Wordless Wednesday

Cottonelle Castle

I really don’t know why we insist on buying toys for our kids.  They always have more fun with things that aren’t meant to be toys.  I am reminded of this every time we get a big cardboard box, but I never imagined that toilet paper could be so much fun!

Now that I have a laundry room to store stuff I buy two big packages of toilet paper at a time.  This last time I did it I was putting away groceries and looked in the living room to find that Bug had opened the big packages and got out all the smaller ones.  She literally spent almost an entire hour playing with them!  She built some pretty cool towers…I didn’t get a picture, but they were pretty impressive and taller than her!

She made a throne…but didn’t see the irony. :)

Boo came in and got in on the fun.

A bed complete with a pillow and headboard. :)

Oh to have such an active imagination! Maybe for Christmas we should skip the traditional presents and get her a Costco sized package of paper towels.  Just think of all the fun that could come of that! :)

Sweet Girls

Are kids born with an innate ability to determine when parents have a possibility of sleeping in and when they don’t??  I am convinced they do.  Last weekend the girls got up at 7:15 and 7:20 and even though they stayed upstairs until after 8:00, as per the rules of our household, they were not quiet by any stretch of the imagination.  There was running across the floor (which sounds like a herd of elephants) loud talking and slamming of doors, but come Monday morning not a peep was heard until 8:30 and then they played quietly until I went and got them around 9:00. :P

I really can’t complain though.  They have been so sweet since Peanut was born.  They almost always stay upstairs and play quietly or read.  Here’s a picture I took of them one day through the video monitor.

And the other morning they were quiet so long I finally went upstairs and found them like this.

Sweet, sweet girls.  Now if only we can get them to do it on the weekends! :)

Smiley Girl

Peanut is really starting to change!  My favorite of these changes is how smiley she is getting!  Before, she would give us a little smile every now and then, but we would really have to work for it.  Now when we come into view and say hi to her she will give us lots of smiles and get excited to see us.  It’s so sweet!

I love watching the girls’ faces light up when she smiles at them!  Bug is so happy when she does it, and says, “Aww, she’s so cute!”

Boo gets SO excited, “Hers smiling at me! Hers wike me!”  We don’t have our pronouns down yet. :)

She is starting to make some great expressions too.  So cute!

She will focus on us and actually look us in the eye now.  Up until now it didn’t seem like she was able to quite get focused enough to look us directly in the eye.  It was like she was always looking just past us, but now she’ll give us the stare down. :)

I hope she has as joyful a personality as her sisters.  They may drive me crazy with their overly excited, neverstopmoving craziness, but I love their joy for life.

“Oooo, what have we here?”

“Hers stick her tongue out! Hahahaha!” – Boo

In the evening after the Bug and Boo go to bed and she is still up we like to just look at her.  We think she is beyond cute!  Which is very helpful to remember when she’s screaming in the middle of the night. :P 

“I’m awfully cute, but I’m going to keep you up tonight!”

Haha :)  For some reason her sleep is very fickle.  She’ll sleep great two nights in a row, going six hours between feedings, and then the next night she’ll wake up every hour, crying just long enough to wake us up and then go back to sleep, or (heaven forbid) she’ll just refuse to go to sleep, like she did the other night, and scream angrily for over an hour!  She was fed, dry, and ready for bed and then just decided she wasn’t going to go to sleep.  We tried everything, and then she finally cried so long that it was only half an hour till her next feeding so I just fed her again and she finally went to sleep. 

It wouldn’t be as frustrating if it was consistent, but since we know that she can go 6 hours between feedings it’s hard when she reverts back to waking up so often.  Oh well, I know she’ll get it figured out one of these days. 

Good thing she’s got a smile that melts our hearts and totally makes up for it! :)

Wordless Wednesday

Painting

We spent the weekend painting the porch!  And by “we” I mean mostly T, but Buggy and I did help some…we still have the paint in our hair to prove it. :)  T borrowed a paint sprayer from one of our friends and OH MY GOODNESS!  Why have I never used one of these before?!?  It was SO fast!  SO messy as well, but it would have literally taken me a week’s worth of naptimes…or more…to paint all that railing!  We got it done in just a couple of hours! 

I love how it looks!  We have been waiting for it to cure and then we will wash the floor part of the porch and seal it.  Our house it really turning into my dream house!  I love how it looks like a farmhouse in the country, complete with my newly planted old fashioned roses in the front!

And my favorite flower of them all, hydrangeas!  I love them!  We originally got them to go in the backyard but realized it wasn’t going to work so I stuck all four of them on the end of the porch where there is more shade.  I’m really hoping they do well there.  They just make me happy!

Doesn’t the rail look amazing?!  T did a wonderful job!

The girls and I took time out from the painting project to attend the wedding of one of their babysitters.  It was a beautiful wedding.  The bride was absolutely stunning, and everything was just perfect.  I got teary watching, first her 3 year old little sister come down the aisle sprinkling flower petals, and then the bride herself.  I can’t imagine how I’m going to keep it together at my own girls’ weddings when I was tearing up just watching this sweet girl who I’ve only known for four years! 

Yesterday was our last day in the 70’s. :’(  But I’m so thankful for this gorgeous weather we have been having!  Tonight is supposed to be the first freeze so the girls and I spent all day yesterday bringing in the garden, and planting tulip bulbs. 

We had a ton of carrots!

And a TON of tomatoes!  Last year I just snipped off clumps of tomatoes and left them in the laundry room where they got some sun and they slowly ripened.  I think we had tomatoes all the way up until January!  I’m hoping that works again, although I think part of the success was that it was cold in there, but we have since insulated so they might go bad before they ripen this time.  Maybe I should stick them in the garage?

T actually had success with the pumpkins and squash he planted this year!  Every year we plant them and we never get them big enough before the frost gets them.  This year instead of starting with seeds he bought some that were already about four inches high and that seems to have done the trick.  We have three pumpkins and one really good squash. 

K also grew a watermelon!  I let her buy the seeds even though I have never been able to grow a watermelon in our short season.  She was thrilled that she got one…although I don’t know if it will be edible.  It’s pretty small, but she’s just happy that she grew one. :)

We had our first homeschool lesson on plants yesterday when we were bringing the garden in (carpet is coming Thursday and we’ll finally be able to set up our classroom!). 

We had fun identifying the parts of a flower that I pulled up for them to look at and then we made a chart that compared 8 different kinds of vegetables/fruit that we grew in our garden.  I asked the girls to describe the root, leaf, stem, and produce on each of the plants and they did a great job! 

Bug came up with words like feathery (carrot and asparagus leaves) and vine-ey (pumpkin and strawberries) and wiggly (tomato roots) and ridges (strawberry leaves).  It was actually a lot of fun, and they listened really well.  I’m looking forward to getting our classroom set up and getting going! Hopefully by next week!

The Tree

Ever since the tree guys came and prepared our tree for it’s imminent demise we’ve been getting comments on how it looks like a giant piece of broccoli or a tree straight out of a Dr. Seuss book.  It was so tall and they trimmed all but the top branches so it did indeed look funny for a few weeks!

On Tuesday they came back to finally take down the rest.  It was so interesting!  I didn’t watch them the first time so I’m not sure if they did this same stuff before, but the girls and I found the process fascinating. 

At first the guy was just up in the tree with a few ropes helping him stay there.

Which looks a lot scarier if you can see that he’s 80 ft. in the air!

We have quite the pile of branches and debris in our front yard!

After he got most of the branches and didn’t have anything to hang onto he got into his bucket.  This is what I found so interesting…since the tree was in between two sets of power lines and mere feet from our house they couldn’t just fell it.  They had to take it apart piece by piece.  The lines were so close they couldn’t just drop the pieces…they got to zipline down into the yard!  Extreme sports for trees!  I thought it was HILARIOUS!  T didn’t find it so amusing, but I laughed every time I saw a piece of tree come careening down. :)

The guy was using short ropes with clips and would hook it to a piece of tree, then he would clip the other end to the main rope they had strung up.  The other end of the main rope made a Y at the end with one end tied to the power pole and the other end held by two workers who kept it tight.  The guy up in the tree would cut the piece down and it would go zipping down the rope to the bottom where it would be unhooked by the workers on the ground and tossed into the pile.  Pretty neat!

Here’s a video I got of the last big piece to come down.  They did a great job not making too big of a mess or hitting anything…with this one exception.  I just happened to get on video the one time they hit the house (well, the roof of the porch).  It didn’t do any damage, but you can hear the thunk on the video.

Can’t you just imagine the tree saying, “Whee!  Look out below!” Haha:)

We went out on their lunch break to survey the progress.  T explained to the girls how the tree rings tell you how old the tree is and since the ridges were deep enough to feel I went and got some paper and let the girls do some shading.  Then we did the asphalt, the sidewalk, some large rocks, and some plywood to compare the textures and patterns.

Stump farm!

T got a picture of the huge stump that was the last piece of the tree.  Apparently some guy in town makes bowls out of stumps that big?  Although I don’t know if it will work for him because it was apparent why the tree was dying. You can see the whole middle section is brown with little tunnels where some kind of insect was destroying the tree from the inside out.  In any case the guy came and got it early this morning.  It was probably 3-4 feet in diameter and ten feet tall.

Here is the leftover tree stump.  It’s hard to tell but the edges of it are all at the edges of the picture.  I stuck my foot in to show how big the base of the tree was.

You can see all that brown rotting tree powder that looks like dirt.  It’s kind of sad that such an old tree had to come down, but I’m glad we were able to get it taken down before it fell on our house!

Farewell old tree!