2018 Father-Daughter Dance

American Heritage Girls hosts an annual dinner and dance for dads and their daughters. 

 Of course, I took the opportunity to get my girls all dolled up and looking beautiful!

  This year's theme was a masquerade, so along with dinner, the girls each got a cool feather mask to wear.

 And of course, there was lots and lots of dancing!!!

I love my girls and there's nothing like getting to spend some time with them having fun. The Father-Daughter Dance is certainly one of the highlights of my year.

Happy Birthday, Emma!

Our sweet, sweet Emma has turned 5! It's so hard to believe... She's growing up so quickly.

When we asked her what kind of cake she wanted, she said, "A butterfly cake." So I asked if she wanted a flower-shaped cake with butterflies on it or a cake with a big butterfly on it and she picked the big butterfly, so that's what I made. :)

As is our tradition, the kids made her a beautiful banner

And Olivia enhanced the whole room with litle hearts, flowers and butterflies on the walls.

Emma's one big gift was to go to a 3-day Snow Princess Dance Camp.

The camp was for 3- to 5-year olds and focused more on gross motor movements than the finer points of dance. So they did big arm movements,

skipping,

making themselves a snowball,

and then a snowflake.

(I'm not sure what this was besides an ab workout...:)

They swayed

and hopped

and ran around and froze when the music stopped.

Then they twirled

and played with the parachute.

Our sweet Snow Princess!

Sukkot at VoB

On the first night of Sukkot, we went to our congregation, Valley of Blessing, for the community celebration. They had built a very pretty sukkah complete with hanging fruit. 

Olivia participated in a dance routine that they had rehearsed diligently for 3 months. It was very powerful!

Miss Ashley worked so hard with her dancers to put it all together and we are so thankful she let Olivia be involved!

Olivia's Dance

At our church's Christmas service, Olivia did the dance she's been rehearsing for the past few months. She did such a great job! Thank you, Lauren, for working with her each week. :)

Olivia also got to show us some of the tap moves she's been practicing.

Olivia was also very proud of the mani/pedi that mommy gave her before the dance. :)

Olivia Dances

Olivia performed a worship ballet a couple of Sundays ago and did a wonderful job! She spent a long time practicing for it and it showed. :) She absolutely loves to dance. Thanks so much to Lauren for the great lessons! Lauren is a young lady in our church that has a talent and a passion for dance and desires to teach that to these little girls. She keeps their focus in the right place. They know they are dancing as an act of worship to the Lord first!

Another Celebrated Dancing Bear and O's Dance class

As part of the FIAR (Five in a Row) cirriculum that I have been incorporating into our homeschooling, Olivia and I read Another Celebrated Dancing Bear. I thought it would be good to incorporate with her own dance class. So we made a combination labbook for the book and also for her dance class. I thought it would be a good way to put down the memories of her dance class.

This is her drawing of Max and Boris. They are the two bears in the book. Max teaches Boris to dance.

We made a version of Russian tea.

This is the inside of the lapbook. We looked on the map and talked about Russia. We also worked on some vocabulary and drama words from the book. Olivia was very excited about the Matryoshka dolls. I am now on the lookout for wooden nesting dolls for her. I introduced the clock to her a little bit.

Also, we talked a lot about hospitality. Here is our verse.

The other side of the lapbook is another lapbook.

The story of David in the Bible dancing before the Lord. We talked about why we dance. It is not primarily for performance, although that is fun, but it is for God first. This is true of everything we do.

We summarized the things she has learned in her dance class. The aims that her teachers have for her.

Here is the inside of the dance lapbook. It has tap, ballet, and gymnastics. We looked on the map for the country of orgin of each type of dance and gymnastics.

Below is a closer look at some of the things she has learned as we dance. And we have done many activities at home to reinforce this...

**Note: Sorry about the pictures. I had a really hard time with this post for some reason.**

Olivia's Dance Recital

Olivia had her Little Gym "recital" last week and it was sooooo cute!



They also had to do a gymnastics "routine" on the bars.

She also did a ballet dance and a balance beam exercise, but, unfortunately, I screwed up and taped over it. :(

They were each awarded a medal for completing the course. Our daughter is such a ham.



And we followed it all up with celebratory ice cream cone. She always gets this god-awful, fluorescent-colored stuff that's got a blue dye that is practically a tattoo on her tongue and lips.

One Mammoth Olivia Update

I know it's been all Gabe this and Gabe that for a while, so here's what his big sister's been up to...

A couple weeks back, we all took a ride out to a corn maze and pumpkin patch. The corn maze was insane. I expected something at least mildly difficult, but no...it had to be this:

There were 6 checkpoints, each with a map, so we figured we could get to one or two and then go, but again, no. We spent more than an hour getting into it and finally just followed someone to a checkpoint where there was a map, took a picture of it and used that to get us back out so Rebecca could go feed Gabe. Maybe if we'd had another 18 hours....

While we were there, we let Olivia play on this giant jumping "pillow."

On another day, Rebecca, Olivia and Gabe went to the Zoo with some friends.

Ok, you're officially a geek if you know what the number on the helicopter is from. (yes, I know...)

The Polar Bear was quite playful the day they went, as you can see.

Olivia's also been doing a dance/gymnastics class at the Little Gym each week and she loves it!