Our girl can S-P-E-L-L

This month was an exciting one!  On March 4th, Annaliese was part of her school spelling team for a parochial school spelling contest here in town.  Her school had a spelling bee about a month ago where she came in 4th place.  That qualified her to be on the school team. 

To get ready to be on the school team she was given 8 pages of words to study.  Easy right?  Each page had at least 300 words on it!  That's a lot of words to study.  We did our best to get study them all but in the end we only made it through the first 6 pages.  Oh well.

The way the contest works is that there are 4 quarters lasting 15 minutes each.  Each school has 4 team members.  Each team member goes up for a quarter and competes against the other schools.  For every word that is spelled correctly the school gets a point.  If a word is misspelled then they are not out, just no point that round.

Annaliese was in the 3rd quarter.  As luck would have it the words she was given to spell were all from page 7.  Sigh.  Of course.  Not page 6 or 5 or 4, 3, 2 or 1 but 7.  BUT she did great!  She kept her cool and held her own.  I know she was nervous but nobody would have ever been able to see it.  The words from page 7 were the hardest of the entire night.  Fortunately all the words for all the spellers in her round were equally difficult. She scored enough points her round to keep her school tied for first.  After the final quarter it was still tied and our 8th grade star speller had to do a spell-off with the other school. Who knew a spelling bee could be so exciting?!  In the end our team won.  What a fun night it was. I'm so glad that Annaliese had this experience to be on the spelling team.  It was hard work to get through even just 6 pages of words but I think if she qualifies in the future she'll be motivated to push through all 8.  I couldn't be more proud of my girl!  Great job Annaliese!

5 Months

She couldn't be cuter or more loved! Little girl has won all of our hearts for sure!  She isn't sleeping through the night anymore but how can I be upset at that sweet face.  We'll figure it out before long.  She is rolling from her tummy to back by herself.  She can roll back to tummy with help.  She's working on her sitting.  She loves her bath time and splashes and smiles and laughs the whole time. She loves all the attention she gets from her big sisters. She loves being talked to and read to and played with. 

Just yesterday we were at the doctor for Adeline.  While we waited for the doctor we put Althea on the exam table and she was thrilled with the crinkling paper that she laid on. She kicked and flapped non stop and was just delighted hearing the paper crinkle all around her. She made Addie and I laugh, she was so in to it.

She likes to make noises when she breathes.  Just because she can.  Especially when I'm feeding her.  Also when I'm nursing her she will almost always grab my mouth.  Kind of funny.  So I kiss her fingers or nibble on them while she eats.  After she eats she will usually smack her lips for a few minutes just to hear the cool sound it makes.  She cracks me up!

When I go to change her clothes or diaper as soon as her pants come off her feet go into her mouth!  She loves chewing on those toes!

She is wearing a helmet these days.  She has (had) tortecolis and favored turning her head to the left when she would sleep.  As a result her head started going flat on that side.  (This is exactly what happened to Annaliese ten years ago!)  We knew the sooner we intervened the less time it would take to round out her head.  So she has physical therapy once a week to work on her neck muscles and she wears the darn helmet 23 hours a day.  She does great though.  If tolerates it very well and is an excellent sport about it.  She's had it about three weeks and I think she'll only need to wear it three more.  Just like that!

Love this girl!  I still can't believe that she is ours.  I am one lucky mom.