Pink shoes, loved so much
Even go with pajamas
Alethea style
Pink Shoes for Easter
Special occasion footwear
At its very best
Always the Pink Shoes
Never quality sneakers
She knows what she wants
Pink Shoes for camping
And Pink Shoes for fishing too
Versatile Pink Shoes
Pink Shoes sprouting holes
Toes starting to peek out now
The unthinkable
And now sweet sorrow
Hello Hello Kitty boots
Fare thee well Pink Shoes
Hope your day is filled with lots of hugs and kisses from someone you love!
XOXOX,
Alethea and Lydia
PS. Click here to see our somewhat disastrous Vday photo shoot from last year!
Wanna guess what one of my 2013 goals was? It was to blog at least twice a week. You wouldn’t have known that though, because I never blogged about it. Oh the irony…
I’ve been thinking about it the past couple weeks and have decided for the first time in my blogging life, to attempt a weekly series. I figure having a specific topic to write about on a specific day of the week adds some accountability and structure to my very unstructured, non-topic focused blog. Therefore, I give you: Tips And Tricks Tuesdays… which does abbreviate to TATT, but will not (at least regularly) have anything at all to do with body art or the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago either. No, Tuesdays will now be me sharing things that make my life a little simpler, easier, and more organized. (And for that large percentage of my readership who sticks around strictly for pictures of the girls, I’ll try to sneak some of those in there too, okay?)
Hang on now, because here we go!
TIPS AND TRICKS TUESDAYS: A Simple Toddler Lunch
As the mother of two toddlers, I’m always searching for easy, healthy lunches to put on the table, because too often we get stuck in a rut alternating between PB&J and chicken nuggets when the lunch hour rolls around. Most of my attempts at being creative have encountered resistance from my little connoisseurs, but we’ve had one resounding success: The Ice Cube Tray Sampler
I take two ice cube trays (I found our pair at the grocery store for $1) and fill each square up with whatever finger foods I can find in the kitchen, trying to get a rainbow of colors and a variety of textures. At first I thought it might be challenging to find stuff to fill 12 squares, but it’s surprisingly easy.
We love crackers, croutons, pretzels sticks, cheese, lunch meat, bits of chicken or hamburger, frozen peas and corn, apple, orange, kiwi, banana and mango slices, pickles, cherry tomatoes, berries, carrot and celery sticks, ranch dip, raisins or other dried fruit, grapes, snow peas, etc, etc, etc.
I love whipping this out on days when I have zero mental energy and nothing in the cupboard seems to go with anything else. It exposes the girls to the idea of trying lots of different foods and they think it’s so much fun. They will keep me updated the whole meal through on how many empty squares they have, so it’s great for the counting skills too!
Yay for mealtime fun!
Okay, now it’s your turn! What are your go to toddler meals? Any tips or tricks to share? I’d love some new ideas, so please leave yours in the comments!
It’s time. Time for Lydia to move into a big girl bed. My baby is growing up… *sniff, sniff*… excuse me while I dry my eyes.
Just a week or two before Christmas she started climbing out of her crib. We’re taking that as a sign. However, rather than converting the crib to a toddler bed like we did for Alethea, we are going to move her straight into a big bed. AND, (drumroll please) her new big bed will be in Alethea’s room.
Now, I am aware that in making this move, we are likely to start rumors, so let me just say for the record: I am NOT pregnant! We felt that having the girls together in one room at night was better for a number or reasons:
1) The furniture in Alethea’s room is all anchored to the wall. None of the furniture in the nursery is anchored. I don’t want Lydia running around in the room at night and pulling something down on herself, but also don’t fancy making more holes in our walls than necessary.
2) If at some point down the road we decide to have another child, we will have one less transition to make.
3) If we don’t have any more children, it will be pretty simple to move the girls back apart later, or perhaps they could have one room for sleeping and one room for a homework/play space.
4) It will simplify the nighttime routine if we read two books together instead of two books each, sing one round of songs, say one set of prayers, etc. Of course we could do this all together and then separate, but at the moment, that’s not what we’re doing and I would LOVE to shorten the process.
5) Plain and simple, the girls WANT to be together. They are both excited to be in the same room at night, and I’m being so bold as to hope that it will cut down on the number of middle of the night interventions I have to make because of a suspicious shadow or other imagined disturbances. *Crossing my fingers*
So we knew we wanted to put the girls together, but then we had to decide on the exact arrangement. Alethea’s room is a nice size, but not so roomy that we wanted two twin beds on the floor, so bunkbeds made sense. However, we didn’t feel that Alethea was ready for a top bunk yet, so it was decided that we would try to find a set of bunk beds with a trundle, so that we could just set up the bottom bunk and trundle until Alethea is old enough to attain top bunk status.
After much internet searching, we were down to these four options:
Option #1 –
This one from Bunk Bed King had by far the best price, was a nice color and is made of solid pine. However, we thought it was the least ‘finished’ looking of all the beds, so we might need to add a side panel at the bottom to hide the trundle when not in use and we also didn’t like how the ladder and trundle would get in each other’s way.
Option #2:
We really liked the overall look of this bed from Target. It was similar to the first bed, but with a little more interest in the trundle front and a side panel already in place to disguise the trundle. Also the ladder was nicely positioned out of the way of the trundle drawer. However, the regular retail price was twice that of option #1.
Option #3:
It was love at first sight when I saw this bed at TheBeanBagStore.com. It’s white (my favorite color) and the detail, oh the lovely diamond DETAIL! I’ve never seen such a stylish bunk bed before! However, price was the number one objection, because even on sale, it was over budget by a couple hundred dollars. Also, I was afraid the white of the bed wouldn’t be the same as the white of the bookcase already in Alethea’s room and it would annoy me if the whites didn’t match (and I’m not sure it would be good for my marriage if I asked Peter to help me haul the bookcase out of the room for repainting).
Option #4:
Okay, so at $22,605 this bed from PoshTots.com was light years outside our budget, and I’m not even sure it would fit through our front door, but the six year old in me just had to pretend for a minute. And, yes, that is a slide you see there on the right hand side…
Anyone care to guess which bed we ordered?
If you said option #2, you’d be correct. The price of number one was great, but then the Target bed went on sale and we used my RedCard to get another 5% off plus free shipping, so it brought the price down enough that it really just made sense to get something we liked as is, rather than buy bed #1 and have to do work to make it look how we wanted it to look.
So now there are six giant boxes sitting in our entry waiting for Peter to get home and start assembling. Lucky guy.
Pictures of the bed and also Lydia’s birthday party will be headed your way soon. Stay tuned!
Merry Christmas everyone!
I’m happy to report that Operation Playroom was revealed to the girls this morning. I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the space since it isn’t 100% complete. Grandpa Chris is building the kitchen sink and they will receive it at our family Christmas on Sunday. I can’t wait to put up a post of all the cute details in the room, in the mean time though, here is the girls’ reaction this morning on seeing it for the first time:
Hope your morning was equally delightful!
I’m sitting on my living room couch writing this post, with a fire in the fireplace, lights twinkling on the tree, and snow falling softly outside the window. Ahhh… It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Our whole family got outside this afternoon to enjoy a romp in the snow (a.k.a. Peter cleared the snow off the driveway with the snowblower while we girls watched). The girls thought it was pretty fun at first:
Lydia enjoyed right up until she tried to walk through it.
Sorry, I don’t have a video, but you can look at the above picture and imagine her distressed little voice saying: “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!”
So basically our afternoon felt a little like a metaphor for my life lately. A little bit overwhelmed by the cold, beautiful snow… What’s been coming down on me lately?
Tons of Christmas crafting/decorating (I’m loving my mantle this year, pics soon), a family tree hunt, directing the Christmas choir at church, a 1:00am trip to the ER with Lydia (she had croup and wasn’t breathing well), Christmas present shopping and card ordering, dentist appointments (Alethea’s first and she was a trooper!), piano lessons and our neighborhood Secret Santa. I feel like I’m jumping from one thing to the next with barely a split second to catch my breath. Whew!
So I’m taking this one snowy afternoon to relax, write a blog post and revel in the wonder of the season, just for a moment… before the madness begins again.
Breathe… just breathe….
Alright, so I know I promised some photos from our vacation to Arizona a couple weeks ago. I’m here to deliver the goods, but fair warning that since it was a family reunion, I didn’t take a ton of pictures. A lot of our time was spent just hangin’ around, which was very enjoyable, but not always photo worthy.
Arizona is about as different from Minnesota as you can get, so there were lots of things that were totally new to the girls. As our flight was descending into Phoenix, Peter pointed out the window and said to Alethea, “Look at the mountains!” Apparently her only context for the word “mountain” is a children’s song, because she responded, “Are those what the bear went over?”
Another totally new thing was all the cacti. They had a chance to get up close and personal with one. Naturally Clifford and Baa-baa had to check out the cactus too. Also predictably, Alethea proceeded with extreme caution, and Lydia just had to find out what Mommy and Daddy meant when they said it was sharp. Turns out, it was in fact, sharp. Lesson learned.
Peter’s mom was nice enough to watch the girls for an afternoon so we could go out with some of the rest of the family and go on a little horseback trail ride adventure. We were quite happy to find a place with a relaxed attitude that let us do some trotting, ride side by side and periodically mix up the order.
I’m pretty proud of this shot given that it was taken one handed, over my shoulder on a moving horse.
Mostly I have to wonder about people who live in the southwest. I don’t think I could do it. I like trees. I need trees. But there really is something about the sky there. It’s really big and really blue. Breathtakingly so.
We visited a nature center one morning. The girls had fun on the puppet stage with their second cousins and “Uncle ‘Teve”.
Peter went for an afternoon hike one day with his dad and brother and got this cool shot of the moon coming up over the butte.
Every vacation we try to get an ornament for our Christmas tree, so we had to hit up the Christmas store. This year we let the girls each pick one out as well. Peter and I got a blown glass cowboy boot, Alethea selected a pink glass ice cream cone and Lydia went for an adorable buri owl.
That trip to the Christmas store along with some delicious meals, hanging out with family, soaking in the hot tub, a couple games of Settlers of Catan, one trip to the ice cream parlor and getting caught in a traffic jam on the way back to the airport rounds out the “what we did on our vacation” list.
So, mostly good, not too much bad and no one puked, which means we are officially calling this vacation a success! Whew!
We had a very busy, very delightful October 31st. Together with Gramma Denny and Grandma Debbie, the girls and I spent the morning and early afternoon carving pumpkins, decorating treat bags, and finalizing costumes by sewing a neckerchief and adding electrical tape stripes to some pink knee socks.
The girls followed up all that excitement by taking naps while I finished carving. When Peter arrived home, we got everyone up and ready and it was out the door to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for a quick candy stop before we returned to our neighborhood and went knocking on doors.
Here are some of my favorite pictures from the day:
Lydia was fascinated by the pumpkin gutting process. Alethea was much less interested this year. I guess she remembered from last year that she didn’t much enjoy touching the pumpkin’s insides.
Lydia dives in with a spoon, while Alethea carefully touches one seed. It’s funny to me how something like pumpkin carving can so vividly illustrate the differences in their personalities.
Because you just really can’t know what you might enjoy eating if you won’t even try it.
As requested by each girl, Lydia’s pumpkin was an Angry Birds theme and Alethea got a Clifford the Big Red Dog pumpkin.
Naturally, Alethea had to bring Clifford out to see Clifford. Also not surprising, she wanted her Clifford pumpkin to spend the night in her room. She said she thought he’d get cold on the porch. I told her he’d be stinky and we left him where he was.
Alethea decided to be Emily Elizabeth, owner of Clifford, for trick or treating. She absolutely adored the costume and wore it most of the day on Halloween and all day the day after. She’s quite sad that we have to return the borrowed white button down shirt and pink sweater.
Lydia went as Jetta, Emily Elizabeth’s friend and owner of Mac the dog, who appears regularly in the Clifford cartoon series. We had to do some explaining to people about who she was supposed to be, but I’m glad we decided to coordinate her costume with Alethea’s. Lydia was thrilled to the core of her being to be fully included in something that Alethea was so excited about.
This is Alethea with the boys who live right across the street from us. No, their mom and I didn’t plan on coordinating and yes, Brody is dressed up as a giant foam finger. Can you say ‘coolest DIY costume ever’?
Anyway, Happy Halloween just a couple days late from Clifford and the gang! Hope you had a good one!
Autumn is here! The leaves are falling off the trees, we finally went out yesterday to buy large pumpkins for carving, and I am in a frantic hunt for the ingredients to Alethea’s Halloween costume. She did an abrupt about face yesterday and decided that instead of being a bumblebee again this year (which had been her unswerving choice), she wants to be Emily Elizabeth, proud owner of Clifford the Big Red Dog. Should be cute, if I can find all the clothing items in the correct colors.
Anyway, I suppose I should probably post our vacation pictures, but I’m just in such an autumny mood with all the Halloween preparations and the weather being so glorious today, that I thought instead I’d post pictures I took of the girls this morning jumping into a pile of leaves. Hope no one minds!
They love being silly together. And I love that they love it.
Confession time: I photoshopped yogurt off of Lydia’s face in this pic.
This is a typical outfit for Alethea: a striped dress, over blue jeans with polka dot galoshes and a stuffed puppy in hand. And in case you were wondering, she was quite sure she did not care for a hair clip.
Love this shot.
This one too.
It was such a perfectly gorgeous day!
Ahhhhh…
Peter was on a business trip in San Diego Tuesday through Friday this week. The girls and I stayed busy with activities every morning and evening. A playdate, the children’s museum and a giant batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies were all great distractions. We also kept in touch with Daddy through phone calls, texts and even a video call (gotta love technology), but we are all thrilled that Peter is home again. Whew!
My favorite text conversation from the week:
Now that Peter is home, today was a day for some family fun. No, we did not go adopt a puppy. We went to a farm for all things autumnal!
The girls loved the corn box where they could scoop and dig and hunt for the buried plastic animals:
Look what Alethea found buried in the corn… (We took this picture just for you, Aunt Genna!)
They had lots of great things for the kids to do including pedal cars, a mini hay bale maze and some photo opp cutout thingies (yes, that is the technical term).
We all climbed up on the hay bale pile and snagged a passing stranger to take a family photo…
… and then we hopped aboard the “hay ride” to ride on out to the pumpkin patch. (Does it annoy anyone else when they call something a ‘hay ride’ but there isn’t any hay on the wagon?)
Alethea and I selected a pumpkin from the field that had some real character, but then Peter said it was the “Charlie Brown Christmas tree of pumpkins”, so when we got back to the farm store, we let the girls each pick out a mini pumpkin instead, which was cheaper and the girls were happier with each having their own anyway.
After depositing the pumpkins in the car, we made a quick trip around the farm yard to visit the animals, and then ended our adventure taking our annual Pile of Pumpkins Pictures. This is always one of my favorite pictures of the year. (You can check out Alethea’s 2010 pic HERE, and last year’s shots of both girls HERE.) Unfortunately this year the girls were tired, hungry and a little wet from the heavy mist, so I tried bribing them with the promise of hot chocolate when we got home.
It worked on Alethea:
Not so much with Lydia:
Oh well. Like I said to Peter on our way out, “It wouldn’t be a true family outing if someone wasn’t leaving in tears.”
The girls are doing better now that they’ve had some food and a little down time, so we’re planning on rounding out our family fun day with a bonfire and some s’mores. Come on over and join us!