Moran Family Fun

This post is about sewing so if you're not interested in reading about the Easter outfits I sewed for the girls, feel free to skip to another more interesting post.  This year I really wanted to sew all the girls something to wear for Easter.  That was my goal last year as well, but I didn't end up finding the time to make something for Madison. I had two weeks to make five outfits but I still didn't even start the last two until Easter weekend.  This year I was determined to meet my goal and amazingly enough I actually did it, with literally hours to spare. I started with Natalie's dress because I wanted to work my way through from youngest to oldest; it's probably good that I did because her dress was the most complicated.  I used the Oliver + S Jump Rope Dress pattern, which I've had for a while but had never attempted because of the three scissors difficulty rating.  The fabric came from a duvet cover I bought at the thrift store, so I would love it i...

Emily has been playing on her school's volleyball team (Go Lions!) this year and has totally rocked.  She's worked hard and has been an anchor for her team, which I learned means that she stays on the court the entire game, and spent a lot of time perfecting her serve until she became much more consistent at getting the ball over the net every time.  I'm not very sporty and I don't know a lot about volleyball, but I think she's a really great player.  Jared, who is very sporty, thinks she's the best player on the team and I'm sure that's an entirely unbiased opinion.   Playing volleyball has been a big time commitment for Emily with practices two or three days a week after school and a match each weekend.  But, all that time at practice paid off when she was chosen to play on the All-Star Team at the end of the season! p.s. The title of this post is a reference to a little cheer Emily and her teammates came up with; sorry if it doesn't ...

Nothing big here, just a sweet picture I snapped of some not too rare sisterly love.  Madison is such a good big sister and I think her younger sisters are blessed to have her in their lives. I love this picture for a couple of reasons.  First, they're wearing matching clothes and they have matching hair.  As cute as it is, I try not to dress the kids in matchy clothes but this photo makes me want to put them in matching Easter dresses this year!  Mostly though, it just makes me happy to see the love in this photo.  With five girls in the house we have our fair share of bickering and tears and sometimes it feels as if moments like this are a thing of the past for our family.  Seeing Madison and Samantha like this was a little reminder that my girls do  love each other and that maybe, just maybe, Jared and I are doing something right.

This year Emily was chosen to participate in the District Middle School Honor Band. It's a two day event where students from six middle schools come together, practice all day, and then give a concert at night.  Madison went last year and learned a lot so we were excited for Emily to have the same opportunity. Unlike the High School Honor Band, there is no audition process.  Each school is given a certain number of slots and the band teacher selects which students will participate.  I kind of wish they did have to audition because it would have forced Emily to practice more.  We very rarely hear the clarinet being played in our home.  If Emily is good enough to be selected for this without ever practicing (it's not super competitive, but still), I can only imagine how much she would improve with daily practice.  I usually ask Emily before the concert which song she likes the most or which song she thinks the band plays best, but I didn't get a chanc...

I'm thirty-five now (well, thirty-five and one month).  It's funny how what used to sound old now sounds pretty young!  My birthday fell on a Saturday this year but Saturday's are a busy day for our family and there wasn't time that day to celebrate so we had a birthday breakfast party (complete with cake for breakfast) the next day instead.  Jared and I worked as quickly as we could to get all 35 of those candles lit and even sped up the singing of Happy Birthday, but we still ended up with drip drops of wax all over the cake. Blowing out that many candles generates a lot of smoke so it was either open a window or listen to the smoke alarm as we ate our cake for breakfast. After the cake we opened presents.  Most of my presents this year were from Natalie.  She made me many, many playdough creations and then wrapped them up in printer paper.  I think this picture was taken after I opened the third or fourth playdough present. You can tel...

The Air Force was nice enough to ask us to stay in Germany for a little longer than we'd originally planned!  There was just one problem - our military issued passports were set to expire about eighteen months before we were scheduled to leave the country.  It took a long afternoon at the passport office, but we now all have new passports. Of course part of the process was getting passport photos taken.  Those little two inch by two inch photos  don't usually present your best face to the world.  I read somewhere that when you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.   As each of the girls took their turn getting their picture taken for the passports they were reminded that they should not smile for the photo.  I think the goal is to have a natural expression with both eyes open and the mouth closed.  I guess for kids that translates into "don't smile." The resulting pictures are both sad and funny.  First of all, my face i...

A promise is a promise and even though I have seemingly lost my ability to write on here, I'm going to do my best to get everything up to date and documented and hope that somewhere along the way my blogging mojo returns to me.  And what better place to start than Valentine's Day?  It's a day filled with love, and flowers, and CHOCOLATE! This year Jared and I celebrated the big day a little early. Jared came home from work one Friday early in February acting very suspicious.  He was making secretive phone calls and talking furtively talking with Madison in corners.  I knew something was up, but I also know that Jared loves surprises so I did my best to stay out of his way and just let the surprise happen.  He did ask me if I'd like to go to out to dinner so I played along and happily went about getting ready for our date.  Eventually though, the entire plan was revealed.  We weren't just going out to dinner, he had arranged for us to have a night awa...