Before and After

The work on our front-porch and pergola is progressing and it will be awesome once it is done, but in the meantime, there are some inconveniences of having work done on the house.  The biggest by far is the lack of a front-door.  As the workers were pulling off some stuff around the old door to get the measurements for the new door; the old door became so unstable, they had to take it out and board up the hole.  Do you have any idea how many times a day you just quickly pop outside to do this or that?

Or how ugly a boarded up front door space is?  I was contemplating a front lawn sign that reads "We ARE current with our mortgage payments and our house is NOT being repossessed".  I finally abandoned the idea in favor of spending $12 on various paints and letting our girls and Rowan go wild painting. 

I think the results turned out fabulous, but I would still give up the painting in a heart-beat if that meant our door would be delivered earlier than the currently scheduled date of October 10th!

Before:

Ready to paint!

 During:

Hard at work

After:

They may have to work on their pose.  And, yes, the adults did get roped into finishing off the top that they couldn't reach.

Kindergarten!

Extended Care started on Tuesday, Kindergarten on Thursday.  After an extremely tearful departure from Preschool (apparently, both Vivian and the teachers were in tears throughout the day), Vivian seems to have no problem settling into Extended Care and Kindergarten. 

The transition was greatly helped because her best buddy Gregory is also in her ExCare class; even though he goes to a different Kindergarten.

Annelee is taking the transition harder, almost bursting into tears when we all dropped Vivian off at ExCare and Annelee couldn't stay and Vivian wasn't coming with us. 

Annelee does like KG drop-off and pick-up on Mondays and Fridays though.  Today, she ran up to Vivian (who was already lined up with the other kids to go inside) and gave her a big hug.  Very sweet!

Here are some photos from the official first day of KG.

If the backpack looks big on her, can you imagine how her classmates (who are all shorter, of course) look?

Not to be left out, Annelee donned her backpack (not that you can see it in the picture) and I had to quickly modify the sign, and she got to take a picture, too.

Homework

Vivian has two days of Extended Care under her belt.  Today, she complained to Will that he was picking her up too early because they were in the middle of a fun game.  I think she's settling in nicely.

Yesterday, she got to meet her Kindergarten teacher, Mrs Munson, for a brief interview.  She got her first piece of homework (?!?!?!) to bring to her first class tomorrow.   Luckily, it just involved filling out a paper with her name, favorite activity, food and color and a picture in the middle.

Needless to say, we were taking photos this evening.  A good thing, because I haven't been doing nearly enough of that lately.

Annelee, of course, needed to have her picture taken, too.

Annelee seems to be taking the whole transition to Kindergarten the hardest.  She keeps telling me that she is now going to go to KG, too, and doesn't like it when I point out that she needs to be 5 years old.  When we dropped Vivian off at EC today, she almost cried because she wasn't allowed to stay and Vivian wasn't coming with us.  Poor girl.

So, here are the photos from our impromptu session.

I'm pretty sure that a beginning Kindergartener isn't allowed to look so big already!

Curly-headed preschooler