Our Kids Blog

Emma and Landry enjoyed a week of Vacation Bible School at the same church where Emma will attend preschool this next fall. They did a lot of crafts and learned some more about the Bible. A pretty good use of some summer vacation time.

The girls made the tie-die shirts that they are wearing in the picture.

We had hoped to go to Noah’s Ark in Wisconsin Dells this summer, so we decided to use Emma’s 4.5 birthday as the backdrop for the day. Kenny stayed home this year with Grandma and Grandpa Swany, but Cousin Landry came a long.

As you look through the pictures, I got some help from Emma for some of the captions. Anything in quotes are her exact words.

Emma didn’t know that we bought a cake at the grocery store.

She was pretty surprised.

We did save the cake until after lunch.

A little lunch. This all took place at a rest area just north of Wisconsin Dells.

Emma and dad went down a lot of the slides together. Next time Emma said she will do them by herself.

Emma did go down this slide by herself.

The two girls did a little racing down the side by side slides.

Here is the finish. A big splash.

Here the two are taking a picture that Emma claims to be “kind of cute and funny.”

Emma says, “Landry went down the turtle slide really fast.”

Emma says, “We took a picture by the turtle and I smiled really kind of good.”

“Riding on the horse, heedy haw.”

“We were in the wavy water and we had so much fun in the wavy water.”

“Wow I jumped really high over the waves. I wanted to say ‘hee haw’.”

Emma’s preschool had its end of the year picnic. It had a lot of fun activities and games. In addition, cousin Landry graduated from preschool and will be going to kindergarten next year.

A little fishing game with some pretty nice prizes. We ended up with two squirt guns and some other stuff.

Big bubbles are always a hit.

The younger grades did some singing before the graduation ceremonies.

Landry is all set for the diploma ceremony.

Emma (and technically Kenny) got a new pool for the summer.

We got a nice posed picture.

But Kenny doesn’t enjoy cold water.

The girls played an interesting game that involved pretending that the castle part was a seat belt in a car.

The girls didn’t seem to notice how cold the water was.

The Swanstrom’s celebrated Mother’s Day up on Lake Wissota. It was a beautiful day outside and we all had a lot of fun. Tammy was recovering from a cold, so she wasn’t feeling the best, but she still was blessed to spend the time with her great kids.

Kenny did not want to just sit for a picture. He wanted to play. For anyone who has held a toddler who doesn’t want to sit, Kenny is just starting the move used by any child–straighten those legs and arch the back and then just slip out of the lap.

Here Kenny is just trying to crawl away. Emma is also interested in doing something else than take pictures and she is letting us know oh so subtly.

This was the best of the three of them. Two smiles out of three isn’t bad.

Don’t know the problem with the little one in the middle, but once again two smiles out of three isn’t bad.

The shirt that Tammy is wearing was painted by Emma for Mother’s Day. It turned out very nice.

As a fundraiser the local theatre guild held a Fairy Tale Ball. Emma and cousin Landry got all dressed up as princesses for the event.

The local Hair Academy (beautician school) styles hair at a reasonable price, so the day started with hair.

Cousin Landry got an “up-do”.

Now off to home to get on their dresses.

Here is the crew that went to the ball. This was a great photograph and was taken by cousin Avery.

The two girls were very excited even though none of us knew exactly what to expect.

Tammy found a clearanced bridesmaid dress that made her look like a princess too.

When we arrived it was raining and cold, so we didn’t know if we would be able to go on a carriage ride, so the girls hopped up into the carriage for a picture.

Since the event was held by the Chippewa Valley Theatre Guild, they put on some little shows.

Carriage rides did happen, so we got all bundled up and took a ride around the parking lot.

Cindrella’s step-sisters and step-mother mingled with the crowd.

A local dentist, I mean the tooth fairy , was giving rides on the magic chair. If you see Emma you can ask her what the magic words were to make it go up and down. At the end of the night Emma mentioned that this was one of her favorite things that she did.

The girls did a little crown decorating.

The night ended with a dance.

Every spring local business put on an event at the Eau Claire Indoor Sports Center. It was a lot of fun, though Emma did get a rug burn that took her out of the action.

We decided that Kenny shouldn’t go by himself, so daddy got to go too.

Landry went first…head first.

Emma also went head first. Those two do a lot the same.

We celebrated Easter at the Ternberg’s house. It was also Carter’s birthday so we celebrated that too.

Here is a picture of all the kids. This was taken just before the Easter egg hunt.

Kenny found one egg. His cousin Avery did the hiding and set the rules so that they big kids couldn’t take any of the eggs that were easy for Kenny to get.

Kenny quit after his one egg, and did a little posing for the camera.

We couldn’t get the best pose from the two of them, but you can at least see thier Easter outfits.

Uncle Ryan and Aunt Tessa helped us get a family picture.

Landry and Emma had lots of fun.

The Boy and Girl Scouts of Eau Claire put on a really nice Easter Egg Hunt for the community. It was a lot of fun.

Kenny did a nice job waiting for the hunt to start. The coloroful eggs were tempting.

Kenny and I set the goal of getting one egg. I placed him in front of a blue one. He just stood there for a moment mesmorized by all of the other kids running around. Finally he reached down to pick it up.

Next was getting the egg into the basket. It looks like he is on his way, but what actaully happened right after I took this shot was that Kenny saw another little boy put an egg into the grocery bag held by this little boy’s mom. Kenny decided that must be the thing to do, so we walked over and with out the mom seeing he put his blue egg in the the bag. The mom did end up noticing and gave the egg back to Kenny and he got it into his basket.

After getting his one egg we went to the egg trading post where eggs were traded for a bag of candy.

If you look really close you can see his bag of jelly beans. Kenny really likes jelly beans.

The hunt was divided up into age groups so Emma and Landry went with Tammy to the 3-5 year old area. The compitition was stiff, but with a little sharing, both girls ended up with 4 eggs.

They too traded in their eggs for candy.

They both like jelly beans also.

Besides just the egg hunt, there were some inflatable jumping areas and one had a slide.

The girls loved the slide and had to do it twice.

This year we decided not to go any where far away for spring break. It wasn’t that long ago that we went to Disneyland. We did want to do a few fun things, so the first thing was to take Emma and cousin Landry to the Mall of America. Every Tuesday of the year is Toddler Tuesday. The two girls had lots of fun. We are sure that Kenny had fun too back in Eau Claire with Mama and Papa Swany.

After going on the ghost shooting ride, we went over to the Merry-go-Round.

Emma and Landry went on the bouncy drop ride.

Daddy got to ride on the Diego Safari Bus.

The Blues Clues ride wasn’t very exciting, but they still liked it.

They both liked the truck driving ride, but Landry really liked it.

Landry even wanted to go on it again by herself. Maybe truck driving is in Landry’s future.

A recent addition to the Mall of America is their butterfly house.

Only daddy held a butterfly though. One landed on Emma and it freaked her out a little bit.

We ended the day at the Underwater Adventure part of the Mall of America. The girls really enjoyed looking at all the fish and the turtles. We were on constant look out for the next type of fish though.

SHARK!!

Cousin Avery turned 11 on St. Patrick’s Day. The birthday party was a few days later, but we were there to celebrate with all of the relatives.

For present opening, the younger girls in the family just looked on. The probably all wished that it was their birthday too.

One of the highlights for Avery was her own computer. I would have been just as pumped.

A Coldstone Ice Cream cake was the dessert of choice. Avery would make a good Rudolf.

Kenny caused a lot of trouble so we did keep him locked up in the sunroom for most of the night. Just kidding. He did like it out there though. Here he is doing a little piggy impersonation.

After being freed from his lock up Kenny did a little relaxing on his Papa Swany’s lap.

And a little nose picking also.

A few days ago Landry showed Emma her new baker’s outfit. Emma really liked it and Landry even let her borrow it. Emma currently has a sticker chart for wearing her glasses, so when she got it filled in she wanted to get a baker’s outfit just like her cousin. Landry was soon over for a visit and the two of them got all dressed up and started some baking.

Emma and Landry sure have become good friends. They really do a nice job playing together.

In the downstairs bakery Landry baked a pumpkin pie and Emma baked a birthday cake.

Emma had 7 of her friends over for a birthday party. They all dressed up like princesses and princes. They ate pizza, cake, and did some fun little crafts. They all seemed to enjoy themselves.

One of the crafts was to decorate a picture frame.

The knight in shining armor got tired out. I don’t know if it was from fighting off dragons or from fighting off all the princesses.

I got in on a picture with our little princess.

You can’t quite see it, but Kenny was dressed with the theme. He had a shirt on that said “King of Hearts.”

Emma and Breely where told to wait until the other girls where done eating so this is where they waited.

Sleeping Beauty lived in our garage the last few days, but she still looked and tasted good.

One last time to blow out some candles.

Here is everybody that made it to the party. It was a lot of fun.

Emma had an action packed birthday. We wanted to fill it with memories that she could look back on.

The first event of the day was going to the Children’s Museum with Emma’s good friend Ava. Papa Fish came along to for the fun.

Eau Claire has a great children’s museum with lots of neat and realistic activities.

These two ladies did a nice job painting their tractors.

After the museum they went to Emma’s favorite place to eat…Noodles and Company.

This might be controversial, but Emma did get her ears pierced on her birthday.

As you can tell there was a little discomfort, but she didn’t cry at all.

If you look really close you can see the pink little flowers in her ears.

I mentioned in the last post that the day was action packed. When I got home from school I took Emma and Landry sledding. The weather here in Eau Claire finally got a bit warmer (upper 20s) so being outside was an option.

Mom had the camera and we had to make a couple stops in some places where the light was good.

We had a lot of fun sledding and we would have stayed later, but we had to get home for the big party.

We woke up to some birthday celebrations and we ended the day with more celebrations. The rest of the day was also action packed, but that will be in the next post.

This was taken at 7:03 am. The kids are usually up by 7:00 so they were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Princess stuff. All this girl wants is princess stuff.

She did get some non-princess stuff that she enjoys. She has a kitchen in her play area so the mixer will help her make her favorite dish…porridge. She also got some books and some mittens.

Here evening party was with family. Grandma Swany once again provided the cake decorating for the event.

It is a Swanstrom tradition to have some sort of princess cake. I even vaguely remember my older sister having a cake something like what Emma has here.

Emma and Kenny both got birthday candles from Grandma and Grandpa Fish.

The two cousins had lots of fun playing together at the party.

Kenny found the princess coloring book something worth pointing at.

Probably the highlight of the evening…7 princess dolls. All seven of them ended up sleeping with Emma in Emma’s bed.

Besides porridge, Emma does like to bake, so a birthday cake will be a nice addition to her kitchen.

Landry, Emma and Carter really play well together. It is such a blessing to live so close to them.

Getting ready to blow out the candles.

And the official blowing of the candles. She did have two boyfriends when it was all said and done.