New Kid On The Block

All those who were young in the early 80's are hearing "Hangin' Tough" playing in their heads. This entry is about Kenzie hanging tough - today Kenzie was the new kid - she had her first day of preschool today at The Goddard School. We have been preparing her to start preschool for a few weeks - ever since our Santa campaign died down. She is going to go to school for two full days a week to start. I was a little nervous about the first day but she really made us proud today!

I can remember the first time McKenzie socialized with another baby and the feeling of joy that she was connecting and interacting. I had that feeling again today when I went to pick her up from school and she was doing fantastic. Kenzie was just fitting in and behaving well in a group of kids her own age. She did great on so many levels - going potty by herself, eating the lunch I packed her, taking a nap at nap time, which I was a bit worried about given her love of solitude when sleeping.

Being the crazy Mom I am, I emailed the center director to check in on her about mid day and she wrote back saying, "She is having a lot of fun with the exception of falling in a huge puddle outside...". That's our girl - luckily she had a change of clothes!

Here's Kenzie with her backpack on and her new princess lunch box heading into school this morning!


I asked her what her favorite part of the day was and she said 'playing' and that she wanted to play more at school. Yeah for school!

In preparation for starting school and Ben's upcoming 1st Birthday (yahoo!) I took both kids to get their hair cut on Saturday. McKenzie got a small trim and some sweeping bangs cut in to try to help with the hair in her face issue and so far it's working great.


Our sweet Benny's hair was going from Rock Star to mullet with it's overgrown back and tufty ear flaps so he too needed a professional hair cut. We stayed long on top but cleaned the sides and back. Boy did he grow up right before my eyes! Can't believe he'll be one in a few week. Here he is posing on the couch at the hair studio with his new cut!



We had a great time last weekend, the sun was out and we made it to our favorite neighborhood parks twice. I finally wised up and had Ben wear his shoes and let him explore the great outdoors. His first mobile taste of real freedom - he loved it! We'll be having quite a fun spring and summer at the local parks once the weather warms up.

I squeezed in some scrapbooking time on Friday night. I've been dying to test all the new equipment I got for Christmas. So far this year I've been finishing up all the odds and ends I have left over from my scrap retreat pages so it felt great to get to start on something new. Here's the result of a couple of free hours to scrap! It's McKenzie's second birthday, zoo party page is next on my list!


One last note to readers and those who comment: for Christmas I had my 2008 blog entries made into a bound book for Matt. I wanted to make sure that I was able to capture all of this family information that I record here for the kids down the road. I used tool from Blog2Print that pulled my entire blog into a book automatically including the comments from readers. So if you comment, know it will be preserved in an offline version at some point. I thought that was a neat option so the kids could see other peoples input into the blog. If you are someone who reads and doesn't comment, join in and share!