Alyssa's growth and car shopping

Alyssa has been growing like a weed lately - except that they don't get cranky and sleepy from it. She comes home from school "starving" and will hunt down any food in the entire house until she heads to bed. She is also really becoming graceful. Alyssa entered ability-grouped ballet this year, "big girl ballet." For the first half of the year we ballet moms laughed at our children as the ballet instructor did these graceful deep knee bend, twirls, and leaps, and our girls flopped around after. Now suddenly Alyssa is slowly and gracefully bending and leaping and twirling and... wow, I know she didn't get all that from me!






Miss Caitlyn is Alyssa's ballet teacher. Alyssa adores her.














Warm-ups at the bar (barr? I'm so un-ballet savvey still). She's really getting it now! Her best friend Emily takes the class with her and there, like everywhere else, they are inseparable.











For one class the girls broke into groups of three and choreographed their own short dance, using what they knew. I was quite impressed!






In other news, we are contemplating cars. If you've seen our rides lately, you'll know we have a Ford Ranger (fits two comfortably when one is in a booster seat) and a Hundai accent (fits four if two are in carseats). Seeing as Alyssa will be in a carseat for six more months, and any more children will be in carseats, this presents us with a challenge. So today we started thinking about vehicles. And I'm sorry those of you who have a minivan and love them, we REALLY don't want to own a minivan! We're going into this kicking and screaming! We looked up minivans and small to mid-sized SUVs and crossovers and all kinds of things. Sigh. There goes our awesome fuel economy. Any thoughts on the perfect kid-car for us? We appreciate comments on this big decision!