat, I learned from another friend who teaches there that none of that word stuff was school policy, but must have been that specific teacher (who was also in the ward). For me, it was just a sign of bad teaching. I put Willa's name on the raffle to get in mainly because people in the ward (who wrote the charter) told me to and I decided to have options.

The second charter school was called Doral Academy. It's an arts-integrated curriculum and very popular. They've had to open up a new campus almost every other year to keep up with the demand. For example, my harp students went to the Doral by our old house. Last year for that school, there were 3,000 applicants for six spots. And the only reason those six slots were available is because two families moved out of state, so no one was dropping out of the school. The only real way to get into Doral is if you somehow squeeze in with the new kindergarten class (something that was still hard because all the younger siblings of students get seats first) or if they build another school. Luckily for us, they were building another school so I put Willa's name on the list for the new school, and two of the other Doral campuses and she ended up getting into the new school. It's a random lottery for all the schools.

Now I actually felt like I had a dilemma. She got into this great charter school that people rave about and that has a reputation in the city. However, I'm suspicious of charter schools in general. They don't have as much oversight as the public schools, they have a smaller budget so they often have new teachers because veteran teachers would be taking a pay cut to leave the district, etc. I also didn't know if I wanted Willa to go to a school that wasn't in her neighborhood because I like the idea of going to school with neighbor friends and church friends. However, because the school system in Las Vegas is so patchy, a lot of the kids don't go to the neighborhood school anyway.

On the other hand, I felt like I HAD to take this spot at Doral. People were dying for spots at this school and if we didn't take this slot, it was likely that we'd never get in again through the lottery. Lots of people see Doral as an alternative to private schools that they didn't want to afford anymore, so a fair amount of the students are coming from Montessori or other private schools. So even if I didn't know that much about the curriculum and exactly why it was so much better than the public schools, was it okay to just follow the crowd and everyone else's opinion that it was :)? Also, it has a middle school and high school on the same campus (in different buildings). It would be especially nice to stick with Doral through middle school where the parents are a little more involved, the kids have to wear uniforms, and you can kind of alleviate some of stresses of those awful middle school years. I also liked that they have a STEAM program for the upper schools. Instead of just STEM, they add Arts into the curriculum so it's balanced. I feel really strongly about being an educated person instead of just knowing facts. Learning about the arts and understanding the arts helps our logical reasoning skills and really gives a broader education in the long run. Lastly, a friend in our old ward is a veteran and award winning teacher. She actually got recruited out of the public schools two years ago, by Adelson, which is this very elite Jewish private school (recognize the same Sheldon Adelson?). She knew teachers going to Doral as well as the superintendent. She was extremely impressed and said that if she ever left Adelson, Doral is where she would most consider going. 

In the end, I went with the flow and we settled on Doral. The new campus is beautiful, it's the last development before you get to Red Rock, it has a beautiful view of the red mountains from the playground. Here is Meet the Teacher night a few days before school started. Her teacher's name is Mrs. Chevalier and it's her first year teaching, eek.

First day of school. She's gotten so sassy with her poses! Willa has been really excited about kindergarten for the past year, talking about it almost every day as we would drive past the neighborhood school. Unfortunately, one day this summer she was talking about it and I said, "You know, it's going to be long. It's going to be longer than day camp." She had just come from a day camp with June that was four hours long... Whoops, that was the wrong thing to say. From that point on, she never talked about kindergarten again. The night before school she was a little excited, but also nervous about the length of the school day and we had to kind of pump it up for her. I feel bad that I ruined it a little for her.

Lining up the first day with her class. It was very sweet and she managed a cute smile and really was looking forward to it. Some of the kids were actually quite sad and it was hard to see them crying and hugging their parents. 

Hmmm...not so excited about the second day. It's rough getting into a schedule. Last year, all of Clark County went to full day kindergarten. A few of the charters still do half day, but ours is not one of them. I wish they would do a five or six hour day, which would be more than the 2 1/2 of half day, but less than the 8+ of full day.

 Lining up the second day.

Her school day runs from 8:30-3:19. We leave about 8:00 a.m. so that she has time to play on the playground before school. The parking and driving situation at the school is pretty awful. Since it's a charter school, there are no buses and it's not a neighborhood school for most kids so there aren't a lot of walkers. That means there are a LOT of drivers. We are lucky to get home around 3:45 most days. If I get there super early, wait in line outside the gate for 10-15 minutes, and am first to pick her up out of her classroom, I can get home by 3:35, wahoo! Still, I find that it's usually easiest to be five minutes late and not have any wait at all to get into the school, but then I hit a little more traffic on the way out. Still, I think 8:00-4:00 pm is a little much for a 5/6 year old. I keep salivating on the little neighborhood school down the street and dream a little about going there. I can get door to drop-off for Willa in 12 minutes depending on school traffic, but then I think about just driving two minutes to the neighborhood school.... Anyway, I like Doral for now. It's a nice place. I don't have anything to compare it to and I'm sure she'd be fine at the local elementary, but I really like having the option to go there for middle school. I also like that a charter school can be more flexible and less bureaucratic with a student or a teacher. If I really had issues with her teacher or something going on, I feel like I would have more of a voice with the principal and there would be more options to solve the problem with less red tape.

It took about two or more weeks for Willa to really settle in and not cry about going to school. There were definitely lots of tears the second day. I feel like we don't have a lot of free time to practice piano and get other stuff done. It feels sad to get home and have it almost dinnertime. I've been trying to get practicing done before school, but that's difficult too. She just doesn't have a lot of down time and so I feel bad taking some of that precious down time and scheduling it for piano or another activity. Still, they do a lot of fun things in class and have lots of specials and breaks so she does enjoy school quite a bit now and it's not all sitting straight at a desk. She's getting to know her classmates and gets very silly with them.