6 Years Old!

Dear Austin,
Happy Birthday to my little man! Today you are 6, you now need to use two hands to show people how old you are! You seem to have grown up so much in just one short year. Your likes are very much the same although you have added a few new ones. Your favorite thing in the whole world is still baseball. You would play it day and night and have adapted the front room to play the "Austin Version" of baseball where you pretty much win all the time because you make up the rules as you go along! You still like dinosaurs, but are not quite as obsessed as you used to be. You are now very much into Transformers, which is pretty neat as they were around when I was a kid. That has become your new favorite movie although you love to watch The Sandlot over and over as well. You and daddy are still reading the Three Investigator Books every night before bed, and you still like Scooby Doo. You really love to swim, and learned to swim this summer. You love to show off your skills by doing cannonballs or going down the slide and swimming to the other end of the pool.

You are such a smart little guy. You love school, and love to learn. You have a great imagination, and you ask very intuitive (and hard) questions about anything. You are a great little artist and love to draw, mostly pictures for your daddy. You have gotten into coins like your daddy, and enjoy going through them and filling your books. You and daddy have joined the local coin club, and you like to pick out which of your coins you want to take for show and tell. You are their youngest member.

You make friends easily but are very loyal to your best friend Kaehler, who shares your love of baseball, swimming and transformers. You are kind hearted, caring and sensitive. I worry about you being too "nice" to your friends, you tend to do things you don't want to so you won't hurt your friends' feelings. I worry that you will get yours hurt instead.

You love your sister and love to give her hugs and kisses, most of the time when she doesn't want them. You can be so patient and wonderful with her, reading her stories or doing puzzles with her, or just playing. You can also be very ornery to her and seem to enjoy making her scream. But she loves you very much, and she misses you when you are in school.

I am still so very proud of the little man you are becoming. You are an amazing person, already at 6, and I thank God every day for you. You have taught me so much already, about how to slow down and just enjoy life, about how to be a better mom, and how to be a better person. Happy Birthday Austin, I love you so much!

End of Summer

Austin started 1st grade today. Summer is officially over. Aubrey and I just got back from dropping him off, and getting out of the car Aubrey asked "Where is Nahnie?". When I told her he is at school, she asked if she could go be with him, "peeese?". Thankfully an episode of Elmo is making her forget she is sad about Nahnie.

Summer has gone by way too fast, like I knew it would. We had a wonderful time this summer though, full of baseball, swimming, the zoo, bowling, the library, and hanging out with family and friends. It seems like we were hardly home at all, (and it shows, the house is a wreck!), but that was my goal. And although I am sad it is over, I am also excited for this school year and all it will bring too. Before I know it, summer will be here again. Wish I knew how to slow down time...

My big 1st grader, what a handsome little man.

Pretty Girl

Brian has taught Aubrey how to pose for pictures. He tells her to "be pretty girl", and she will cross one leg over the other, put her hands on her knee, cock her head to one side and say 'cheeeeeese'. It is pretty darn cute. Although now it is hard to get the camera out without her sitting down and "striking a pose".

This is about as girly as my little girl has gotten.

We bought her the crown/earrings/ring set for her birthday because she showed some interest in it at the store, but after she opened it she really didn't want anything to do with it other than to put it all on other people. But on this day I (or rather Nahnie) got her to put it all on and take some pictures. She and Nahnie had gotten into my make up right before this, and Austin was very generous with the amount of powder they applied to her face. And to her shirt.

After we washed her face a little. Much better.

My little princess...