Pryor's Preschool Graduation

These pictures are a little blurry but I forgot my camera so I had to use my phone.  I also videoed two songs and took more pictures - but I think some unnamed children playing with my phone accidentally erased them!

They are still cute - even if they are a bit dark!  He's sad for his last day of school tomorrow.

Alice's Recorder Performance

Her class was chosen from the whole school to go to a county wide recorder festival.  They performed again at the PTA appreciation breakfast where I recorded this song:

They performed 3 songs but I couldn't get the other 2 to upload.  This one was given to them by their music teacher just the day before - I'm not sure why they needed a third song but this is what they did.

She's standing here next to her friends, Maya and Sarah. She loved doing the recorder. She practiced and was so excited about it!

Cultural Arts Night

Grady and Alice both had pieces selected by their art teacher to display at the Cultural Arts Night.  All we knew was that they had at least one piece.  Grady knew of two different projects that he didn't get back.  It turns out, when he got everything afterwards, he had *3* pieces displayed!  WOW!  Here are pictures of the ones that we knew about.

Ceramic Leaf

Ceramic Leaf

Pencil/Charcoal drawing of the body - he chose an interior view.  You can see the spinal cord!

Grady's 4th grade play

So many things to post - I'm going to try to catch up quickly.

Grady's class put on 2 small plays - Little Red Writing Hood - where Grady was an FBI agent - Fairytale Book Investigators.  They also did a take off on The Wizard of Oz - and he was the Scarecrow. 

At the beginning of the play, they signed and sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Here are some pictures of him from both plays:

And as a scarecrow:

Alice and Pryor were able to watch the play- it was great fun!



The Arnold Family Singers

The first time they did this was a little bit better - but this is the version I recorded - oh well!

Grady is playing his piece for his piano recital in a few months - still working on it! Alice is singing - trying to keep up as well as she can. Pryor, well, Pryor is contributing in the best way he knows how - comic relief!

Grady's Cub Scout Jamboree Camping Trip

Well - if these are not pictures of happiness - I don't know what are!!

Stephen and Grady are with 10,000 Boy Scouts from the region to celebrate 100 years of Boy Scouts. They left this morning and get back tomorrow some time. Stephen just sent me these pictures - and I think they are worth 1000 words - or maybe 10,000!

Alice in the Murrysville Art Show

Alice has been taking an "Art Camp" this summer by a local former art teacher. She has been working on clay pieces for the month of July. Her teacher told the class about the Murrysville Art Show open to anyone in the community.

She entered three pieces in the "3-Dimensional" student division and won 3rd place for one of her pieces! When we went to look at it today to show Daddy, they gave her the "prize" - a two dollar bill!!! I thought the prize would be the ribbon. HA!! She was very excited!

In this video clip above, Alice explains her piece in detail and her other two pieces.

Grady's First Piano Recital

We had a very big afternoon today! We all went to a nearby church where Grady performed in his first recital. He knew his piece well. He said he was a little nervous beforehand.

Once he got on stage, he was all business! In fact, if you notice at the end, he was just sitting on the bench as if he were going to play another song. Beforehand, we had talked about how he was going to walk down the aisle and start playing as soon as his teacher finished announcing him. However, we neglected to mention he needed to get up as soon as his piece was over! HA! He was ready for more!

Alice's Postcard Project

If you remember from this time last year, it's that time again.

Alice's first grade class is doing a social studies project examining the world around us. "The project is designed to provide the students with an awareness and appreciation of other places in the United States and the world." Grady will get to read the postcards to fellow classmates and plot the locations on the class map. They can be sent from any place. There is no deadline.

If anyone would be willing to send a postcard I think Alice would love it. If you know of someone living in another country that would be really fun too.

Send to:
Mrs. Rich
Newlonsburg Elementary School
3170 School Road
Murrysville, PA 15668

Thanks so much! I hope to get pictures/videos of our trip online in the next couple of weeks.

Alice - the song writer

After St. Patrick's Day, Alice wrote this song. She made up the words and tune. You can see on the sheet that she colored a picture on both sides as well.

So adorable!!

Alice Update

News Update:

So Alice ate her first chocolate cupcake (or chocolate anything) tonight because she made them today. Should I be weirdly glad that she likes something I'm so passionate about, or sad because now she might steal my chocolate? Who knows? She may hate it again tomorrow!

Christmas

We got matching pjs - but couldn't get Pryor to get in the picture. Oh well! They are comfy and look cute.
I think this is the only picture of all of us from Christmas. We had such a great one this year. It went by too quickly!
Here's a picture of "My best Christmas of my life." I don't think I'm going to be able to convert the video I took - but it was awesome for those of us who were there. Alice had been asking for these and Santa brought them!! She screamed after she opened them up and rolled on the ground with them. Sheer happiness!
Alice and Grady were very "helpful" with Pryor. He was the last to wake up - about an hour after the other two woke up. Let me rephrase that: they were not allowed to come out of their room until 7:00 AM. About the time they were finished with their stockings, he came down.

Soon after he was finished, Grandmother & Granddaddy made it to GrandPatti & Papa's house. We all had a great time opening up our wonderful presents. This was a fabulous Christmas!

Like Mother, Like Daughter

Can you even believe how cute this is?!?!? We went to Macy's a few weeks ago and found this coat for Alice that perfectly matches mine! I think one thing that makes the whole thing even better - it was only $10!
There must be something on the lens of our camera - the bottom of the image is a little fuzzy. That's on all of these pictures - oh well! When we have worn these coats at the same time - we get rave reviews! I'm glad she wants to dress like me. We'll see how long that lasts!!

Making Christmas Cookies

We had such a fabulous Christmas vacation, I thought I'd relive it all by posting some great pictures. I have some awesome ones from the family Christmas pageant, but I'll save that for a later post.

We traveled first to Jefferson City for our break. One activity I knew I wanted to do while we were there was to make cookies and decorate them with icing. I couldn't have handled it without my mom!!
As is often the case, the recipe we made was sticky, so we had a very difficult time with the dough and transferring the shapes onto the cookie sheet. I also wanted to make sure that we had enough cookies - so we doubled the recipe! We had enough!! HA!
Grady and Alice really got into decorating the cookies. They both were pretty good at handling the cookie cutters. The icing of the cookies was even better! Both children really enjoyed and got into the different colors and making designs. It was a really fun project!

Pryor decorated maybe one cookie, but he was happiest cutting up paper. This is his new favorite activity! The trick is just to make sure that the paper he is cutting up isn't important!

Halloween in December??

I am finished with Christmas things, and don't want to pack for our trip yet. One last post...
Our neighbor, Yoshiko Sonoda, used to tie obis (the sash around Alice's kimono above) professionally - for festivals and what not. She gave this one to Alice!! It was amazing to watch her work. She had a thin piece of cardboard in the front to start. She tied it at 11 AM so Alice could go to a birthday party, and it lasted all day and into the night!These pictures don't do the obi (sash) justice. Alice looked beautiful! She loved wearing the Japanese shoes (although she almost didn't wear them when Yoshiko said they were men's shoes! We told Alice no one else at the birthday party would know that! Since the top was navy - that's what made it a men's versus a women's shoe.)
A smiley cookie (local restaurant - Eat N Park - their signature is the smiley sugar cookie - he has smiley body tattoos on his hands - they were too big for his cheeks), girl from Japan and Bob the Builder.

These are our jack o' lanterns. Daddy let them pick which design they wanted us to cut. If I had been there - I would not have let Alice pick out such a difficult one. Needless to say, I was stuck trying to cut out the spider legs!! It was ridiculously hard - but it did turn out well. Stephen got the easy ghost in the window. Next year we are doing a basic smiley face!!


I tried to capture on video the joy of Pryor and his enthusiasm running from house to house. Check out the above movie.

I am blown away at how much candy and other stuff they got for Halloween!


They can't possibly eat it all. Even with my parents here and all of us eating the candy for a week, we still had enough stuff left over to bring down for all the big cousins to eat at Thanksgiving! That's a lot of candy!

Breakfast with Santa?

I don't really think I need any explanation here. The video and pictures speak for themselves. I'll put them in chronological order:


Above is the video I took as we were getting the children ready to sit on Santa's lap. Pryor screamed last year and he wasn't so sure on this day...

You can see in front of me, Pryor sliding off of Grady's lap. Except that Grady was still holding onto him and his shirt, so his entire stomach is showing!
Trying to talk some sense into him...
Wouldn't even face the camera with me holding him!!!
This was as good as it was going to get. Oh well, there's always next year!

Christmas Programs!

I'll make this brief:

Yesterday, Grady and Alice had their Christmas program. My camera does not like the school auditorium - so the pictures are dark.
Here you can see Alice in the middle in a red dress. When Pryor saw her, he yelled "Hey! Alice!" and she saw her and waved. She acted embarrassed - but she loved it!

Grady had the first speaking part for the second grade! He took the time to memorize it (it wasn't too hard) and he remembered every word!

The above is a short clip from Grady's program. He is on the top row - middle. I only taped part of the song - figured a little goes a long way. HA!!

Pryor's Christmas program was today.

He is the one that is in the front row, on our far left. I love his actions (except no one else is doing them! ha!!) Plus, at the end of the above video, check out his bow.

Glad this is the last of these till next year! Pretty cute, though!

Museum of Natural History

OK - OK - I haven't blogged in *forever.* So I thought I'd write something quick so I can at least have something on record for November. However, I don't want to miss anything - so I'm posting from the middle of October when we had a friend staying with us for the weekend.

Curtis Shull came to our house on a Friday night and went home on Sunday night. We had a busy and fun weekend! On Sunday, we decided to go to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

They have an exhibit where you can be like a paleontologist. They have "bones" buried in "rocks." I don't know what the hard substance is - something like rubber or rock. They gave them each a chisel, brush and they had to wear the safety goggles.
Pryor wasn't too sure about the safety goggles - but since Curtis and Grady were wearing them - he decided he would too!
We stayed at this exhibit for a while. Sometimes they would all work together on the same site and other times they went off on their own. After they "dug up" these bones, we looked at the dinosaur bones and then decided we'd had enough of bones! It was a quiet ride home - we were all exhausted!

All About Alice

I have been remiss in posting! Our fall has been a bit hectic!

We signed up Alice to participate in a cheer leading clinic. It was a one night affair, and afterwards parents were invited to see what the girls had learned.

This first movie is from that evening. The "clinic" was a fund raiser for the high school cheerleaders who taught the girls the cheers. I finally got Alice in a position where I could film her, and one of the high school girls stood right in the way! Oh well! I think you can see Alice in the second row just to our right of the cheerleader in the center of the shot.


Just to break it up a bit, chronologically what happened next was at gymnastics class. Alice is really enjoying taking this class with twin girlfriends from school. I think this picture was from the second class. She climbed higher on the rope than I ever did in school! I think she has subsequently gone even higher!


The second part of the cheer leading clinic was to be able to "cheer" at a JV High school football game. The Saturday morning of the game it was rainy and miserable! You could tell who the die-hard girls were - just the fact that we were even *at* the game!



Alice was a bit overwhelmed at the whole affair. The high school girls gave each girl a pom pom to use - and I think that was the best part for Alice! I think next year we will definitely do this again!

Pryor Potty Posting

Well, I think Stephen and I are entering a new phase of our lives...Pryor has gone one whole week without potty accidents! He got the red gun above after one whole day of staying clean. Today, he got the blue gun (same idea, different color) for staying clean for one whole week!!

I questioned whether it would ever happen because he has been SO stubborn about going potty. However, he has almost completely figured it out. Whoo hoooo!! Now this is a cause for celebration!