Kate Sinclaire Martens

Today Kate is known as "Kate, the birthday girl.......the now 5 year old birthday girl!"
Our daughter has been waiting for this day the entire year, and started asking "how many days until my birthday?" in June. With this birthday she feels confident that her dreams to learn how to tie her shoes, learn the mystery of reading, and finally get to go to Kindergarten will all finally come true.

Kate continues to take gymnastic classes every Monday afternoon. She is always the teacher's example of how to do a certain skill, and she loves loves loves her tumbling. Cartwheels, round offs, forward rolls, backward rolls, and headstands are her favorites. We even bought her a tumbling mat for her birthday so she would have something to practice on besides our dirty builder grade carpet. Her teacher loves to tell us how talented and what natural ability she has...too bad her parents are cheap, lazy, and non-commital.

Andy was Kate's blast ball(4 year olds Tball) coach this summer. Kate loved her practices as much as the "games" and took each at bat very seriously. We are so excited to have another girl loving to play softball, but not excited about how complicated it gets trying to cheer on two girls at two different ball fields.

At church, Kate sings in the kids choir and attends Sunday School. She and Tess take great pride in getting perfect attendance recognition each month and I am so proud that Kate got to start her Sunday School attendance pin this year. Not many kids her age make it the required amount of Sundays per year to be recognized. Kate is also our pray-er. We can always count on Kate to remind us "we forgot to say the pray" at dinner times, and LOVE to give her the honor of saying the prayer. Sometimes the prayer is one sentence, sometimes we thank Jesus for the food, our family, stuffed animals, bubbles, and the Royals.

Here is a paragraph of things Kate loves: macaroni, pasta without sauce, stuffed animals, playing Wii, snakes, Barbies, Littlest Pet Shop animals, action packed animated movies, dancing and listening to music, funny books, the colors purple and pink, wearing boots, shirts that have patterns/sparkles/cute sayings on them, taking baths, painting her nails, getting dirty, being girlie. I love how she has always been great at playing alone, and is learning the art of playing with more than one friend at a time. She thinks she looks like Rapunzel from the new Disney movie "Tangled" and is pretty sure she wants to grow her that long. She is our blonde haired-blue eyed beauty. She is our emotional, quick tempered, slow to say sorry, loving, courageous, but sometimes shy, outgoing girl who hates the spotlight....except when she wants to be the center of attention, and then she is all about the drama. My favorite Kateism is one morning we were getting ready to go run some errands, and she asked how much longer till we were leaving. I told her the amount of time, and she said "okay, I better get to dancing....." and left to go get her groove on until we left.

Kate started Pre-K preschool class this year. She LOVES school, and is disappointed on Tuesday and Thursday morning when we tell her she has to stay home. Her teachers are enjoying the "unique differences" between Tess and Kate. I think that is a polite way of saying what we already know.....Tess was a go with the flow kind of girl, and Kate makes you work hard for the money. Kate came home from preschool one day and said her day was "not good." When I asked what happened she said "I was bored. They just didn't have enough for me to do today!"

Lordy how I love this girl. I worry she gets lost in the shuffle as the middle child. It is so hard not to lose track of how amazing and wonderful she is, but also hard to not over compensate for losing track in the first place.........
She turned 5 today and it seems like just yesterday that we were announcing to the world that Kate Sinclaire Martens had been born. I am hating how fast she is growing up, but so interested and excited (and scared and worried and anxious) to see what God has planned for her life.

Happy 5th Birthday Kate. This post has way more than just five things I LOVE about you!