lessons learned while blowing bubbles

lucy cuddles anything:

hazel drinks from the wand:

lucy is hard to impress:

hazel, when she's not licking the wand, can blow many bubbles:

lucy does a great furrowed brow:

hazel is a skilled negotiator, convincing lucy to trade her monkey-wand for an empty pink bottle:

lucy reads license plates:

hazel and lucy are best friends:

and so pretty:

lucy's a goof-ball:

chain reaction

many may recall our christmas decorations. grant took our tree down back in january but the paperchains on the wall:

 and our christmas cards hanging on the door:

we left up. since it's march, i decided it was time to take it all down. sad, sad day. the walls and door seem so bland and empty:

it's a good thing our couch is orange or we'd go blind from lack of eye stimulation.

because i spent so much time making the rainbow chain, instead of throwing it away i hung it up in the girls room:

i had some left over and the girls put it to use:

hanging it back up was kind of difficult. why? because the walls have crazy texture. here's a close-up:

the walls are covered in this roughness (the girls and i have had many bad scrapes. i guess we should just stop walking into the walls, eh?). since there is no crown molding in the kids room, i had to tape the chain directly to the textured wall. the chain lasted a day and started falling down. once it was within lucy's reach, the death sentence was offical. this was the chain yesterday morning:

you can see hazel making a break for it with another length of it.  grant threw it away last night. happily there is a small section holding on to life:

i'm making it a memorial.

weekend tales

we had another busy and somewhat emotional weekend. friday night we babysat three little boys. we're on a babysitting rotation that gives us two kid-free friday nights (sometimes a saturday morning). this a wonderful, wonderful thing. anyway, friday was our first full night with all of the boys and we were kind of nervous about having five kids under the age of four to entertain. grant was especially worried about the kids making too much noise for the downstairs neighbors so he thought it would be a good thing to take the kids down to the park. it was a good idea until we got there. someone was having a birthday party and the park was pretty crowded. i was a bit stressed at having five little heads to count, two is usually hard enough, but the boys were all well behaved and that seemed to rub off on hazel and lucy. after we'd been playing for a few minutes, i noticed a couple of kids take special interest in lucy. this happens all of the time, she seems to be a novelty: a bald baby that walks! i kept an eye on them and they didn't try too hard to pick her up or help her. thinking lucy was safe for the moment, i paid a bit more attention to the boys we were watching.  they were having fun chasing grant around with hazel. i looked back to lucy just in time to see a heavy-set 2 or 3 year old girl bear hug lucy to the ground. i hurried over and asked/helped the girl to get off of lucy. i was nice about it because i figured she was hugging out of affection and got too enthusiastic. lucy was crying which surprised me, she's a tough cookie, but i assumed that she was scared about being tackled from behind. i brushed off the bark chips, calmed her down and carried her off to play with hazel and the boys. the 'affectionate' girl went back and forth between the birthday party at the pavillion and playground several times and then suddenly she came up behind lucy again and grabbed her around the neck in a headlock. i ran over and it looked like she was kissing lucy's cheek. when i got to them, i was horrified to see that she was biting lucy's face! i angrily told the girl to stop and pulled them apart. lucy was screaming and had purple marks on her cheek. i picked her up, took the culprit by the hand and marched over to the pavillion. some adults saw me coming and i told them that this girl was biting, handed her off and tried to comfort lucy. she hasn't cried like that since the colic days. it took a long time to calm her down and i was trying not to cry with her. grant and i decided to go. we gathered up the kids and walked home. as i walked past the party i saw the girl with, i assume, her parents. i wish now that i had taken lucy over to show them what their child had done, find out if this was a common behavior and, if so, ask them why they would let her play unattended. oh well, i don't think they live in the complex so here's hoping we never see that kid again. when we got home and saw lucy in proper lighting, i was appalled. her cheek was swollen and the bite mark was so close to her eye. i took pictures (of course):

 you can still see a faint brownish bruise today. i guess we're just lucky it didn't break skin. oh, and that first tackle that i thought was affection? that girl was biting lucy on the scalp. we noticed a red area on the side of lucy's head that would have been by that kid's face. grrrrrrrrrrr.

i'm glad that i have pictures from saturday to end this blog post on a happier note. we had originally planned on going to the beach saturday. hazel has been begging to go for the longest time. unfortunately, i had signed myself up to bring a dessert for a young women fundraiser at church and we didn't really have time for both. we ended up at the zoo instead. before we went inside, we fed the ducks in herman park:

lucy was all about jumping in and swimming with them. grant tried to keep her from the water but she still managed to get her legs wet.  

she loved throwing the bread in the water. only a few ducks were interested: 

we were soon out of bread and off to the zoo we went. lions:

tigers:

and bears:

oh my! hazel was so worried that the poor sleeping bear was going to roll off. he didn't. hazel insisted on stopping at every bench for a picnic:

a bunch of keepers were out talking about some of the animals. we saw the spotted lepard do some tricks for lumps of meat:

we found a bench by a big flowering bush:

the kids sat for another picture:

then took off to run in the grass, where hazel found a fossil:

i didn't tell her it was actually a lump of cement. grant and lucy found a bald eagle.....

not a bald eagle, an eagle that was bald and turned blue:

i almost felt bad bursting that bubble and telling grant that it was actually a vulture....almost (heeheehee).

we passed the numerous giraffes (at least 3 new babies in the past year!) and made it to the natural encounters building that houses the revered fish tunnel. the place was packed so hazel and lucy had to wait to go through the tunnel. lucy doesn't like waiting. they went through once and i heard someone say that a keeper had a snake out. despite my initial shudder of disgust, i took hazel over because we all know how much she loves creepy things. i was happily surprised to find the keeper with the cutest little hedgehog:

 

hazel was appeased:

and lucy stared at the fish:

here's what i made for the fundraiser:

chocolate cupcakes with mint buttercream (minus the ganache and extra mint) and bittersweet chocolate curls; and almond cupcakes with vanilla buttercream, sprinkled with cinnamon (minus the vanilla paste, i just used extract). don't they look good? i finally bought a 1m tip and now my icing jobs look pretty good. i have to say, those almond cupcakes were awesome, seriously so delicious. make them.

you can't go fast if you go too slow...

on your mark......:

get set...........go!:

lately, this is how we get the kids to the car. lucy especially will just stay in her runner's position until someone says "go":

what form! today after they 'race' each other a few times, lucy lost interest and watched a plane fly by:

then she found a stick to hit things with:

hazel, who became a "mousekentear", saw this as a challenge and they had a duel:

hazel won and prepared a victory fire:

and proceeded to cook and eat lucy. true story......well, very slightly embellished....hazel doesn't know what a duel is yet and she may or may not have eaten lucy before the sword fighting...

monday night flashback #26 ("the panic, the vomit")

look at that! two weeks in a row! watch out, folks, this may just become a habit...

i'm not going back too far for this flashback. i figured since i just humiliated hazel on the interwebs, i'd better get lucy too. look at this picture:

those big eyes, that sweet little smile; they suggest angelic innocence. they don't tell you of the torture she put us through the first few months of her life. here's an understatement for you: lucy was a hard baby. we were spoiled with hazel: she slept through the night (9pm-9am), consistantly, at 2 months; she never spat up; we could cuddle her to sleep at church; grant nicknamed her "snuggler". lucy was completely different: colicky up until 3 or 4 months, literally crying for hours each night; 'blessed' with unbelievable screaming pitch/range/volume; spat up constantly until she was a year old; grant nicknamed her "barfy".

anyway, that's all just background for [but really doesn't have much to do with] this whale of a tale. one thing both girls love is yogurt. each would happily eat it for every meal. since lucy is a scrawny little thing i usually get her the full fat baby yogurts. well, back in early september, i picked up these:

on a thursday morning, i fed a surprisingly reluctant lucy one. a couple hours later, lucy was projectile vomiting all over the place. she continued throwing up the rest of the day. friday, she was better but i kept her away from dairy. saturday, i gave her milk and she was fine. we figured it was a 24-hour bug. sunday morning came and we had no qualms taking her to church (it was our second week with our new ward. remember, we moved the last day of july and spent most of august in utah.). i fed her a yogurt and we headed out. she seemed a bit moody throughout sacrament but nothing out of the ordinary. we dropped hazel off in nursery and went to our sunday school class with lucy. it started out fine, lucy was happily shoveling goldfish crackers into her mouth and playing with a young couple a few seats down the row. and then all of a sudden: BARF! everywhere. all over his legs and her skirt, on the carpet, and probably the seat as well. i took lucy to the bathroom and washed her as best i could while grant cleaned up the classroom. i was on my way back to him when she vomitted all over me. i was seriously plastered, it was even in my hair. luckily, i had chosen to go through the gym rather than through the chapel because she spewed several more times. i stood there frozen, trying hard not to breath through my nose. i wanted to cry, the few paper towels i'd thought to take from the bathroom were absolutely saturated, so i couldn't clean up the floor or myself. then a super nice man came through the doors, took one look and said, "need some help?" he got some paper towels and cleaned up the floor for me. thankfully, grant arrived quickly after. we grabbed hazel and left. the whole drive home was filled with the sound of lucy dry heaving and the awful smell of my clothes. anyway, after many wonderings and searches we finally figured out that it was the yogurts. they weren't expired, they were just soy (something i missed when i bought them). apparently, lucy is violently allergic to soy yogurt. go figure.