Noah's Birthday

I was so worried I had lost Noah's birthday - I couldn't find pictures of it anywhere!  But I just found them uploaded to my online account.  Whew!  We had a calm family birthday at home (he took some Star Wars cookies and favors to preschool with him in the morning.) I made his favorite meal - tacos. Since we were in temporary housing, and I didn't have any of my normal cake baking/decorating equipment, I just made a sheet cake, frosted it and covered it with more Star Wars cookies. The kids loved it.  

He got light sabers for one of his gifts, and the boys really enjoyed batting balloons around the apartment with them.

Fun books

A while ago, I posted on a great children's book, You can do Anything Daddy. I also noticed that my friends Nate and Emily posted on how this was a family favorite. So I figured that I would post some recent favorites. If I were to name the things that my children read most, it might actually be the Lego Star Wars instructions. But these are actual books.

Dinosaur Roar (amazon) by Paul and Henrietta Strickland. This is one of Olivia's favorites, and is a great board book.

Not a box (amazon) by Antoinette Portis. On a business trip to florida, I was looking for a present to bring back to the kids, and desperately trying not to get something like an overpriced sea shell. I wandered into a small bookstore and found this gem. It's about the imagination of childhood.

Psst (amazon) by Adam Rex. Hooray for a random library find!

Lego Start Wars Illustrated Dictionary (amazon). This was a gift from friends.  It may look like an more of a lego plug, but our boys love reading this (and comparing this to their sets).  It has lead to our acquisition of additional lego sets.

Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. Harrison read these this summer, and enjoyed them.  I'm not sure how he kept the stories straight, because he read them concurrently.  He would read 40-50 pages of one and then loose it, so he would start a different one.  But, I asked some fairly detailed questions, and he knew the story.  He is prehaps not sure what order the books are.

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.