Chinese hat dance...recital

Kyleigh just finished her winter showcase dance recital, titled "nutcracker sweets." Her class performed the chinese hat dance. Kyleigh did a great job. She practiced and practiced and had the steps down pat. She practiced so much that at her last class she was finishing the steps half way through the music. Her teacher reminded her to slow down, and she did a great job at the recital. I was the class chaperone and had the job of wrestling with the chinese hats. All of them were broken and the straps were duck taped to the hats. When I had the girls lined up outside the stage two of the hats came untaped. I quickly fixed them with more duck tape. Crisis averted. Then when we were lined up on the side of the stage one of the same hats popped off again. I was out of duck tape and she went on with her hat on halfway. She had to pull it off and kick it to the side to keep dancing. I've decided that I'm not much of a stage mom and chaperoning at dance recitals stresses me out, but Kyleigh liked having me with her so I guess I'll do what I have to do. Katelyn has been dancing the chinese dance all over the house every day. One more year and she can start ballet also.

It's an Idaho Christmas year! We are so excited to spend the Holidays in Idaho. When we are on an Idaho year we always have a pre travel party to celebrate a Cook Christmas. We received a stack of flat rate boxes, got a turkey with all of the fixings, and of course some cranberry muffins with butter sauce. Everybody loved their gifts. Pictured below are some of the festivities. Naiya with her "nuggle" (her word for blanket), Katelyn with her tinkerbell figurines, Kyleigh with her digital camera, Rusty on his hang board (made by Mike out of monkeypod wood), Holly with her BSU Mr. potatoe head, Russ and Mike with their new shoes, the girls playing with their new barbie house and barbies, and the dinner feast. All of the gifts were from the Cook family, except the dollhouse. That was from Rusty and I to the girls. It is kind of a given that you can't take a barbie house on the plane, so we went ahead and gave it to the girls. Rusty spent so much time on this thing and it turned out beautiful. He had saved scraps from several jobs, and had things like handmade wallpaper, tile, oak trim and nice carpet to put inside. I was mostly Rusty's company while he built it, although I did sand all of the oak trim, puttied the nail holes and learned how to countersink finish nails. We had almost decided we didn't have enough time to get it done, but went for it anyway. Rusty has been working on it every morning at 5 and every night after the girls went to bed. We finished Saturday afternoon, the day before our party. His hard work was rewarded with the girls' excitement. They played with it the rest of the night and the next morning Kyleigh woke Katelyn up playing barbies too loud. Then I walked in their room just in time to see Katelyn roll out of bed directly onto her knees and start playing with Kyleigh. It was great. We loved all of our gifts, but miss getting them directly from the hands of the givers. It is hard to always be missing one family at Christmas but we are grateful that they are mindful of us and so thoughtful as to send us such nice gifts. Thanks to the Cook family. We love you!

Furlough Friday

The state of Hawaii just instituted furlough Fridays. Because they needed a way to balance the budget they decided it would be O.K. to take 17 school days away from the children. Hawaii public schools are ranked 47/50 so how they could justify that is beyond me. Anyway, my friend Wendi decided she wanted to make volcanos with her girls on furlough Friday and invited us to join them. We made it a homeschool field trip day. Not only did we make paper mache volcanos, but we decorated gingerbread cookies and spent the afternoon at the beach. The pictures of the volcano below are backwards so just pretend you are watching the volcano process in rewind. We made the volcanos on Friday and shot them off on a Monday night with the help of the dads. We tried baking soda and vinegar but got a pretty slow response with that. We also tried dropping mentos into diet coke, which is the blast pictured below. It was a great project and a great day. Thanks to Wendi for always having something fun up her sleeve.

Neighbor Gifts

Our neighbor/friend/work gifts this year were chocolate covered spoons with packets of hot chocolate.

Rusty and Kyleigh studiously dipped.

Katelyn ate a lot of chocolate.

Then Katelyn ate some more chocolate.

I was in charge of the swirls and peppermint.

Both girls took over the lick the bowl duties. Which meant more chocolate for Katelyn.

I hope everyone enjoyed their chocolaty peppermint hot chocolate.

The Nile River

We are learning about ancient Egypt from a book called Story of the World. These pictures are of a model of the Nile River that we built. We planted grass seeds along the banks of the "Nile" and flooded it to see why exactly crops were grown along the banks. We also learned about pyramids and made our own out of clay to add to our model.

Making Meringue

Kyleigh decided she wanted to make lemon meringue pie for a treat for Daddy because it is one of his favorites. I agreed, but told her she had to be in charge of the meringue and pick the lemons off the tree. She did a great job on the meringue. She developed a system to make sure she added the right amount of sugar to the meringue. She wrote the numbers 1-6 on a piece of paper and crossed them off as she added each tablespoon. Our pie turned out great and the fresh Hawaiian lemons really add a new dimension to lemon meringue pie.

Officially the Christmas season...

The tree is up, the house is decorated, and we are eating cranberry muffins. It must be Christmas time! We spent part of the day after Thanksgiving preparing for Christmas and the other part of the day swimming at the beach. The girls were so excited to start decorating we had to pry them away from the Christmas bins to go swimming. Kyleigh got to put the Christmas topper on the tree. It was Katelyn's turn this year, but she said she didn't want to be lifted up that high. Maybe next year. We filled the advent calender with treats and Katelyn has already climbed up on the counter to steal candy from behind the little doors. Holly has already read the girls about 10 Christmas books. We started burning the Christmas candles we got from Jenny last year. We are looking forward to a great holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We got to enjoy our Thanksgiving with the "Portersons." It was our NM reunion holiday. I didn't have my card for my camera to take any pictures of our delicious feast. You'll just have to take my word that it was a delicious feast. I did get my card prior to the after dinner festivities of kickball and ultimate frisbee at Kaliwai park. Thanks to our host's for a great day!

Everyone playing kickball.

Daddy, the scary monster on the park toy.

Katelyn isn't quite tall enough to get a drink.

Kyleigh and her NM friend.

Daddy and Katelyn running for home base.

Remember when...

Between Holly and I we didn't have enough pie pans to make pies for Thanksgiving. We had square pies that year. November 2000.

If you are counting the number of pies... YES, there are more pies than people. It isn't a genuine Cook Thanksgiving if there aren't more pies than people.

Kokee Sunday

Last Sunday we went to Kokee to feel the cold air, play games, and have a bbq. We had a great time. Kyleigh's friend from dance happened to be there so she played with her friend for awhile while Rusty and Katelyn explored and poked mushrooms with sticks. We played catch and soccer. We had a bbq, and realized that the little bbq we bought 10+ years ago needed to be thrown away. A sad day in the Cook family. It was rusted out and the only place a flame was coming through the grill was a big rust hole right in the middle. Rusty had to position our meat around the one flame and rotate it every couple of minutes. We watched the stars come out, but had to leave because we were all shivering and freezing. When we got back to the truck we saw that the temperature was about 54 degrees. What have we become?

Katelyn turns 3!

I can't believe Katelyn is three. Even typing the title for this post I had to remind myself that she isn't two, but three... already. All she wanted for her cake this year was a smiley face cake. Easy enough, even I can handle that. We made it a smiley face party. We had smiley face pancake men for breakfast. We had smiley face pizzas for dinner. Everyone got to make their own pizza face. We even printed an ehow article on how to throw pizza dough and tried our hand at that. We also made our plates into smiley faces. After dinner we had cake and opened presents. What a loved little girl. She was so excited to open all of her presents. Kyleigh was so excited to get her a gift this year. She got her a horse coloring book, wrapped it in two layers of wrapping paper with about a whole roll of tape and helped Katelyn open it. We got her a dance cam, so she can dance in front of the TV and watch herself while she is dancing. For quite awhile now she has claimed "I dot dis for my birday," every time she plays with any toy. Now she can actually say that about all kinds of fun things.
Happy Birthday Katelyn. We love you!