September 2021

September started with a Mommy-Daughter Date with me and Nora Kate.  We went to the new Buff City Soap shop in town. Nora Kate loved taking her time smelling every single item in the store (I still can’t smell thanks to Covid, so I didn’t smell a thing), but according to her everything smelled SO GOOD!  She picked a soap and a GIANT bath bomb to buy, then she got to paint her very own bath bomb.

Here she is painting her bath bomb!

I also took her to the nail salon to get a mani! She picked pink nails with butterflies on them.

Then, per her request, we went to a Casa Blanca Mexican restaurant where she ordered a Sprite, Cheese quesadilla, and cheese dip…all of her faves.

As I’ve continued increasing my mileage as I’m training for a marathon in December (eek!), I’ve had to get up earlier and earlier to start my runs in order to get in the necessary miles before the kids get up and John has to leave for work.  This particular day the sunrise over our lake was BEAUTIFUL. I’m usually not one to stop mid run to take a picture, but this was just too pretty.  The water reflected it beautifully too.  The picture doesn’t really do it justice.

Carter, always a lover of numbers, came to me to tell me how the had developed a math problem to calculate how many bumps were on the ping pong paddle.

First Tennessee Game of the Football Season! We may be in Alabama, but we are wearing our ORANGE!

Soccer games have started and it’s HOT!

Pink cheeks!

We did a fire in the backyard and made s’mores.  Our new fav way to make s’mores is with fudge stripe cookies that apparently taste like chocolate and graham crackers, then stick your roasted marshmallow in the middle!

One of the items on the kids’ Summer Fun List was to camp in the backyard, but it had been SO HOT all summer, so on the first coolish nights in September Dawson pitched the tents and the kids and John camped in the back yard.

Here they are cooking hot dogs on the fire before camping in the backyard.

Our backyard campsite.

I got to go with Dawson on a 5 mile hike with Dawson early one Saturday morning with his scout troop.

Not sure why my watch broke this into two separate runs,  but I finally got back up to a 10 mile run which was my longest after having Covid.  Hopefully I’m starting to get some energy back!

We went to our last Trash Panda game of the season.  They caught a ball!

We love sitting on the berm

Clayton was the most excited about the ball we caught.

It was a Sunday so after the game the kids got to run the bases.  You’ll notice Carter in the red hat, NK in the “I’m about to do a cartwheel position” and Dawson and Clayton behind her.

Yup, out of the ALLLL the kids who ran the bases our Cartwheel Queen was the only one who cartwheeled the bases haha!

We took Duke to Duke’s creek for a swim.

Nora Kate was excited to build the Lego Aquarium set she purchased with her bday gift card from Aunt Emily.

Clayton still requests selfies at school drop off.

Clayton has a very wiggly tooth, so we took a picture of his complete smile before it falls out….so far though, it’s still hanging in there.

Randomly we ended up with a night with no scouts and no soccer games…very rare, so we went out to dinner and we let the kids order dessert.  It was a SCookie…a cookie in a skillet.  They devoured it.

Soccer game for our Purple Panther!

All three of our soccer rockers.

Nora Kate

Purple soccer hair

Clayton is doing AWESOME at his first season of soccer!  Go Silver Sonics!

There’s Carter with the ball in gold!

Go Golden Hawks!

Nora Kate with the ball

Clayton taking the ball from the opposing team.

Throw in stance

Dawson went on a weekend camping trip with boy scouts!

He text us this picture of the tent he pitched and slept in.

Clayton playing soccer

Our garden is STILL producing jalapeños like crazy.  Clayton wanted to measure them because we let some get REALLY big!

I donated blood…successfully!

Hope my blood with antibodies helps someone who is sick with Covid!

Thank goodness for older siblings who taught this kindergartener the proper way to eat a sliced orange!

Action shots!

I found funnel cake mix at the grocery store, and John used it to make funnel cakes for everyone! They looked awesome!

Carter was extra excited about them!

Our funnel cake chef!

We were going to be at the beach for John’s actual birthday, so we gave him his bday gifts the night before we left for the beach!

I ran 14 miles, then got home and the kids wanted to run one more mile with me…so here I am getting left in the dust by Clayton on my 15th mile!

Love his little running legs!

The final week of September we spent at the beach. That will be in another post.

Nora Kate at 8

There is SO much to say about Nora Kate at 8, where to begin!  I’ll just start with a brief recap of all the new, different, or fun things she did over the past year.  Right after she turned 7 last year the school year started and she adjusted well to wear in a mask (thank to the Covid pandemic) in school.  We (last year and this year too) are still hybrid schooling-Athens Renaissance for 3 hours two day a week and then homeschool the rest of the time.  This is working great for Nora Kate.  I was very amazed at how much her reading abilities advanced over the past year.  

Nora Kate has still been taking gymnastics and even asked to be enrolled in classes over the summer.  She’s strong and fast and she likes being able to use the combination of these two things to do flips, bars, and beams! 

Nora Kate still LOVES soccer. She played last fall (her team won the championship!). Then she asked to play spring soccer so we did (her team came in second in the spring championship!). And now here we are starting another soccer season.  Nora Kate ended up playing goalie some in the spring which she was not a fan of, but she would go after the ball and block it when other girls wouldn’t so she got put at this position some.  Fortunately she’s fast and has good ball control so she also got a lot of play time on offense as striker or midfield.  She much preferred these positions.

Nora Kate’s very favorite thing to do when we are just playing at home is to jump and flip on her trampoline.  I can’t even guess how many hours she has spent on the trampoline since we gave it to her at Christmas.  It is one of the most used presents ever, I think.  

Nora Kate also loves swimming.  We have gotten a lot of pool time over the past 3.5 months and she has loved every minute of it.

Nora Kate loves baking with me. I think she would bake every day if I let it be an option.  

She also loves to do art and craft projects-paint, color, beads, you name it-she loves it. 

Nora Kate loves unicorns, mermaids, pink, purple, glitter—-all things girly.  This is so fun though that she loves these things since she’s our only girl!

At 8 Nora Kate always knows what she wants, and she’s not afraid to voice her opinion.  She also tries to take care of her brothers both big and small all the time, which is really sweet.  She’s also our free spirit.  I love that she’s all these things rolled into one sweet, curly headed, blue eyed, girl.  

She says her favorite subject is science because she likes the science experiments that we get to do. I don’t blame her, they are pretty fun!  She also says she wants to be a vet when she grows up so she can help take care of dogs and other small animals.  When I told her about large animal vets, she was not at all interested in that.  

Nora Kate at 8 is very outgoing. I think she knows the names of almost every kid at her school.  She will talk to or play with anyone. She’s the first to just make a friend on the sidelines at soccer or basketball games or at the beach.

Speaking of the beach, this sweet girl completely shares my love of the beach.  She loves the sand and ocean and sun.  She’s counting down the days until our next beach trip (we all are!).  

Nora Kate hasn’t always just completely loved to hike, but she’s gone along with it. However, I think over the past year she has really started to enjoy it more.  She also loves riding her bike…she rides it in the neighborhood a lot and loves it when we load all 6 bikes up to go ride a trail or path.

Other random notes that I want to remember about her as she is turning 8: Nora Kate also enjoys her hoverboard and her scooter.  She likes taking Duke on walks. Despite the fact that the rest of us enjoy fishing, she does not really. She will give it a try each time for a little bit, but she’s just not super entertained by it.  She loves having her nails polished. Nora Kate likes to use hair chalk to color her hair before her soccer games.  She loves the show Lego Masters and Nailed It.  She has gotten into American Girl Dolls and books this past year.  One of her birthday gifts was the American Girl Molly doll that I got when I was little. Nora Kate loves being with her brothers and playing and she’s definitely an extrovert, but then sometimes just likes to go in her room where it’s quiet and have a few minutes to play alone.  She’s also been very proud of her Lego building abilities this past year.  She can now build VERY hard sets all on her own.  

We continue to be amazed at what a wonderful girl our sweet Nora Kate is growing into. I could go on and on, but I want to share a few pictures from over the past year leading up to her 8th birthday and a few pictures from her actual birthday (party pictures and info are in a separate post).

Nora Kate at Dave and Busters with her light up lemonade.

Hiking 5 miles in Bankhead Forrest with Duke.

Swimming with Dawson

She loves being out on a boat!

Indian Pass Raw Bar last fall after a day at the beach.

One of our favorite places.

Our soccer-loving girl!

Nora Kate can get this dreamy look in her eyes sometimes.

I feel like this picture captured at Camp Lolly in July captures that look.

On the scrambler at the Kiddie Carnival in July.

This picture also reminds me to mention one of my very favorite things about Nora Kate-her laugh.  When she gets really tickled by something her laugh just seems to bubble out of her. She has the happiest sounding laugh. 

One more picture from the kiddie carnival.

A summer tradition in Alabama!

When Nora Kate had read 1,000 pages this summer we took her to The Yard for a giant ice cream treat. She picked this mermaid ice cream bowl of course. 

Nora Kate enjoys going to Trash Panda games with our family!

We like to sit on the berm and she loves to walk down to the edge of the field and run the bases after the games.

I can’t believe she’s a THIRD GRADER!

Nora Kate and Grandad at the beach in May.

Back in the summer we let all the kids pick 2 camps.  Nora Kate’s 2 choices were gymnastics camp and soccer camp.  Carter picked soccer camp too, so they were there together. It was neat for me that they did the soccer camp at UAH!

Nora Kate with Lolly in Tennessee in July.

This girl was made for the beach.  She always has the perfect beach hair, even after swimming in the ocean.

Loves digging in the sand.

Now for some pictures from her actual 8th birthday!

She is a LEGO MASTER!  We gave her this set for her birthday (it has lots of tiny details that you can’t see in this picture), and she had built the hundreds of pieces in no time!

Lolly and Nana and Grandad gave her this balance beam for her birthday! She was so surprised and excited! She loves it and has fun practicing her gymnastics on it! 

Happy 8th Birthday, Nora Kate!

Somehow I got this picture really shadowy, but here is Nora Kate on her 8th birthday with her new gymnastics bar from John and I, Lego set, Molly American Girl doll, swimming turtle toy, requested dangly ear rings from her brothers, and lots of little crafts made by her brothers!

On her actually birthday we got her a cookie cake from American Cookie Company. (For her party, I made a unicorn cake)

She was thrilled that we had a little surprise put in the patter and it wasn’t just chocolate chip cookie cake, but m and m’s cookie cake!

See the paper hat she has on? Carter made it for her for her birthday.

And here she is opening the Molly doll!

Heart Shaped Pancakes for breakfast complete with a pink candle!

Sitting under her gymnastics bar from us, opening up a final present from us-Cooking Fever for Nintendo Switch!

I can’t believe Nora Kate is 8, but we love the sweet, free spirited, opinionated, fast, strong, helpful, creative girl she’s growing into!