We are now a family of five..and other things that have happened since my last post.

So I realize that we haven't been updating much in a while. Life has been pretty busy, to say the least. The last post was the beginning of summer, and now we find ourselves at the end of summer and getting Lindsay ready for first grade! Where does time go?
Anyway, June was a busy month right down to the last day. After school got out, we had one quiet week, then Uncle Brent came for a little visit. Really, it was work but he got to stay for the weekend and play with the girls, Lance, and Debra in the pool. The girls really loved having Uncle Brent around! That weekend, I turned 33. And moving right along...We had a visit from Lance's Aunt Cathy, also here on business but a great visit as well. The week of the 21st-26th, we had VBS, which the girls loved! I was crazy and had volunteered to teach. After thinking I was going into labor after the first day (I was 38 weeks pregnant) I figured out that I was just dehydrated and made it through the rest of the week just fine. The girls loved it! And REALLY enjoyed the music and activities. They are still singing those songs at the top of their lungs all around the house! That week, Lance and I also Celebrated our 10th Anniversary. Being overly pregnant, we settled for a simple dinner to celebrate. We'll have to do it up real good next year! The last week of June brought our last visitors for the month, Mom and Heidi, coming to help us whith the arrival of Baby Lucy.
Which brings me to July, which started with the birth of our third little princess, Lucy Jo (Lucile JoAnn). For details on her birth, if you haven't already checked it out, you can take a look at Lance's blog (www.lancebauslaugh.com), he was there blogging, twittering, and anything else you can imagine in social networking while I was laboring and delivering a baby. :-) It kept him busy! Lucy Jo came into the world in a hurry, and we have been enjoying our beautiful baby girl every minute since. The fourth of July weekend was spent mostly taking care of baby girl, but Lance and the girls (along with Grammie and Auntie Heidi) got to do a lot of swimming. Lindsay participated in the local Fourth of July parade with her Girl Scout Troop, and They all enjoyed the Melissa Fourth of July fireworks. Having baby around took a little adjustment on the two older girls' part but they have come through pretty well. Lindsay is a responsible helper and Leslie is endlessly kissing and loving on her baby sister. The rest of July was pretty much spent locked up inside. With the heat, going out with the baby was not really an ideal situation. The girls have been playing all day long with each other every day, with very few altercations. Two of their favorite things to play are "Food Network Star" and "Design Star." Can you tell what mommy likes to watch? They love it too and will sit and watch an entire show about making delicious food or designing an amazing room with me. At the end of July, we celebrated Leslie's 4th birthday with a small family dinner of her request: pig (pork roast) and green beans.
When August came, we had a visit from Papa Jim and Auntie Heidi just in time for the joint birthday party for the girls (maybe the last year we will get away with that!). Lindsay says it was her best birthday yet, as we celebrated her 6th birthday. The party was planned as a pool party, but a torrential down pour turned the party into an impromptu house party. Thanks to Papa, and Aunties Heidi and Debra we were able to quickly think of games to entertain 15 kids and their parents and clean up the house in order to make it acceptable for guests.

The summer has included some exciting events such as Lindsay losing her first, then her second tooth and learning about the tooth fairy. And both girls learning how to really swim (we have taken FULL advantage of our neighborhood pool once again this summer). Leslie followed Lindsay's lead in this area and has been a true swimmer for a couple of weeks now.

The summer has calmed down a little in the last few weeks. Thankfully. We are currently getting ready for Lindsay's first grade year and Leslie starting to work on pre-k curriculum with me at home, as we did when Lindsay was 4.

Lucy is now 7 weeks old! Time has gone so quickly. She is just now starting to smile at us, and has recently started to notice that there are interesting things too look at all around her. Lucy has been just as easy and content as her sisters. She is still waking us up at night, but we trust that this will be over soon as it was for the older girls at around 8 weeks.

So that is us, hopefully It won't be another 3 months before my next post! :-)

A busy couple of weeks...

The last couple of weeks have been busy for us with a fairy princess birthday party, Daisy patch ceremony, Lance and the girls going to South Dakota for a wedding, Lindsay's Kindergarten field day and graduation. Unfortunately, our digital camera showed up to the wedding broken (it won't focus) so we only have a couple of pictures from that and my mom has all of the pictures from field day. Aunt Debra loaned us her digital for Graduation but we had a hard time getting good pictures there too. So we will have to be satisfied with the following:

Fairy Princess!

Daisy Patch Ceremony- She was excited to get a patch none of the other girls got- Cookie Mom!

So much fun to dress up! Thanks Aunt Kristin for doing their hair.

Not a great picture but can you see how shy she was? She was worried because she hadn't seen where we were sitting and didn't think we were there.

Lindsay and the best Kindergarten teacher ever! We are really going to miss her.

Our First Graduation.

It's hard to believe that it was 9 months ago that we walked our little girl into a classroom and left her in the hands of a wonderful teacher. Wow! That was probably one of the hardest weeks of my life. I still fight the urge to keep her home with me because I miss her so much (so does her little sister). In 2 weeks, Lindsay will be graduating from Kindergarten! The girl has grown so much in the past 9 months and is learning like crazy. Her favorite subjects in school are reading, math, art and music. Music especially, and she has received complements from both teachers and fellow students on her natural talent in music. Her teacher went as far as to say that in her almost 30 years of teaching she has not seen another student so naturally gifted in music. We are hoping to get her into some sort of music lessons next year, hopefully piano.
In reading she has blossomed. She is about in the middle of her class (a great place to be!) in her reading level. Her struggle here has been confidence. Lindsay does not like being wrong so that holds her back from trying and being OK with making mistakes. When I work with her at home I am trying to really let her know that it is OK to make a mistake because sometimes you have to make mistakes first, so that you can learn. I think this is going to be a struggle for the rest of her life- she is a bit of a perfectionist.
In math she has completely surprised me- math was never a good subject for me. I vaguely remember counting apples on trees in Kindergarten- they are doing full addition and subtraction. The other day she wrote a number down and asked me what she should subtract from that number. She wrote 10 I said, "subtract 5." She said "that's easy, 5" Then she wrote 6, I said, "3." She just gave me a look and said "mom!" It so easy all I have to do is do it backwards and I know that 3+3=6 so 6-3=3. Well, excuse me, doing it backwards???!!! I guess I need to be a harder quizer. :-)
So now she is at the end of Kindergarten, I'm glad that we didn't wait another year to put her in. At almost 6, she is more than ready for first grade and is excited about the coming year. Though she will tell you she wants to stay with Mrs. Merchant forever, until she graduates high school (to tell the truth so do I). I don't think Mrs. Merchant would go for that. You can almost see the change in her pictures. The one at the top is her original school picture 3 weeks after school started. She was still to shy to smile for the stranger behind the camera and was dealing with an eye infection that makes for a bit of a heartbreaking picture. By Spring though we have a very confident little girl. And her graduation picture, taken last week, shows how much she really loves school now. I think she might pull a muscle with that smile. You should see the other pose, the smile is even bigger, if you can imagine.

Leslie is Worn Out

Tonight Leslie had a hard time with Dinner. I think she was just tired. On a side note... Katie told her to finish her dinner. She was going to sit there until she was done eating. Katie told her that she stays up late and Leslie should, "try her!" :-) Those comments were several minutes before this video. Also, do you like Lindsay's singing? She is upstairs in the SHOWER!

On the Princess Farm...

So recently a friend referred to us as the princess farm. I'm embracing it! With all of the little princesses around...why not? Anyway, it's been so long since we posted anything here or put pictures up so I thought I better update a little. Here's what we've been up to:

Lindsay loved Upward basketball!

Leslie slammed a dunk!

Leslie likes to pretend she's on Ace of Cakes.

We had a green party for St. Patrick's Day.

It snowed! Can you see it?

Lindsay worked hard on her powder puff derby car.

She came in 2nd for her troop, 18th over all.

Uncle Bobby and Auntie Heidi came..Bobby braved the animal farm with the girls.

Lindsay and Leslie haven't figured out that egg hunts are competitive, you snooze, you lose!

We made a cute treat for Lindsay's class.

The girls had fun on Easter in their pretty dresses from Grammie and Papa Jim.

We've been slacking off!

Here is a slide show of pictures from December and January. I haven't been good at taking pictures at all, in fact I have very few pictures from when the Bauslaughs visited in January for Lance's birthday. What was I thinking?

Lindsay's selling cookies!

In an earlier post, we announced that Lindsay is a Daisy Girl Scout. She loves every meeting!! Now it is cookie time for Girl Scouts so Lindsay is in the business of selling cookies. She's learning very important goal setting and money management skills. If you are interested in purchasing cookies either for yourself (if you are local only please!) or for Project Troop to Troop (where purchases go directly to US Troops home and abroad as well as USO and American Red Cross) please email us or give us a call!

Lindsay Starts Basketball on Saturday