Eleven and stuff...

My girl just turned eleven. It happened before I even realized it. She'd been talking about her birthday for months. I thought I had so much time, and then.... the day was here and I was not ready. I'm never really ready.

My goal was to keep it simple. Super simple. I told her one friend could spend the night. I did no decorations for the first time ever, I think (except for maybe when she turned two and we had no money to even buy her a gift.) And you know what, it was totally okay! I was able to relax and enjoy her day and not worry about the little things that normally make me crazy. I even was flexible and let another friend stay over at the last minute (literally, like at 10 o'clock that night) and I only stressed a teeny little bit about it! That's a huge deal for me! :)

Jenna and her best friend, Brenna.

Marah, Brenna, and Jenna

The four layer cake I made for the birthday girl.

Her favorite color right now is turquoise. I saw the idea for this ombre cake on Pinterest.com in pink and thought it would be fun to surprise her with the blue version :) She loved it!

Jenna got the Nintendo DSi that she has been begging for (everyone chipped in for the gift) plus two new games (Nintendogs and Zelda). She's pretty much had her face buried in it ever since! I'm letting her catch a break with it because it's summer vacation but in July we start up "school" again and then she won't have as much DS time.

Yep, that's right. I said school. In July. Does that make me a mean mother? Here is my line of thinking; rather than three months off in the summer we take one month off every five months. Plus a week or two off here and there to coincide with family vacations, birthdays, holidays and such. So our schedule will look like this:

School- July, August (first 2 weeks off for family vacation), September (last week off for Marah and Alex's birthdays), October (one week off for Halloween), November (two days off for Thanksgiving)

Break- December

School- January, February (last week off), March, April (one week off for Easter), May

Break- June

There will probably be one more week off in that second semester for a family trip or something but we don't have anything planned at this time. I'm pretty confident that this schedule will work well for us and I am excited to get started! I'll be blogging about our curriculum plans for this year soon.

Here are some pics from the summer outdoor fun the kids are having. They aren't inside playing video games all the time :)

This one totally cracks me up. Every picture of Jenna running through the sprinkler looked like this :)

The girls with our neighbor's boys, Sam and Benny.

Oh, and I found some pics of Marah and Zion that I thought were cute and worthy of sharing. :) I loved how they played side-by-side on the computer and would tell each other secrets. <3

whisper, whisper

Zion is totally cracking up here :)

Make each day count!