Good Summer

We have had an incredible summer, and are sad to see it come to an end.  You can read more about it here on Carrie's blog.

Olivia Turned Two!

I can hardly believe Olivia is already two. She has grown up quite a bit in recent months, and no longer seems like a baby. She's talking non-stop, and loves to express herself as often as possible. Her favorite phrases are "I did it!," "I got it!," "right there," and has already become quite the little boss of her brothers. The other night at dinner she barked at Noah, "Stop it! Come. Sit. Eat," as he was spinning around in the kitchen instead of eating dinner with the rest of us. Looks like she's already practicing the fine art of motherhood.

She had a great birthday.  She loves pointing out Kitty Cats, and saying "neow, neow," and has a special affinity for Hello Kitty, so we went with that for a theme.  She got a Hello Kitty stuffed animal, which has since become her constant companion.

I made some Hello Kitty cupcakes, and tried my hand at cakepops:

The cake pops were a little more challenging and time consuming that I was expecting. I think my icing/crumb ratio was off.  There's a reason they are laying flat... They were falling right off the sticks.

The first gift she opened was a Hello Kitty shirt I had made with an iron on.  It was so funny to watch her quickly strip off her jammie shirt, and put on her new one.  My boys could have cared less about clothes at this age, but she was really excited about getting clothes.  And she's much better at dressing herself at this age than my boys ever were.  Which can come at a cost.  Have I mentioned we've had to tape her diaper on with packing tape every night for several months because she will undress herself and take off her diaper in the night?  Yeah, not fun.

To go along with her "mini-mother" attitude as of late, she received some "mini-mother" doll toys from Grandma Margie.  She now puts her babies to bed in a crib, diapers them (complete with diaper rash cream), helps them sit on the potty and flush, bounces them in the bouncy seat, carries them in their car seat, and seats them at the table for dinner.  

 Here she is enjoying her Hello Kitty cupcake.  We celebrated by having her best buddy, Isaac, and his family over for dinner and to help us consume our cake and ice cream.  They brought her some Hello Kitty books, which also became an instant favorite.  I'm thinking she might even be Hello Kitty for Halloween...

Olivia is such a delight.  She is a ball of energy, and loves to laugh and play with whomever is up for it. She loves being tickled, and requests more and more if we ever stop.  One of her favorite games is ring around the rosies.   She's quick to say sorry, and loves to give big hugs.  Swimming is probably her favorite past time.  She'll bring me her swim suit and a swim diaper several times a day, to see if I'll take her swimming. She's a dare devil in the water.  She's becoming very independent, and wants to do everything on her own.  If we help her with something she wants to do herself, she often undo what we helped her with, and redo it on her own.  She is very picky about her clothes, and I often have to coerce her to wear what I have picked out for her.  But pointing out how pretty it is, and showing her that I have some matching hair bows is often all it takes.  She loves to be pretty, and asks to have her hair done each day.  She is extremely observant. (I tried to do some birthday shopping with her, and there was nothing getting past this one!)  Lately when we spell things to try and keep a secret, she yells out what we just spelled (like should we get out the i-c-e c-r-e-a-m?, and she yells, "ice ceam!")  We love you Olivia, and can't imagine our lives without you.

Advertisement for Legos

It's been 8 months since Christmas brought Legos to our house. I will say it now to be clear. Everyone should buy their children a lot of legos. Ditch the TV, and any other toys. Our boys play with Legos all day long. They particularly like Star Wars. Sometimes they recreate scenes from the movie (or the book about the movie that they have read ad infinitum) or improvise with the characters and anyone else they can co-opt into the act. Woody from Toy Story is Han Solo, Jessie is Princess Leah, Propector - as you can see in the image - is one of the bad guys. Sometimes the emperor.

Without being a totally walking ad for Legos, these have been awesome. They are captivating. They promote imagination, even if it is 'blow them up' imagination. I've been surprised by the in-depth story lines they are making up.

Cute Card

Harrison wrote Olivia this birthday card, all by himself. We asked him where he got the "pur-fect" joke, and he said "I got it from a Spiderman story." I think it may be a catwoman joke in a Batman book, but maybe I don't know my superheros that well. He reads more than me, so ...

We Made our Bed

No, I don't mean that we put on sheets and spread a duvet.  We bought boards, screws, nails and paint, and actually built a bed.   Thanks to Ana White at Knock-off Wood who provided the plans.

The bed is a "knock-off" of this bed at Pottery Barn.  I loved the bed, but wasn't going to spend almost $1000 for it.  I thought a daybed would really help out our toy room, and make a great guest bed.  Our toy room previously had this:

A couch we got off craigslist when when we moved here.  We were able to sell it on craigslist for the same cost of the 3 plywood boards ($100).

We built this over the course of a couple months.  It was mostly built within a few weeks (working for an hour here and an hour there in the evenings) and then sat unfinished for several weeks.

 We finally painted it last Monday.

The kids love climbing into the boxes.

And before I could get the mattress on, Noah and Olivia decided it would also make a great playing space: 

This was a really fun project to work on.  Sam and I would build in the evenings after the kids were down for a night.  The bed consists of 3 boxes, which you then frame with 1X2's and 1X4's.  I think we built 1 box per evening, and then it took a couple evenings to frame the whole thing.  We got the plywood boards at Lowe's, where we got them cut to size.  We quickly learned that we had to measure their cuts, to make sure they were accurate, to save a trip back to the store.  The trim was all cut by yours truly. With a hand saw and a miter box.  Yes, my arm and shoulder were pretty sore the next day!  The plans call for a cubby divder in each box, to divide the space into 2 cubbies, but since the bed is going to be against a wall, we didn't want to loose that storage space, so we left it out. Now the whole space can be accessed from the front.

I found plans to make fabric covered boxes.  I just increased the size of the pattern to the size of the cubby openings, and made them 20 inches deep.  I found some fun home dec fabric at Joann Fabric, and I just love how these turned out.  They were a bit tricky to sew, being so large.  The top edge is sewn through the cardboard, and it took both Sam and I trying to balance and feed the huge boxes through my machine to get them sewn together.  But it was definitely worth it.

Here's Sam working hard to nail on the trim.  There were moments when we really wished we had a nail gun. Maybe someday...

After sanding a bit by hand, we decided that a power sander would be a very good idea.  It made the sanding much easier and faster.  

I'm still working on making pillows for it.  I've made 3, but would like to make a few more,  Right now I just have a bunch of spare guest pillows on there.  The bedspread I got at home goods,and I based all the colors for pillows and the boxes from that.

Now for the cost.
3 Sheets of plywood = ~$100
Trim wood = ~$50
Screws = ~$10
Wood glue = ~$3
Nails = ~$3
Paint/rollers/brushes =~$45
Fabric for boxes = ~$40
Fabric for Pillows = ~$10
Bedspread/pillow Sham = ~$30
Mattress - Free
TOTAL: $281 (which includes all the bedding and the fabric boxes)

We also built this for our kitchen (also from Knock-Off Wood): 

It's a "recycling center" much like this one from Pottery Barn.  We use one side for trash, and one side for recycling.  It's been great having the extra counter space.  And it looks so much nicer than have a trash can out.  

This also sat unfinished, for even LONGER.  I just don't like the whole "finishing" part of building furniture.  

This was our first project, and we learned a lot as we went.  I'm excited to build some more things someday (Ana has SO many great plans - I have a long wish list of things I want to build!), but I think we'll be taking a little break for now.  

It's the 5th of July!

I don't know if it was a subconscious thing or what, but this morning I selected the "Eddie From Ohio" songs to play during my workout. They happen to have a song about the 5th of July. How appropriate.

We had a great 4th. And 3rd for that matter. And the 5th is turning out pretty good also.

On the 3rd we had some friends over to celebrate. Since we don't do outdoor BBQ's or party type things on Sunday, we decided to celebrate on Saturday. I found some cute print outs on the internet and had fun making some fans and water bottle labels to be festive.

I also found some great head-wear in the dollar spot section of target. The kids loved wearing the various hats and headbands. Everyone looked so patriotic! 

We had a water balloon fight

played at the park,

blew lots of bubbles,

and ate lots of yummy food!

Including this flag cake which a tried again this year.  I really should have outlined the flag before I decorated it - in the end the blue stars part was too small (there's only 40 stars) and there were 15 stripes.  Ah, well.

On the 4th, we got out our Sunday patriotic clothes (minus the hats...), and headed to church. 

After Church and naps, Sam lead a tickle fight.

And then Sam and I decided that we wanted to see the fireworks downtown - but we didn't want to deal with any of the traffic. We saw them together when we were dating (I guess that was 9 years ago now), but we knew the craziness that exists downtown, and the high traffic every where - the metro, on foot, and especially on the roads.  So we thought we could pull off on on one of the scenic overlooks on the GW parkway, and watch from there, and then leave before the rest of the traffic caught up to us.  Sounds like a good idea, right?  So about 8 PM we headed down, kids in jammies.  But as we started down the parkway, we soon found out that the police had barricaded off all the lookouts.  I'm not sure why that seemed like a good idea to them.  So we thought, maybe we could watch from Roosevelt Island.  Well, a lot of other people had that very same idea.  The lots were full, and again, police had barricaded off the parking lot not letting anyone else in.  While we discussed various plans (pull off on the grass like we saw many other cars doing, back into one of the scenic lookouts, since only the entrances were blocked off, park at the airport parking lot....) we got lost a few times.  We drove around a lot, and pretty much decided we were going to give up and head back to home, where there were fireworks right near our house.  So, we headed from the airport back down the GW parkway.  We noticed traffic in the right lane was slowing down quite a bit, and I joked to Sam, "Hey, maybe we can just get stuck in traffic on the parkway, and be able to watch them."  So instead of passing people on the left, we got back in the slow right lane.  Where apparently a lot of other people were hoping to see some fireworks too.  Our lane came to a complete stop right at an opening in the trees, and the fireworks began!  We could see the Washington Monument, and Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, as well as the top of the Capital.  With an amazing fireworks show right in the middle, reflected in the Potomac as well.  I forgot my camera, but it looked something like this: 

The kids, who moments earlier were nagging why we had been in the car so long, were suddenly appeased.  We stayed and watched for 20 minutes or so, and then decided to head home before it got too late or the traffic got too bad.  On our way home we drove right under the Montgomery County fireworks - it was kind of crazy, people had pulled off on the side of the freeway all over.  But it was fun to see.  And we had no traffic.  The  kids were home and in bed just after 10 pm, which, according to Harrison, was way too late. 

And now it's the 5th.  Sam has the day off work, so we're getting some work done around here.  Namely, finally painting the bed we built - hopefully I'll have pictures to post really soon!

Big Bubbles

When my mom came to visit us, she did some grandma magic. Bubbles hold some sort of enchantment spell over children. Its amazing.  Kids love to blow bubbles, follow them in the wind, and pop them.  My boys love to stomp them if they fall on the grass.

Harrison: Me and Noah thought it would be fun to pretend to save the Star Wars galaxy by popping all the bubbles. Of course it was just a game. The big bubbles were more fun to pop.


She bought a variety of bubble wands, but the big attraction was definitely the massive wand.    Here, I managed to encase Olivia in a bubble, well from the camera's point of view. It reminds me of Glenda the good witch of the South traveling in a bubble.


The boys had taken some of their medium wands and used them as lightsabers to pop the bubbles (and save the galaxy).  After a little while, the neighbor kids noticed and joined in.  We soon had a very large crowd, which came back often on later days to ask us to start the huge bubbles.