A Goat!

Alanna is attending Vacation Bible School this week. Every year they raise money or collect donations for something. In the past it's been school supplies or food for the food shelf. This year, they're collection spare change to raise money to purchase livestock for a village in Africa.

Each day they are going to put their money towards a different animal. Tuesday was chicks, Wednesday - ducks, Thursday - pigs, and Friday - goats. The goal is for the kids to be able to raise enough to buy at least one of each animal as a group by the end of the week.

Alanna came home Monday and immediately asked if there were any chores around the house she could do in order to raise more money to donate. It's been raining, so I didn't have any outdoor chores, but gave her a list of some things inside she could do and promised we'd evaluate at the end of the day to determine how much the extra chores were worth. By the end of the day she had swept, done dishes, cleaned the bathroom, organized her toys and even separated out toys she no longer played with to give away.

We looked through the toys and determined that the Zhu Zhu pets could probably be sold. She immediately declared she'd like to sell them as soon as possible so she could also use that money to donate.

Mommy's awfully proud. Alanna was able to earn enough money through sale of her Zhu Zhu's and her extra chores to buy a goat all by herself!

XRay Eyes

We were discussing the new baby the other night when Alanna asked, "Mommy, when will I get my xray eyes?"

I replied, "Xray eyes?"
Alanna: "Yes, when the baby is born. When will I get my xray eyes?"
Me: "I don't understand, honey."
Alanna: "Well, YOU have xray eyes and can see EVERYTHING I do, so when I'm a big sister I thought I'd get xray eyes too and be able to see everything the baby is doing!"
Me: "Oh sweetie, only Mommies get xray eyes. You'll have to wait until you have your own baby someday to get those."

Big Sister

Alanna is going to be a big sister come next January. She's super excited now, but wasn't originally when we first started discussing it.

In January we had talked about how our family would change if we had another child and asked how she felt about becomming a big sister. She determined that she wasn't sold on it and that "I don't want you and Daddy doing ANYTHING to make me a little baby brother or sister."

After further conversations, she came around to the idea that it might be ok and that we should leave it up to God to decide if we were going to have a new baby in the family.

Now that we're definitely adding a new person to the household, we've tried to make Alanna feel as special as possible about being a Big Sister. We know that no matter how hard we try, there will be some resentment/jealousy once the baby comes and figure if we can build her up prior to that maybe it won't be so bad.

I found an adorable custom made shirt for her from togs4sprogs.com and she was able to wear it to school to share "HER" news with all of her friends. Apparently she was so excited that she yelled it out first thing when she got into her classroom.



I also ordered her a book from Amazon called "There's a Brand New Baby in the House and I'm the Big Sister". We received it the other day and she's really excited to fill it out and is already planning her answers for each of the pages. I told her it was something we'd wait to do together after the baby is born. It's actually a super cute journal book about the Big Sister when the baby is born. It talks about how old Alanna is and how big she is and then has pages for her hand print and the baby's hand print. Overall, a good purchase.

I'm trying to think of things we can do over the next months. Maybe one a month to keep her excited. I have an idea for a little room plaque, a bracelet she and I can make (just need to call the bead store and see if they have Big Sister charms or I'll need to order one), and a Big Sister tool belt. Any other ideas?