Analogies of a Five year old-

Tonight while tucking Grace into bed she said, "Do you remember how badly I wanted my pillow pet last year? I wanted it SOOOO bad! How badly I wanted it, that is how mean I feel you are being towards me. You ALWAYS make me do chores."  Other than the part about me being mean, that is a pretty good way to describe her feelings! I was pleasantly surprised with her ability to get her point across. We had a really good talk about the fact that we will ALWAYS have chores to do. We walked through what would happen if we stopped washing dishes, doing laundry, vacuuming, etc.  She got the point quickly. She realized it is less painful to take 15 minutes and do the laundry then to go to school naked.  That is never fun!
I can't believe my baby is going to be six soon. She is growing up so quickly. I am amazed by her maturity some days, and frustrated by it others. This life is definitely a learning process.
I love my sweet Gracie Aryn.

Christmas time is on the horizon-

For those of you that have heard of "Elf on the Shelf", get this...Gracie's friend has the elf at his house and asked Grace where her elf was.  Well, I had every intention of getting said elf while shopping the other day, but I forgot. Heber is too small of a town to have this cute book, so I did what any desperate mom would do. I improvised. Big time.  I concocted a letter from "Roofus". And who is Roofus you ask, he would be a small monkey from the North Pole. Santa sends him out when all of his elves are busy. So far, so good. Roofus returns to the North Pole every night to report on how Grace has done for the day. Grace is slightly freaked out by this little monkey watching her all the time, but on the other hand, she loves it! She wakes up first thing and runs around the house looking for him. So far she has caught him in the fridge eating Jake's pie, climbing the vines over the kitchen table, and roosting in our other plant. Tonight, he will be hiding in one of many balloons which I will blow up and place around the house. We will see how that goes:)

Grace for the past month and a half probably has been talking about a boy in her class named Austin.  From the way she talks about him you would think they spend all of class talking. Turns out, he doesn't even sit at her table. She just really likes him. I don't know that I would mark this up as anything, but when Daddy asks her about him, she turns red and won't talk. Pretty funny.

Funny Grace-ism for the day "Mom, have you laughed today?" While holding out a laughing cow cheese. Needless to say, I laughed.