Quotes from Rachel

"I just finished this whole book! (Arthur--10 chapters long) This is the happiest day of my life!"

"My first dream is to be a singer, on stage.  My second dream is to be a cheerleader. "

Rachel flips the tv on every time I turn around.  When she walks in from school, when we get home from church.  When she wakes up in the morning...you get the idea.  So most days I spend a lot of time saying "Rach, turn off the tv." but on the days when I am sick of sounding like a broken record sometimes I give up (even though I know I should stick to it, usually it is on a day when it is miserable outside so I can't really blame her, even know I know she could  come up with other things to do inside.)    But today when we got home from church and she flipped it on, I stuck to my guns.  It was a great day outside and I told her to turn it off, and it will stay off all afternoon.  She made a picnic for us (juice boxes, pepperoni, cheese, and grapes) and we ate in the back yard while basking in the sunshine. 

Then we spent a couple more hours in the front yard.  I sat in a lawnchair flipping through magazines and cutting out the pages of stuff I liked (something that I have been meaning to do, but never get around to it) and she sat in my hammock chair and read books, and I watered my grass every hour (cmon grass--grow!). 

While she can read chapter books, she usually isn't a fan because she doesn't like that they don't have big colorful pictures.--but this last time at the library I made her get all chapter books.  She grabbed a book on her own, and thought sitting in the hammock was so fun she was happy to sit and read chapter after chapter.  It was great!   It is nice for her to learn that you can find ways to enjoy new things --kind of like when  she went jogging with me last week.   I went outside to go jogging and she asked if she could come (I thought she would ride her bike along side me) but when I went outside she was in her sneakers and had my MP3 player (that has some of her music on it) clipped to her shorts. She said she wanted to run with me.  I think having a little running buddy is going to be fun.  I stuck close to home in case she got tired and wanted to stop, but she did pretty well.  She would walk then run a bit, she'd walk a little longer than I wanted to, but when she would run she would run a lot faster than I normally would--so she wasn't always the hold up :-)

My life doesn't always turn out the way I thought it would be, but days like this are a pleasant suprise!