I can't think of a clever name for this ;)

Hello ladies :) Some of you already know this, but whenever I say that (or should I say type that) in my head it sounds like the guy in the Old Spice commercial. You know, this one.

Well, I thought it would be more exciting for me to do my week on the blog after we moved in, because then I could do a tour of the house, and all that fun stuff. But we've still got stuff happening.

Yesterday I went down to Minot, ND to pick up my kitchen cupboards!! I'm very excited about them. We are a few steps away from installing them, but it's wonderful to have them actually in the house!

Minot still has a lot of floodwater, more than we have in many areas. Here's a shot I took on the way out of town. Pretty, but that should be a field, not a lake.

Here is my new living room in progress, jammed full of boxes of cupboards:

It's late, and I'm sweaty mess from priming the basement, and I'll be spending a lot of tomorrow priming as well, so just a short post tonight. But for fun, here's Sophia, my 4 year old, and her hair in all it's glory. When you pull the curls straight, it's pretty much down to her tailbone. And yet she insists that her hair is still short, because it's not long like Rapunzel's. She got the movie Tangled for her birthday and it has profoundly effected her life.

(we're in the middle of growing her bangs out.)

Who wouldn't want to go to candy college?

Alexia's school is in this quaint little hippy part of town, full of rich sahm's who have nothing better to do but shop all day and spend their husbands money. No, i'm truly not kidding. Her school is in Hyde Park, this neat little section of downtown Tampa where you can walk to everything within a block or two. You pay quite a premium to live there, the houses start in the low 800's or so, but most homes are in the millions-i'll show you them tomorrow :)

Anyway, a block or two away is a local candy store that has some amazingly cool types of candy-like jalepeno fudge, and bacon bark (no, im not kidding, ask Heather Jones about the bacon bark). They also have handmade ice cream, and some really cool drink creations like chocolate tea, drinking chocolate, and Mexican Coke! It's in the glass bottles and everything, which is really neat.

The store owner does something called Candy College for kids. Basically, you get the store to yourselves for a bit, and they tour the store, get candy samples, and get a history of the different types of candy and the candy making process. Then, the kids get to dip chocolate marshmallow skewers and decorate them! It was reasonable at $6/per kid, and that included free samples and the marshmallow skewer. The only catch was that you had to have at least 4 kids, so i recruted some of her friends from school :)

At the beginning, they decorated the bags that their sample candy would go into. This is Alexia's, it has her name, herself, and a giant lolipop.

Then, they did a tour of the store, and learned all about the saltwater taffy they make there, the fudge, chocolate, and all other yummy stuff, and they got samples of everything:

Then, they got to see the milk chocolate "pond"-

Freshly dipped...yum!

Decorating hers-

She is quite proud of her creation!

After they were done decorating their creations, they were stuck in the freezer for a minute to cool down, and wrapped to take home-Alexia couldn't wait to eat hers.

Thanks for coming to Candy College with us!

Day 1-Alexia's School

Day 1!

This is Alexia's school. She is 4, she goes to a pk3 program for 3-4-5 year olds M-F, from 9am-12. There are 28 kids in her class, and 4 teachers, so it's an excellent student:teacher ratio. The program is only $45 a week, which is great, and since Jonathan works for T-Mobile, it gets reimbursed to us, since they cover up to $200/month in childcare/educational expenses.

This is the outside of her school:

This is her classroom:

There are four tables, red, green, blue, yellow, the kids are first grouped by where they sit, and then moved based on how they interact with the surrounding kids :)

They each have their own cubbies (in the right of the picture) in which to keep their coloring books, lunch box, etc...

This is the splash pad that is behind her school-they go there every Friday for fountain day:

The kids love the fountains! They get to wear their bathing suits, bring their squirt toys, and wet the teachers. Sometimes, they even have whipped cream pie fights!

And this is her schools playground:they go outside to play every day it isnt raining :)

Tomorrow-Hyde Park, and Candy College!!