a new park

sorry, this is the last post for today......unless something cool and exciting happens later. today was playgroup. i haven't gone for quite a while, mainly because i'm lazy and partly because they are usually 30 minutes away. today was no different, but i decided to go. i'm so glad we did:

it was a beautiful park with a pond. hazel has been asking to go to the beach, ever since we went to galveston. when she sees her sand shovel or bucket she says, "go to the beach tonight?" she had tons of fun playing in the gravely dirt.

and the water:

i've never really realized what a girly-girl hazel can be. she likes to get dirty and thinks spiders are 'cute', so i've just sort of thought of her as tomboy-ish. but at the park today, one of the other mom's pointed out the dainty way hazel was holding her left hand as she dug in the mud:

maybe the whole 'cute bug' thing is just a phase and she'll learn to scream and point and cry out incoherently. one can only hope. (she got mud all down her back from tossing it over her shoulder. and then one of the little boys decided to toss it back into the water, but got hazel instead) anyway, lucy as always was stuck in the stroller, and, as always, wasn't too upset about it:

i hope that she doesn't grow out of that. by the way, she claps now.....kind of. ok, sometimes her hands meet in the middle but not hard enough to make a noise. she also waves now and then. she's a little genius, too.

the next martha stewart?

i made these. it's true. i made them with no pattern. after i successfully made the first one, i planned this long braggy post in my head with step-by-step instructions. i took pictures:

that's when i messed up. 'pride cometh before the fall', right? i still ended up with three lovely pillow cases, well two really. the first one was a test and i used some fabric that i accidentally cut some random slits in. i mended the cuts but not very neatly, so it will be a back up or something. anyway, i'm quite pleased with how they turned out.

wednesday afternoon's edition of monday night flashback, #15

this is for deb: behold the side ponytail. this was my first day of kindergarden. the side pony was kind of mine and my sister's signiture look for a couple of years. my mom used to make them so tight it would give us a face lift. i decided to try this with hazel's hair (without the face lift):

it turned out really cute. grant will be so pleased. he loves my side pony tail pictures.

lucy crawls and shakes

i finally got on the ball and got lucy crawling on video. i'm pretty sure i never recorded her awesome army scooting, so i thought since she's already trying to stand by herself (at the park on sunday, she stood by herself for a couple of seconds before looking worried and sitting down.) and can walk along furniture, her days of crawling are numbered (as is my, already questionable, sanity).

i also got a video of her shaking her head. she doesn't mean it as 'no'........yet. hazel plays with lucy in the car by shaking her head. they do it back and forth, giggling.

sorry these aren't the best quality. oh well.

success

i've decided that when something that you've cooked so often that you don't need a recipe doesn't work out, for whatever reason, it's a lot more frustrating than messing up something new. it makes me appreciate that 99% of the time this is what happens:

i love when my labor bears fruit. makes a day go better. lack of patience is less of an issue. the kids are funny and cute rather than messy and loud.

*news flash*

lucy's first tooth broke through today! and it's about time. she's been teething for the past 3 or 4 months. i would have tried to take a picture of it, but it's really just barely out of the gums. i had to feel to make sure it was really there. my little lucy loo is all growed up.

peek-a-boo

lucy is now playing peek-a-boo by herself. she stopped once i was taking pictures but she was pulling the blanket up to cover her face and waiting for me to ask where she was, then she pulled it down and:

this next picture is the crème de la crème:

i'm so glad the camera caught this! i think she was a bit out of control while trying to sit down. hilarious picture!

this is what happens....

when the power goes out 10 minutes after you put the bread dough in the oven:

what a waste of a morning.

here, kitty-kitty

we caved. we decided to get a cat: ha! fooled you all! today i cat-sat (if that's a word). our friends had their apartment fumigated and needed somewhere to take their two cats, gabe and loki. grant kindly offered my services while i was still blissfully slumbering (i almost typed 'slobbering', and i guess that wouldn't be that far from the truth). anyway it went better than i expected. i kept them shut up in the bathroom at first but after the girls woke up from their nap i let the cats out. they were pretty nervous. loki was the bravest one and he came out into the living room only to be cornered by the girls. i've never seen lucy crawl so fast. she was laughing and squealing, chasing after the cat:

the girls trapped him in the kitchen and before i could save him, lucy took a few swipes at his head. so from that point on they hid in the bathroom. hazel tried to coax them out with a constant stream of, "come 'ere, kitty! i wanna pet it! come 'ere!" when the owners came to pick the cats up, hazel quickly said, "hi! wanna see my pet kitties?!" she was pretty sad to see them go.

monday night flashback #14

kandice, this is for you. summer/fall 1990: i need to point out several things in this picture, for nostalgia's sake.

• the wooden blinds or roman shades: i'm pretty sure these were here when our family moved into the house, back in december '85. i mainly just remember that our dog, chip, chewed them up.
• my hair: i was not a fan of the brush, obviously.
• the brown couch: vintage.
• the baby: my little sis, jessica, in her hand-knitted booties.
• my socks: rolled. sometimes i would wear two different colors of socks on each foot and then fold one over the other. i was pretty awesome. i think this was around the same time that my older brothers were pegging their pants. i had one pair of pink pants that i used to peg, so i could be cool like them. i don't know why this ever went out of style.
• the shoes: i went through shoes like you wouldn't believe. dragging your toes on the asphalt causes holes, you know. i remember playing out in the large field across the street from our home and accidentally kicking a small cactus with my holey shoe. it hurt.
• the carpet: i loved this carpet growing up. you could play the best games on it. one of the more popular ones was declaring the reddish-orange spots to be lava and jumping from cream spot to cream spot. good times.

our little easter

we hope everyone had a great easter weekend. we did. after church yesterday, grant told a very watered down version of the resurrection. hazel clapped at the end so i think she understood the happy ending (or beginning, i guess). once we finished that we had a really hard easter hunt:

we kept it very simple. hazel got a notebook and socks. she also got a ladybug and some bubbles to share with lucy. they each got a couple eggs and lucy had lots of fun shaking them:

i tried to get a nice picture of them together in their dresses. these are the best ones:

lucy looks so cute in this one, but hazel looks like she's plotting something...

i just noticed in this one that lucy has a bit of a cracker down her dress. oh well. they are cute girls. after their naps we went over to grant's professor's house for dinner. it was really nice and the easter bunny had left a basket for each of the girls there. they got a beach bucket and shovel, and cute fluffy lambs. hazel had a blast playing with alex, their 5 year old son. they got really silly and sang us songs while dancing and theatrically falling down. all in all, a very nice holiday.

the tower(s) of hazel

hazel may just have the makings to be an architech. she loves building towers. grant took these first few pictures, i was shut in our room reading the fourth fablehaven book. i've been loving this series. thank you, kandice, for introducing me to it. anyway, back to hazel:

she's so clever. grant stacked these cups like this and hazel copied. she's so good at getting them to balance.

those were taken a couple days ago. these ones i took just about an hour ago:

hazel wanted to make a 'circo tower'. so she picked out all of the 'circo' blocks and stacked them up:

she really liked this picture. after i took it, she said, 'that's cwazy, mommy!' and giggled. once she knocked this tower down, she cleaned up the blocks so that she could watch a movie. we've been keeping them in a backpack and she decided that she wanted to wear it. the last time i remember us putting the backpack full of blocks on her, she pretty much toppled over backwards. she handled the weight better this time and started towards the door saying, "i go skoo with daddy now."

she said this very seriously. she really wanted to go and was quite upset when i told her we weren't going to school with daddy today.

she kept trying to get the door open and wouldn't let me take her backpack off. it still took half an hour to get it off after i calmed her down. i guess we won't have any trouble getting her off to school.

monday night flashback #13

when looking at the hundreds of pictures a couple weeks ago, i found out that i've been here:too bad i don't remember. good picture though. left to right: aaron, my oldest brother; me; my dad; and jared, looking deceptively innocent.i know i posted this picture once before, but i just look so happy. unfortunately, i didn't have any sunscreen on that day: i'm not so happy in this picture. or this one. these photos aren't the best quality to see the blisters on my face, but they're there. i need to remember to put sunscreen on the girls, sadly they inherited my albino-esque skin with my blue eyes.

daddy daughter bonding

hazel is still obsessed with 'flying'. randomly, she'll throw herself down on the floor and say, "wook, mommy! i fwying!" i wonder when or if it will ever get old...

a standing ovation, please...

i finally took some pictures of lucy standing. she's been pulling herself up for a couple weeks now.

this is how we are greeted after naps and in the morning. she takes after grant (at least when he gets around 7 or more hours of sleep at night, which is happening less and less this semester) and doesn't have the struggling-to-wake-up stage. this picture worries me. i've been thinking we might need to mount the tv to the wall and put this table away. she has figured out how to open the drawer and, when she falls, hangs on to it. i'm afraid she's going to tip the table over and get smashed by the tv.

i have been pleasantly surprised at how well she does standing. hazel would stand up and then cry because she couldn't figure out how to get down. lucy seems to have known all along how to 'fall' right. it's nice that she is getting more and more independent, but sometimes i wish she was a ball of inert flesh again.

bits of h&l

i have more stories to write about. this blog has become so useful. it's my scrapbook and lucy's baby book, at least until i have some tangible ones. sorry if this bores you, but i'm not stopping. so here we go.

hazel is really good about reminding us to pray every night. last night she said the prayer and it was very difficult to not laugh. she said, "....tank you for mary awice, nanny, gwanddad and jared, yogurts, jessica, nanny and movies..." she just went on and on, finally i was able to help her finish. it's so cute, i love hearing her prayers. hazel has also been doing funny things with her pretzels lately. she bites off pieces and makes/finds numbers. the first time was the number 2 (it's backwards in the picture, but you get the idea): then the number 6 (sorry for the picture, hazel isn't wearing pants and i hadn't brushed her hair yet. it was while lucy and i were sick.):a couple nights ago we had german pancakes for dinner. we always eat them with strawberries and whipped cream (it's yummy). anyway, hazel had a full goatee made of cream and when i got the camera to take a picture, she wiped most of it off: it partially relocated to her neck:here's another messy face picture. i made this scrawny chef smoothie:hazel loved it. lucy wasn't allowed to try it, see her sulking in the background.

this next story involves lucy indirectly. remember the duck, the rain and the laundry? last week when i was doing the girl's laundry, grant asked what the loud clunking sound was. being sick and in a bad mood, i replied that i didn't know and didn't care. when i took the clothes out of the dryer i found this:
look how sparkly clean it is. apparently i need to look through the clothes before putting them in the washer. lucy's involvement? she likes to hang out in the closet where we keep the basket of dirty clothes and she's obsessed with that shovel. i can't prove it, but i'm fairly sure that she is the culprit. speaking of lucy, here is her new favorite look out:i have to pull up the blinds every morning as soon as she's out and about or she pulls and bends them.
i took this picture the same day i did this post:
i've forgotten how babies get into everything. hazel never really became a menace in the kitchen or bathroom, but lucy already opens the kitchen drawers and the bathroom cupboards. a couple days ago, i found that she had pulled herself up to stand using the toilet. her binky was swimming (now it's in the garbage and there is a strict rule to keep the bathroom door closed). she's also trying to pull the plug protectors out of the sockets. she's crazy about cords as you can see in the picture above.

i thought i'd toss this picture in at the end. it's so nice that lucy has learned to love baths. she has so much fun splashing and playing with her toys.