Category Archives: Lydia Grace

Happy 4th of July!

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We haven’t done anything picture worthy yet today (not that trips to Home Depot aren’t thrilling and all that), but for your enjoyment, here are a couple of 4th of July memories from years past…

Alethea sailing, July 4th 2012

Lydia at the beach, July 4th 2012

July 4th 2011… no pictures, although I do recall sitting on the couch with Alethea watching fireworks displays on YouTube. Yup, YouTube fireworks, now that’s patriotic…

Alethea hangin’ out, July 4th 2010

Alethea sailing (rather unwillingly), July 4th 2009

Here’s hoping you all have a wonderful red, white, and blue kind of day!

Now Introducing… The Kitchen Sink

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As you may recall, we gave the girls an under-the-basement-stairs playroom for Christmas, and they loved it. And I promised that I would post pictures of it. And I never did.

Sorry about that.

The main reason I never got the photos taken and posted was because the room wasn’t done. My dad was building a toy sink for it and the extreme perfectionist in me hated to take pictures of an incomplete sink-less play kitchen.

But then yesterday at Grandma and Grandpa’s house… what is that hiding beneath a blanket?

It’s the finished sink!

Why, yes, it does have a stainless steel bowl sink (or stainless steel bowl, turned into a sink, if you’d rather) complete with matching stainless drain stopper (it doesn’t actually come out, but it IS water-tight).  I’ll give you all one guess as to which parent I got my perfectionistic tendencies from…

My dad machined out all the pieces for the handles and the faucet. Lydia checked to make sure that Grandpa made it so the knobs actually turn (which naturally, they do…)

Alethea’s first order of business was to have Little Baby Doll wash her hands. Her second order of business was to get out the toy food and a washcloth and start playing kitchen.

And then came my favorite part, which was to take it home, put it in the playroom and take pictures of it. Although I am a little sad that we got four-inch solid oak butcher block counters in our house, and they somehow ended up in the playroom, and not in our real kitchen.

In honor of the momentous occasion, I pulled out two sink related accessories that I’d stashed away: an empty dish-soap bottle and a little yellow dish cloth that Great Grandmother Ruth knitted just for girls.

Alethea came in, saw the new set-up and got right to work scrubbing dishes.

Thanks Dad for making such a special toy for the girls! We all love it!

Now we just have to get the door to the oven reattached (it broke off when it got sat on)  and THEN I’ll (probably) take pictures of the completely finished room. Although I do have a fantastic idea I found on Pinterest for a fabric-covered magnet board that I’m itching to try. So maybe that will have to happen too. But eventually… someday… the room will be done. I think.

But until then, at least we have sparkly clean dishes.

Pics at the Park

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I was going through my photos this morning and realized that I didn’t get my camera out much in April and as a result my folder of monthly photos of the girls was a little bit sparse. To prevent such a catastrophe from occurring during May, I packed up the girls and my good camera, and we headed off to the park for some playtime.  Here are my favorite pics from the morning:

My very first photo of the day was of Alethea’s feet hanging off the slide, a different sort of shot for me, but I couldn’t resist the playfulness of the moment.

Lydia absolutely flies off the end of this slide… and loves it!

Alethea likes the tube slide too. It took all four years of her life to work up the courage to go down, but now it just might be her favorite part of the park.

Lydia’s favorite part of the park is the swings. That girl would swing for hours if I’d stand there and push her.

Ride ’em cowgirl!

Picking dandelions was just as much fun as playing on the playground!

(Yes, Alethea’s dress is on backwards. Yes, I mentioned it and yes, she was quite sure she didn’t want it turned around.)

Alethea thought her flowers looked liked something for a princess and wanted to go home and “put on my dress from Aunt Genna’s wedding and wear it while I hold my flowers”.

So there you go, a day at the park in pictures. Now I can rest easy tonight knowing that I have properly documented the month of May 2013 in the girls’ lives. Whew!

Not Your Average Spring Day

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Can’t believe it’s April 19th and there is a fresh foot of snow outside on the ground.  I won’t say I’m thrilled, I’d much rather be gardening, but when your garden looks like this, you just have to find something else to do instead…

So instead of planting flowers or strolling along a sun drenched path the girls and I spent our morning outside doing other things. Like…

Building a snowman…

Hugging a snowman and…

Feeding a snowman lunch.  Although I was in formed that our snowman was in fact named “Ms. Snowman” and was therefore a girl.

We also…

Put a ball in our mouth…

And pretended to be a puppy.  And by “we” I mean “just Lydia” because no one else was so brave as to chew on a wet ball from off the driveway.

Additionally…

There was a pine tree close to the snowman and…

Alethea thought it was hilarious that the tree was tickling her.  A bit of preschool humor there for you.

And for our last hurrah, we..

Found a puddle to jump in and had a good time getting soaking wet and then a not so good time becoming very cold.

After which we…

Went inside and had hot chocolate…

Good to the last drop!

And…. We’re Back!

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Sorry for the long blogging break.  We’ve had a busy last week or so.  Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Last week Monday through Thursday, we took a little family vacation to a hotel/waterpark in Duluth.  Not the most exotic destination, I know, but after last year’s somewhat disastrous spring break trip, we decided to keep it simple and affordable by avoiding air travel and limiting the trip to four days.  And what do you know, it pretty much worked.  There were some melt downs and Alethea started asking to go home a full 24 hours before our departure, but over all, Peter and I agreed that it was one of the best family vacations we’ve had since Alethea and Lydia arrived on the scene.

Naturally, the waterpark was the highlight of the trip and the yellow slides were the highlight of the waterpark.  It did take the girls three trips to the pool before they worked up the bravery to duck under all the falling water to access the slides, but once that was done, they were interested in trying nothing else.

The Friday morning after our trip we took it easy at home and tried to do a post-vacation decompress, but that evening I went out with some friends for a ladies night out at a restaurant/bowling alley in Minneapolis.  Unexpectedly ran into my brother-in-law there, hanging out with his friends, which made me feel good to know that I’m at least cool enough to frequent the same establishment as people who are still young and childless.  Maybe I’m not SO old?

Let’s not dwell on that question… So, Saturday we took the girls to a local Easter egg hunt.  There aren’t too many places in the world where hundreds of people would show up in 30 degree weather to pick up plastic eggs out of several feet of snow, but Minnesota is one of the few.  And yes, Alethea did choose to wear a dress and yes, she was quite cold.

The girls both enjoyed gathering eggs, were thrilled to discover that they contained candy and afterwards, Alethea was even brave enough to have her picture taken with the Easter bunny.

Lydia was not so confident and actually twitched nervously every time the bunny moved, so I have no picture to share of her snuggling up to him.  I did get a good one of the girls hugging each other though…

Sunday was church and afterwards a friend and I stayed to do some painting.  It was supposed to be a couple of quick walls, but then we kept finding more to do, so I arrived home late in the evening, quite sore, and not at all ready to jump back into our regular routine on Monday morning.  Oh well!

So now we’re all back to our usual stuff: playing with stuffed animals, going to work, reading books, teaching piano lessons, doing dishes and lots and lots of laundry.  Oh and planning Alethea’s birthday party, buying her present off Craigslist (she’s getting a bike, it’s pink and has streamers on the handlebars), prepping for Easter dinner (we’re hosting) and tracking down stuff for the girl’s baskets. And dreaming of spring… always, always dreaming of spring… sigh…

What have you all been up to lately?

Funny Baby

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Okay, so here is the story behind this video: Lydia got a genuine Lamb Chop puppet for Christmas this year, but since “lamb chop” was an unfamiliar term to her, she promptly dubbed it “Porkchop”. The other bit of information you need to know is that lately Alethea and Lydia have been “doing voices” for their stuffed animals, which is pretty hilarious, because they generally try to make their voices low and masculine.

So anyway, this video is Lydia performing a puppet show with Porkchop singing Baa Baa Black Sheep even though Porkchop, who is actually a lamb, has white wool, not black. Got it?

Cracks me up every time!

TATT: A Simple Toddler Lunch

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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!