Cora and Olivia

Last Thursday, while Cora was at preschool, Olivia sat down to draw some little pictures with me. She had little note sized squares of paper and she started drawing various faces and people on them. Most of the time her drawings are more scribbles, so it was fun to see the assorted faces she produced. I put some of them together to make a little collage. When Cora got home she saw the collection and thought it would be neat to tape it to the back door, on the outside. Now it is taped on the inside of the back door, so it won't get wet when it rains. This particular day Olivia was wearing the special apron that Aunt Barbara made for Cora; she wore it all day long and didn't take it off until it got soaking wet when she was playing in the water outside.

Olivia doesn't get a whole lot of time with us on her own, so it is really nice that we have time together while Cora is at school. Sometimes we run errands (because it's easier to do with just one child) and sometimes we spend some time together at home. I've started taking Olivia to the library occassionally when Cora is at school as well, Olivia really likes the puzzles there. Andrew and I try to sometimes take turns taking only one of the girls so that we can spend time with each of them on our own. It gives each of them a chance to spend time with us without having to compete with one another and it can be a lot easier for us to only have one child at a time to be responsible for.

The signs of spring are showing up all over the place in our yard. The almond trees bloomed last month and are now already starting to form little "nutlets" among the bright green leaves. Our fruit trees are blooming now and the bees are busily flying around the flowers. The temperatures are still quite cold at night, but we've had some beautiful breezy sunny days. Andrew and the girls did some mowing this weekend, Cora & Olivia even helped push the reel mower around. Of course we have a lot of lawn so Andrew had to do some of the work by himself. It has been so nice to get out and play in the yard in the sunshine after all the rain we had. We had some very cold weather recently and although it didn't snow at our house, it did snow close by.



















Cora LOVES to play dress up. She will dress up almost every single day; it's one of her favorite things to do at preschool too. Olivia has discovered that she likes to play dress up as well, especially now that some of the dress up clothes actually fit her. Ballerinas and princesses are very popular themes and often their dress up play is accompanied by dancing. On this day, Cora was Princess Anneliese and Olivia was Erica, of the Barbie version of "The Princess and the Pauper." Of course, Olivia still likes to pretend to be a cat most often and since Cora likes Harry Potter, Olivia is often Crookshanks (Harry's friend Hermione's cat). Olivia is starting to pick up on the whole Harry Potter thing, she knows enough about the basic characters to play along.

Cora & Olivia can play together quite well these days, something that I am thoroughly enjoying. It's so nice to see them interacting with each other, pretending, giggling, and just having fun. They really like playing together much of the time and will even work out disagreements on their own sometimes, I think so that they can keep on playing.

I found a couple of undated quotes, but they are from the last couple months.

Cora, "Am I still in preschool?" I told her yes. "It's taking a long time for me to be in high school!"

It was evening and most of the lights were out when Cora wanted something from her room. She would have to pass through dark rooms to get there and said,"I'm scared! Too scary!" Olivia replied, "No problem, me coming with you."

Olivia is often heard saying "No worry," or "No worries," these days. I hear her saying it a lot to Cora while they are playing to reassure her or one of the characters they are playing with. I can't say which phrase she is actually saying, it sounds a little like both, but it is very sweet.

Last weekend Cora, Olivia, and I traveled down to Santa Cruz for cousin Dana's 3rd birthday party in Santa Cruz. Cora had been especially excited to attend Dana's party and both girls were in "birthday" mode, talking about birthdays, parties, and presents, singing and acting out birthday activities, etc. We spent the night at Aunt CC & Dave's house, something especially exciting for the girls as well. They were both awake unusually early on Saturday morning and couldn't go back to sleep because they were so excited about sleeping over and the upcoming party! Cora helped take Luka for a walk with Aunt CC and we all had time to go the park before the party. The party was fun with lots of crafts to do, and we all enjoyed ourselves immensely. After the party, we headed off to Roseville to Grandma Sandy and Grandpa Tim's house, where Uncle Lance & Aunt Barbara joined us for dinner. We had an enjoyable Sunday relaxing (me) and playing (Cora & Olivia) with Grandma & Grandpa.

On May 21st, a Sunday, at 5 pm Cora will have her first ballet recital. The theme is "Into the Garden" or something like that, and Cora's class will be sunbeams. The performance is at the Paradise Performing Arts Center. If anyone is interested in attending, please let me know. We have to purchase tickets for anyone attending and if we want to be able to sit together we need to purchase the tickets by March 18th. We can probably still get tickets later if needed, but they will start assigning seats on March 18th. There will be a DVD of the performance available, so if you can't make it, but want to see it we'll have something to show you.

In February, we all drove down to Berkeley and then Santa Cruz to visit with family. We spent the night at Dana's house and the cousins had a lot of fun playing together. We walked to a nearby school park where the girls played, here weaving in and out of the bike racks.






We also went to the Oakland Zoo with Dana and Uncle Marty, our first time there. It was a great zoo with lots of animals and a fun new children's area. Daddy was found to be carrying around one of the monkeys on his shoulders. Cora's favorite seemed to be the meerkats, there was even a special kid sized tunnel she crawled into that gave a good view into the meerkat area. There was an area with rides just outside the zoo. All the girls rode on the carousel and went on the little train ride. Cora went on her first roller coaster ride with Daddy; a tiger coaster on which they rode in the last car, by the tiger's tail. Cora thought this was pretty exciting and kept saying that it had been really scary!
























After the trip to the zoo, we continued on to Santa Cruz. There were excursions to the beach, a fun park with neat slides, duck feeding at the pond near Grandma's house, and interesting flower & dirt stews brewed while we were there. We saw lots of family: Grandma Julie, Grandpa George, Aunt CC, Uncle Dave, Uncle Marty, Aunt Ingrid, Dana, Uncle Jeremy, and Uncle Jay. The weather was really beautiful while we were there. And we all got to see Uncle Jeremy & Uncle Jay off on their road trip to Florida.




















After returning back home, we spent some nice days at home before the weather started get rainy and cold again. We took the girls to see Curious George at the theater, it was Olivia's first time at the movies, Cora's third. It was a very fun kid movie and they both really enjoyed it!

Kindergarten update: Cora has gotten into our second choice school, Hooker Oak Open Structure Program. She is currently 14th on the waiting list on our first choice school, Chico Country Day School. Both are public schools here in Chico, but are alternative programs/charter schools within the district so they choose students by lottery. We're still hopeful that she'll get into Chico Country Day, we'll just have to wait and see.