Dance Class

Now that "baby sister" has arrived, we were looking for a way for Melissa and Sheinah to have special time together...enter Mommy and Me dance class. Melissa saw an ad for the class in the local paper and decided to sign up. Melissa and Sheinah go to class for 30 minutes on Saturday mornings. As Sheinah likes to say, "no daddys can come." In addition to Mommy and Me, Sheinah's best buddy from her old daycare, Gabrielle, also goes to the class so it's doubley fun for Sheinah.

This Saturday, her Nama was in town so we all went together to class. We decided to get some pictures and video to capture this momentous ocassion. It should be noted that Melissa managed to leave the camera there (she has a long history of losing cameras, just ask her Aunt Jo-Ann). Luckily, someone turned it in!

The little girl in the green shirt is Sheinah's friend, Gabrielle. You'll see that they are the only two little girls who are not wearing fancy dance clothes. Maybe Auntie Shannon can make Sheinah a little dance skirt for Christmas? HINT, HINT, HINT :)

In this week's class, the girls learned first position. In the video below, you'll see Gabrielle and Sheinah practicing first position and doing a Plié and then doing a dance at the end. The teacher uses some neat terms to help the girls learn the positions. To get them into first position, she talks about zipping and unzipping the feet. To do the Plié, the girls "open a window." Sheinah really doesn't like first position at all (she won't unzip her feet in the video). I guess we'll be doing tap dance class instead of ballet in the future! Enjoy the video!

Abi or Amaris

Now that Amaris is a little bit bigger, she is starting to look a bit like other family members. Melissa thinks that in this picture she looks just like her cousin Abigail (Abi is the baby on the right).

Twins?

We've been thinking that Amaris looks a lot like Sheinah so we decided to duplicate a picture we had taken of Sheinah when she was six weeks old. Can you tell which picture is Sheinah and which one is Amaris?

Shannon, the master seamstress

Shannon's gift to baby Amaris was the gift of sewing. We sent Shannon some fabric and she made a nursing shawl and new cover for the glider in Amaris' room. The result was quite amazing. She even found matching buttons for both fabrics! Check out the glider (to the left). To see the nursing shawl, check out the Marshall Kids' blog: http://marskidsinterest.blogspot.com/

She also made Sheinah a really neat jacket and matching doll for her birthday. Sheinah has been wearing it every day since we opened the package.

What's Missing?

Check out this photo and see if you can tell what's missing. Hint...it used to be attached to Amaris and went missing today.

Story time for Amaris

Sheinah really loves to "read" stories to us. This weekend, she got to bring home Duncan, a little dog who travels to the homes of the kids in her preschool class. Duncan comes with his own suitcase, pillow, blanket, and story books. Tonight, Sheinah decided that Amaris would like to hear Duncan's story so she asked daddy to help her read to Amaris.



You'll hear Sheinah talking about duck poop several times. After we stopped recording, Travis asked Sheinah why she was talking about poop so much. She said, "here, let me show you where the poop is" and proceeded to turn to a page that had a drawing of what she thought was the duck's poop. It was actually a soda bottle in the water, but she was convinced it was poop and that became the focus of her story :)

Amaris photo shoot

During our travels this summer, we came across a cool photo of a baby's feet that we decided to try to replicate with Amaris. We also found a cute photo in a baby magazine that we tried to duplicate. See below for the finished products:

Wake up time

Travis has a facination with the faces babies make when they are waking up. Both Sheinah and Amaris made/make the same faces. Check out the video to see what Travis loves so much.

Fixing Jonne's bike

Travis took Sheinah outside to play because the weather was nice (an oddity for Duluth at this time of year). He decided to put the muffler back on Jonne's dirt bike while they were outside. "Uncle Jonne" travels for his job so our home is kind of his storage unit. When Travis was done, it was Sheinah's turn to fix Jonne's bike. It's important to notice that she actually uses the wrench appropriately (only putting it on actual bolts) and that she figured out she needed a larger size for the big bolts. At any rate, she had a good time hanging out with her daddy.