Happy Birthday, Travis!

Happy 32nd birthday to my hubby! Jeez he's getting old..... Yeah - I'm still older (and wiser), but he's creeping up in age too. No big plans tonight other than watching the Season Premier of ONE TREE HILL!!!! We've been waiting for MONTHS for this final season to start back up. Of course I'm gone most of the evening, but he knows better then to watch it without me. :)

Maddie has her 3-year check up today. I've been telling her about how we're going to go see Dr. Stalter so he can check her eyes, nose, ears, etc. She's not real excited about it though and keeps telling me that he's going to my owies. I really hope she cooperates when we get there! She's always been really, really cooperative for Doc, but now that we're at the "Independent 3's" stage I suppose she'll be a little booger about it. If I remember correctly, she was 35 pounds and 36 inches at her 2 year appt. last January and I KNOW she's grown quite a bit over the year so it'll be interesting to see how she measures up today!

We had her birthday party this past weekend and it was all PURPLE! The girl loves herself some purple.... She had her purple tutu on, we had a purple table cloth and purple plates and napkins. I baked up some white and chocolate cupcakes and tinted a container of frosting purple (plus I made a quick batch of rice krispie treats for people like myself that don't care much for cupcakes). It was great to see Grandma Sancken at the party too. She's definitely lost a lot of weight during her ordeal (but she did say that she put back on 20 pounds so that's encouraging!). Aunt Peggy and Kurt even made the celebration so we had a nice turn-out. Everybody got the memo on bringing purple-wrapped presents and she received a lot of great gifts! In fact, I spent Monday morning (before she got up) finding a way to fit all of her new stuff into her toy corner. One of her favorite gifts is her Fisher Price iXL that Grandma Joanne gave her. She plays her "puter" all the time and it's amazing to see little people get the hang of technology so quickly! She's always playing on my phone and knows how to turn it on and get to the games she wants. Same with the iPad - she doesn't need a bit of help on that either!

Last weekend, in general, was pretty busy from a baby shower to Maddie's birthday party to dinner with my friend, Katie, Saturday night. I love going out to dinner with friends minus little people. Don't get me wrong - I love my little person - it's just easier to relax and enjoy adult conversations without her. :) We ate at DeLong's so of course I had to get the fried pickles - I love those things!!

No big news on the preschool - I was told by another daycare provider that the DCFS chick told her they were not coming back to this area until winter was over because they didn't want to travel in the nasty weather. Ummmm.....unless I'm seeing something different out of my windows than she is - THERE IS NO SNOW!! In fact, I know she was in the area on Monday because she finally did a re-licensing visit for another daycare friend of mine who's been waiting since September. So I might try calling her yet again to see if I can convince her to come this way before the bad weather REALLY gets here. If this whole process keeps getting delayed, I don't know if it's going to make sense for me to open for just a few months or not? I don't know how many parents would be interested in sending their kids from February to May or March to May?? I could justify a January to May "school year" in my head, but beyond that I just don't know. Depending on how much longer this waiting game goes on, I might wait for my summer classes or I suppose I could still open and see how much interest there is. How frustrating! In the meantime, I'm trying to get different things checked off of my to-do list (which currently has 62 items left on it!). I started re-painting a big easel I got from a school in Blm. that was closing down. I just re-painted it all white and plan on painting one side of it with magnetic paint and then chalk paint on top of that (so that it's a magnetic chalk board) and then paint the other side with dry-erase paint (so that it's a dry-erase board). I also printed out all of my alphabet animals that I want to put around the classroom along with the alphabet letter they go with. I need to get them laminated (in fact, I have a big stack of things that I need laminated) and it's not exactly cheap so I broke down and bought myself a laminating machine and 200 laminating pouches to do it myself. It was a fraction of the cost of having a printing place do it for me and knowing that I'll probably be doing LOTS of laminating, I'm sure it will come in handy quite often. I've also decided to make my own Circle Time chart to talk about the date, days of the week, weather, etc. so I put all of that together and printed it all out (and of course that all needs to be laminated as well). I just need to get a big piece of flannel, mark it off for all the sections I need to make on it and put some wall grommets on it to hang it with. Hopefully it turns out ok! I'm trying to make a lot of the things myself to save on money. For example, this Circle Time chart - if I were to buy all of the charts I want it would cost me around $180 so I picked the sections that I wanted the most and am combining them into one home-made chart that will basically cost me paper, ink, flannel and my time. Much cheaper!

It's almost 8:30 and I haven't had any breakfast yet so I should probably get something to eat. I love when Maddie wakes up in the mornings - she sits at the top of the steps and hollers down at me, "Mom....MOM...." and when I finally peek around the corner, she says "Mom, you missed me." LOL She's right....I did miss her!