Category Archives: Lydia Grace

Play Group and a Peanut Butter Sandwich

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Last spring the girls and I started hosting a neighborhood playgroup at our house for moms and preschoolers.  We met every other week for a story, craft and snack time, followed by some unstructured play.  We picked it up again this fall, are now meeting every Tuesday, and I even got organized enough to create a schedule of themes and field trips.  (My homeschooling roots are showing through.)

Here’s what we’ve done so far:

Week 1: ZOO THEME DAY – read Two at the Zoo book, sang ‘Old MacDonald had a Zoo’, did a Giraffe craft and ate an animal cracker snack

I didn’t take any pictures during group, but here are Lydia and Alethea admiring their giraffes afterwards:

Alethea’s doesn’t have any dots because she refused to put her finger in the brown paint, which is totally fine, but does amuse me, because apparently Peter also refused to finger paint as a child.  Like father, like daughter.

Week 2: Field Trip – Naturally, we followed up Zoo Theme Day with a field trip to the zoo the next week, where we did see real live animals, but the statues were thoroughly enjoyed as well.  In fact, Alethea liked the tortoise statue so well, she gave it a hug.

Somewhere there is a picture of me as a child sitting on this same gorilla statue:

Week 3: Favorite Foods Day – read Bread and Jam for Frances, sang the “Peanut Butter and Jelly” song, made pasta necklaces, and had a very special snack.

Did you know you can dye pasta really cool colors?  I was sitting on my couch Monday night, cutting lengths of yarn for our necklaces when I decided that I had to find a way to make it more fun than just plain pasta yellow.  A quick google search revealed that a simple recipe of alcohol and food coloring is all that is necessary to achieve really gorgeous bright colors.  Here are the full directions if you care to check them out.

All the kids seemed to really like this craft.  I haven’t ever done bead stringing with Alethea, so I wasn’t sure how she’d do, but she was able to do it all by herself and thought it was enjoyable enough that today she sat down and used the leftover pasta to make more necklaces for her friends.

The last activity of Favorite Foods Day was to eat our very special snack.  Can you guess what it was?

If you said, “Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” you’d almost be right.  It was in fact, a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Cake!

My friend Pearl sent me this great recipe and I knew it would be perfect for our Favorite Foods Day.  Alethea helped me make the cake and Lydia taste tested the peanut butter frosting.  When she was done, she held out her spoon and said, “More frosting!” which I think roughly translates to “Two thumbs up!”  Of course, Alethea (Dee and Lullaby too) were anxious for our friends to arrive so that the eating could begin.

So that concludes our September playgroup adventures.  On the docket for October are Castles, Monkeys, Autumn and a trip to the Children’s Museum.  Good times!

What Gives?

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For those of you who follow my blog exclusively for cute pictures and stories about the girls, I apologize.  I have the pictures and stories, they just having been making it on here lately.

If it makes you feel any better, know that the girls have been getting on my case about the lack of publicity.  Really.  Like when Lydia logged on to my blog the other day and she said, “What?!?! Another post about the front porch?  Really, Mom?!?!”

I am so sorry.

I will try to do better.

(Into and) Out of the Mouths of Babes

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Kids say and do the funniest things.  Mine are no exception.  I started thinking a couple months back that it was really sad that I haven’t been recording more of the moments that crack me up.  Nearly every day one of my children does or says something worth remembering, but as you all know, I don’t always get them posted here.

I am sure that if I don’t write it down somewhere, in a few months I’ll have totally forgotten that this summer Lydia excitedly pointed to a couple of butterflies fluttering through our garden and shouted out, “Butts!  Butts!”  Or the fact that for the longest time Alethea was calling bubblegum “BungleBum”.

Feeling that those precious moments were slipping away from me, but knowing how inconsistent I have been in the past at all my attempts in daily journal keeping, I searched Amazon.com for a line-a-day journal.  Just one line each day.  That I might possibly be able to do.

I ended up buying this journal which I loved not just for the gorgeous color of the cover (I’m such a sucker for robin’s egg blue), but also because it was a five-year book.  Here’s what it looks like inside:

I love the idea that not only will I be able to keep track of the cute things happening each day, I’ll also be able to easily look back and see what my kids were doing one or two (or three or four) years before.

That way I will get to laugh all over again at the day when I was so proud of Lydia, on her hands and knees, closely examining an ant hill on the driveway.  Just as the thought, “Wow, she’s really watching them so intently.  Maybe she’ll be a scientist someday!” floated through my head, Lydia suddenly bent her head down and licked that ant hill right off the driveway.  Yup, she is suspicious of cotton candy from the hand of her mother, but ants on the driveway she eats without hesitation… that’s my girl.

Speaking of things going into mouths, I chuckle each time I think about the day Alethea was in the bathroom washing her hands by herself.  I had recently changed the handsoap to a new citrus scent and from the kitchen I heard the following.  “Mommy got new soap.”  Pause… “I like it, it smells good.”  Longer pause… “But it doesn’t taste good!”  Who’d want to forget a moment like that?!

So far I’ve been pretty good at getting something written down every day.  Sometimes I have to play a little catch-up, and some days are less amusing than others.  But even the small details of my children’s lives are something I know I will treasure in the years to come.

I’m really glad I’m doing this.

Tree Removal as a Spectator Sport

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They are building a new house on the lot next to ours. I’m a little sad to see it filled with a house, but not at all sad that today they removed a bunch of the messy, overgrown, half-dead pine trees that bordered our lot. Hurray!
As an added bonus, watching the tree felling process kept Alethea and Lydia busy all morning.  It just might be the next olympic sport.

A Four-Day Vacation

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We took a little four day vacation together as a family this past Saturday-Tuesday.  It was actually two mini vacations rolled into one slightly larger one.  We spent two days at a lake with friends and two days camping on the North Shore (Lake Superior) with my family.  Here are my favorite pictures from the trip:

As you can tell, the girls were a little out of their element, and from time to time it showed, but we really did have a good trip.  They were troopers and apart from Lydia’s bedtime melt-down on our first camping night and some serious whining from the back seat during the car ride home, we all stayed happy and well-occupied.  Alethea was more daring in trying new thing than I expected her to be and both girls were surprisingly careful about keeping a safe distance from the fire, which I was happy about.  Alethea says her favorite part was roasting marshmallows and I’d say both girls also enjoyed the wild raspberry picking/eating along the trail we hiked.

I’ll admit that I am extremely glad to be home to my own bed, hot water and indoor plumbing, but it was totally worth the sore back and showerless days to see Alethea and Lydia having fun exploring the great outdoors.  In fact, we’re already planning for next years trip.  Can’t wait!

A DIY Mirror Project (and a Porch Sneak Peek)

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No, the front porch isn’t done yet.  We hit it hard this past weekend and I am happy to report that all of the masonry and major construction is done.  We are sensing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but still have some painting, staining and other finish work to do.  Soon.  It will be done soon.  But in the mean time…

I am ashamed to say that I have been hoarding an embarrassment of picture frame riches in my garage for the past 12 months.  Can you believe that I have had half-a-dozen large and beautiful empty picture frames for a year now and haven’t managed to do a single project with them yet?  *Hangs head in shame*

But this past weekend that all changed.  I finally got one of them transformed and up on my wall.  Here’s how it went down…

Last year we got a stack of great frames from Peter’s parents who were cleaning out his great-aunt’s house.  I loved this one in particular:

I thought it would make a great frame for a mirror, but I wasn’t sure where one might get a custom sized chunk of mirror.  I thought I might have to call one of those glass specialist trucks, but since that seemed likely to be pricey, I made a quick call to Lowes first.  I found out that yes, Lowes does cut custom sized mirrors (up to a certain size), but the guy on the phone was a little fuzzy on the details.

I had a bunch of other stuff to pick up for the front porch project anyway, so the girls and I made a trip one morning to grab what we needed and check out the mirror cutting situation.  Turns out that you buy a large piece of mirror (I think it was 30″x36″) for $17 and then they cut off the piece that you need.  I wish I had known that ahead of time, because I only wanted a 15″x20″ chunk, but after the guy cut it, he asked me if I wanted the rest of the mirror.  And what was I going to say, “No, I paid for it, and it’s perfectly good mirror, but please throw it in the trash”?  Nope, couldn’t do it, so I ended up with not one, but two 15″x20″ pieces as well as two smaller 15″x16″ sections.  (Anyone else sense more mirror projects in my future?)

Back at home, I headed outside to freshen up the picture frame with several coats of gloss white spray paint.  While the paint was drying, I attempted to photograph my recent Lowes acquisition.

Is it a mirror or a portal to another dimension?

So photographing a mirror ended up being a little tricky, but I tell you, if I had known how simple the actual project was going to be, I would have done it ages ago.  One trip to Lowes, a few coats of spray paint, put in some staples with a staple gun, bend staples away from frame, insert mirror, bend staples back and ‘voila!’ it’s done!  One gorgeous framed mirror for around $20, with paint and extra mirror pieces to spare.  Love it!

Lydia thought it was pretty great too.

We had a good time playing with the mirror together.

So that was my adventure in DIY mirror framing.  Right now the finished product is hanging in my dining room, but I’m not sure if that is its permanent home.  We’ll see where it ends up.  I feel like it could look good in just about any room of our house.

It might even look good outside.  But with our super slick new front porch, the mirror probably wouldn’t get the attention it deserves.  I’d say it takes something pretty adorable to distract from something so fabulous as a nearly finished front porch.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Update: To view the completed front porch project, click here.

Lydia’s Eighteen Month Update

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Lydia turned eighteen months old on the fifth of this month.  Happy one and a half years birthday, Baby Girl!
Unfortunately, my general lack of blogging the past five months has extended to my children’s updates, so my last Lydia post was in January.  Sorry!  I just went back and read what she was doing and well, she’s changed quite dramatically since she was 12 months old.  Here’s what’s going on now…

At Lydia’s eighteen month check-up she got a passing grade on everything but her milk consumption.  She loves yogurt and cheese and (of course) ice cream, but milk is not her food of choice.  Despite that, she has grown and her current stats are: Height – 30.25 inches, Weight – 25.2 lbs, and Head Circumference – 48.5 cm.  That means she is in the 15th percentile for height, 66th for weight and 93rd for head circumference.

Lydia’s motor skills are progressing nicely.  She walks confidently on most terrains, tries to run, turns in circles while playing the ‘spinning game’ with Alethea and climbs on everything.  She also has good fine motor skills and enjoys coloring with crayons, sticking stickers onto paper and picking up little bits of anything off the floor to eat them.

Her vocabulary is also growing by leaps and bounds.  I’m not sure how many words she’s said, I’ve lost track, but it seems like she’s got most of her daily use nouns and verbs down, you know: hug, cup, truck, brush, pants, up, bye-bye, yellow, car, juice, pillow, boat, star, bath, etc.  She says Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa, Poppa, and her own name: Dee-dee-ya!  Lately she’s even been putting two words together like today when she pulled The Runaway Bunny and Are You My Bunny? off her bookshelf and said to me, “Buddy book!”  I replied, “Yes, those books are both about bunnies, aren’t they?” And then she held them out to me and said, “Two!”  (I’ve been working on counting skills with Alethea lately and I guess I didn’t realize Lydia was paying that much attention.)

As far as her family relationships go, she continues to love Mommy and Daddy fairly equally and nothing pleases her more than when everyone is all together.  Whenever she gets up from bed, she always asks the getting up parent where the other parents is.  She also adores Alethea, as in, I’m pretty sure she thinks Alethea can walk on water.  Despite this Alethea and Lydia have had a rocky five months or so where they almost never played together and generally couldn’t even be in the same room at the same time without constant discord since Lydia had a tendency to mess up whatever Alethea was trying to play with.  However, that seems to be resolving itself to a great degree lately as Lydia has become more adept at playing pretend.  Alethea has also discovered that Lydia is largely willing to do whatever Alethea tells her to.  Alethea has been known to use that knowledge to her advantage from time to time.

Lydia’s looks haven’t changed a whole lot in looks over the last six months.  She’s gotten a little taller, a little slimmer, and has a bit more hair than she did at 12 months.  Her eyes are still a really interesting gray around the outside, fading to brown at the center.  I’m kind of half waiting for them to go all brown, but now that she’s 18 months, I’ve started to let myself hope that her eyes always will be this beautifully unique color:

Things Lydia likes right now are Baa-Baa (her stuffed lamb), bee-yup (to “wrap up” in a cozy blanket), playing outside, reading books, and trying to get her hands on whatever toys Alethea is playing with.  Her favorite foods are red grapes, yogurt, anything sweet, and whatever is on the floor after a meal (even if it is something she refused to eat while she was at the table).

She dislikes most vegetables, not being allowed to play with Alethea’s toys, going into her crib at night, being told ‘no’ about anything, and most of all, having to go to the nursery at church on Sundays.  She really likes the toys in there, but can’t stand the idea that she isn’t allowed to leave when she’s ready to go find Mommy and Daddy.

We love you, Lydia Grace!  It’s hard to believe that you are already closer to being a two year old than to being just one, but we are trying to soak up every moment with you, our happy, goofy girl!

Another Busy Weekend

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Memorial Day Weekend 2012

My baby sister graduated from college.  Where does the time go?

Long pants in 90 degree weather? Check.  Shirt on backwards? Check.  Wearing Mom’s flip flops just because they have polka dots, even though she can’t walk in them? Check. Backpack on back that contains a toy baby bottle, a hair brush and a pair of bedroom slippers? Check.  Let Mom or Dad talk her out of any of that? Absolutely-completely-utterly-unthinkable.

Walked into Lowe’s to find concrete stain for our front porch facelift. Found the exact product in the exact color we needed on the mistint shelf for $4. Uh-huh.  That’s right.  Score one for the home team.

How do you know when it’s time to harvest your rhubarb?  Not really sure, but figured if it was twice as tall as my 16 month old, it was big enough.  Looks like I’ll be whipping up some cherry rhubarb jam this week.

Spent a lot of time outdoors this weekend communing with nature and working on the yard.  Saw lots of birds, a fat brown toad, some fairly large spiders, way too many mosquitoes, and this cute little guy who had found a crevice in one of our boulders to hide in.  Alethea wanted to pet him, but insisted that she put on her gardening gloves first.

Hope you all had a great weekend too!