quick catch up…

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Maisie is 8 now – and has been for almost half a year. She loves to read and LOVES school, ballet and dancing and singing and swimming. Her teachers tell me what a beautiful loving friend she is which makes us super proud. She has loved year 2 and is excited about year 3.

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Tally turned 7 in July and as I type this is in the pool swimming laps of backstroke and freestyle trying to improve her strokes! She also loves school and is very athletic and still loves her sleep! She is at the top of her reading levels for year 1 and is busy trying to guess what teacher she will have in year 2! When I asked her 3 things that she loves she said “Mumma, Daddy and the hammock”…

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Alice is about to turn 6 and finish her first year of Kinder. We have had a busy year with Alice and working out how to control the beast inside her, and with the help of Dr Jo and cutting out numbers and colours from our diet there has been a massive change in her behaviour. She just told me that she loves swimming in the pool, bouncing her ball and rocking in the hammock (she likes to know what Im doing at all times…)

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Pippa (or pippy, stinkerbell, tootsmcfruits) is “finally 4” as she likes to tell people this week. She is a clumso – always hurting herself somehow. She tries very hard to keep up with her big sisters. She loves “tiny little babies” which is good because we have a few around us at the moment! She goes to pre school on a friday morning and has lots of friends – that are all boys!

 

 

Maisie @7.1

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So Maisie has just turned 7! She has really grown up into her own little self in the past 6 months – year one has changed her! Another little girl who just loves school and is very social, loves to read and also loves computer time. We gave her an email address which she uses to email family and friends from which she thinks is pretty cool. She is good at getting everyone organised in the games that they play – and helped me with the organising of the womens conference that our Church was working on by getting the forms and filling in details. She enjoys helping us. Earlier in the term her class was on assembly but she would be missing out due to us being away for Winter Camp which upset her a bit, so her teacher let her do the presenting up the front on the microphone the week before we went which she thought was super awesome. She did a great job at it and was very pleased with herself having such an important role to play. She is our thinker – at times I feel like I can see her brain ticking over…
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Maisie turns 6

Miss Moo turned 6 on Tuesday and it was almost a full week of celebrations!

We had some presents at winter camp, and then her actual birthday when we got home (which included afternoon tea with some friends and dinner and cake with some cousins), and then the Morrisons over for dinner on Wednesday night and then her 6 year old party on Saturday with 9 friends!

present time
Im six now!
Cake time #6
WOOOOHOOO
party time
Waiting for the guests to arrive
Fairy bread time
Craft time
Door hangers
Tie Up Time
6 year old birthday girl!
Cake time
Maisie checking if daddy holding the pinata was the best system
tally in action
All over!

old mcdonald had a ballet girl eieieo.

Maisie went to ballet today! Its a beautiful little class run at our community center with about 5 other 4/5 year old girls.

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She came up with a song to show her excitement:

“Old McDonlad had a farm, eieieo. And on that farm he had a ballet girl, eieieo. With a ballet dance here and a ballet dance there everywhere there were ballet girls eieieooooooo”.

Miss Maisie @ 4.4

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This is our big girl. Beautiful isnt she! Maisie has been at pre school Friday mornings this year and has enjoyed the responsibility that comes with that. She loves to help us get organised, with her school bag to be packed with what she has to take along each week. Next year she will be going two days a week to a new pre school which is just down the road from our house. She enjoys spending time playing games here at home with her little sisters. Mums and Babies is by far the pick of the bunch – I wake up most mornings to some variation of this game going on somewhere in the house. Maisie loves to be able to “help” her sisters do things, which sometimes causes some grief at them not being able to do it.

She still naps most days – if not every day. We did think that she was going to drop them at one stage, but we have found that she really does still need that time to rest, some days she will sleep longer than the other two! She loves to help cook dinner, garden, sort the washing and just recently we have let her have some “computer time” where she plays some educational games on a website that are for pre readers. She seems to be enjoying learning to read – something I need to invest more time in with her.

She is becoming more and more self confident and there is lots of attitude coming out in her- one minute she is fine and the next “ahhhh!!”. Her hair is crazy, flyaway/curly/thin – she still hasnt had a haircut! It has grown, but its very hard to manage! She is average height for her age, which is a good thing for us as her and Tally are wearing the same size clothes at the moment so they just share their wardrobe! Her eyes are big and blue and so amazing to look at. She is very fit – has a great running style that Cade is impressed with and is going really good in the water with her swimming again this spring. She gets flushed pink cheeks when she is too hot and her hair goes all curly and crazy when she sweats to much!

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We are starting to see her personality change and develop – with parts of both Cade and I clearly coming thru. She can still be very shy and introverted, but loves to get to know people and has many stories to tell… which we are finding interesting as parents! She is very interested in what people have to say and you can sometimes see her tiny little mind just ticking over everything that is going on and being said. Her nightly prayer can consist of some things that we would never have thought she would be thinking about!!

Maisie has been a “big sister” since she was a teeny tiny 13 month old, and she has a very strong bond with her two little sisters. She is excited about the baby coming, but more interested in the logistics about the baby arriving – bed, bathtime, sitting arrangements…. the list goes on!

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Miss Moo is in the middle of dropping her day sleep. We are in this weird time warp where if she doesnt have a sleep – by 5pm she is CLIMBING THE WALLS but then asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow at 7pm. If she does have a day sleep, she is able to cope so much better with the world in the evenings, but bed time is a long drawn out process.
Every day around 11am she starts asking “can I stay up today” or “I dont need a sleep today”… but today as we got home from the shops at 9:30am she said “I will be having a sleep today cause I am very tired”. I agreed.

Maisie Elizabeth @ 3.5

I have been trying to get around to doing this post for a while now – but it just seems like there is far too much to write about our darling eldest child. It seems pretty much that every parent I speak to that their kids enjoy doing all the same things as what she does, so here is a brief run down for us to look back on for the future.
Maisie loves to sing and dance. She is a very girly girl. She loves to put on dress ups and dance around anywhere and everywhere (even in the supermarket). The Sound of Music is the most regularly played CD around here at the moment alongside Colins Favorites – with Super Saviour the most requested at the moment. Her favorite colour is pink. She loves to read books and does different voices for the different characters.
She still needs her routine and likes to ask “but what after” when we will be doing something later in the day. She still has a lunchtime sleep time most days and she still takes one of her old wraps from when she was a baby to bed with her. She can spell out and write her name (when she feels like it!) and loves to draw and paint. She loves to do anything crafty with sticky tape and glue. Her current favorite dinner is sausages.
She enjoys playing outside with water and rides her big girls bike with training wheels all over the place. She has gone from not wanting to put her head under the water to jumping in and swimming across the pool at Great Grandma Marys house in about 6 weeks. She is very aware of her environment and knows where to go if we are driving somewhere familiar. She has started to push the boundaries like answering back to us and also picking fights her sisters. She picks up the funniest things, like at the moment its very important to her to let us know who her “best friends are” (they change all the time…)
She is looking forward to her pre school day this year – she is talking about it all the time, and this morning she drew a picture all about it.
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Pre School drawing
The people up the top are her family and up on the right is Hamish and herself going off to her preschool which is down the bottom. The person that is purple down the bottom is Helen, her preschool teacher!

So long, farewell… from the Sound of Music (extended edition)

Watch Maisie and Tally perform the moves. Listen for Tally’s perfectly timed ‘No’ to Maisie’s request to drink her first champagne.
In case you are wondering what’s going on at the end, that’s Tally performing the final part of the song from the movie where Gretel goes to sleep on the stairs and she gets carried up the stairs by an older sibling (in our reenactment, it’s me lifting her with one arm and plonking her on the couch).