The "Funnest" Month So Far

Eulee just turned 7 months and I have to admit that this has been the "funnest" month so far.  Everything she does is SO amazing and fun now.  I love it!

1. SITTING: She is learning how to sit, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities (if you can believe it)!  Now when we go to restaurants, she can sit in the highchair (with extra padding from the Buggy Bagg).  This is so much better than just holding her.  She doesn't LOVE highchairs yet, but I think with more practice she'll get it.

Since she can kinda sit, she can play with lots of different toys now.  It's amazing how different the toys are once you don't have to be lying down all the time.  She loves to bang on her little piano and her Superstar toy!

She is also testing out the Push Around Buggy.

2. HAIRDO: Shortly after she turned 6 months, her hair started to go flat.  Boooooooo!  We love the spiky hair!  But, alas, it is too long to defy gravity all the time. The problem is that the front of her hair is getting into her eyes, so we have to use a hairclip...but then the back part still defies gravity, so it looks weird.  We don't know what to do with it anymore.  It really is a mess, but I'm not going to cut it (as per my mom's advice).  For now, we can live with the crazy hair.

3. RASPBERRIES: She loves to blow raspberries now.  It's so cute...even with the saliva dripping down her chin.  She's not exactly doing her full-on raspberries in these videos, but she's trying.
4. FACIAL EXPRESSIONS: She's full of different facial expressions.  My faves are the tongue-sticking-out look...

...the biting-the-bottom-lip look....

...and the doe-eyed look.  Irresistible!

And I especially love how quickly her face can go from this...

...to this!

5. INTO THE MOUTH: That's where everything goes these days. Check it...

6. TOES: She actually loves to suck on her right big toe!  It's crazy!  She always does it during diaper changes.  But like I said, everything goes right to her mouth these days...

7. SLEEPING: Unfortunately, her sleep still isn't perfect.  On most nights she goes from 7:30 or 8pm until 5 or 6am.  Those nights are great.  But then she'll have these random weeks where she'll get up and STILL cry for an hour for no particular reason.  It's so odd.  We can't figure it out.  Can anyone help us out here??  I think this is probably the only downer this month.

Like I said, this has been such a fun month with our littlest one!  Can't you tell?

Pi Day, St. Patrick's Day, and A Birthday!

On March 16, we celebrated 3 things with our friend AJ and her family--Pi Day, St. Patrick's Day, and AJ's birthday.  How did we even decide to celebrate all these things on one single day??

Well, AJ's birthday is actually on St. Patrick's Day, so that was a no-brainer.  But we kind of stumbled upon celebrating Pi Day with AJ and her husband, RJ.  It was so weird because I was mentioning to B that we don't really have any friends to celebrate Pi Day with (not since KT and her family left us)....no one who will actually take it seriously.  Not that we're THAT nerdy, but it's just fun to celebrate with people who try to memorize as many digits of pi as they can.  Wait, that DOES sound pretty nerdy.  Anyway, not the point of the story....

So a few days after I had this conversation with B, I also talked to AJ about it too....not really thinking anything of it.  But then she mentioned that RJ is a big nerd, too...how he was a biomedical engineer and he actually has math joke t-shirts.  Oooooooohhhhh.  This was such a huge find because we are always looking for fellow nerds.  That's how we decided to celebrate 3 things on one day with AJ and her family.  Yay!

We decided that I would bring the desserts--birthday cake and pie, while AJ took care of dinner.  I volunteered to make AJ's cake because I've been wanting to make this rainbow cake for someone, but have never got around to it.  I figured a St. Patrick's Day birthday was the best reason to try it out!

Boy, this cake was definitely some work.  It was just time consuming to bake 2 layers 3 times.  Other than that, it wasn't too bad.  I'm so glad that my friend LW taught me how to ice cakes.  It wasn't flawless (I should have made more icing!), but it was better than I had expected considering I haven't iced a layered cake in a good while now.  It didn't take me too long to ice the whole thing and it was actually fun.  Usually when I ice cakes, I'm so nervous and constantly hold my breath.  This time I really enjoyed myself because I felt like I knew what I was doing.

Then I finished it all off with some rainbow skittles and mini-marshmallows.

Honestly, the most difficult thing about making this cake was getting things done while managing Eulee.  B was nice enough to take the older kids out that day, but Eulee decided she didn't want to take good naps so I was stuck with a baby who loves to be held.  Let me just openly admit that I let her cry in her exersaucer while I iced and layered each color.  Gulp.  But I picked her up right after I got the top red layer on.  Eulee repaid me with a blowout though..."That's what you get for letting me cry in there, Mommy!"  Message received.

The day before I had actually made rainbow cupcakes, too.  They turned out beautifully this year with a new recipe, but they were even more time-consuming than the rainbow cake.

Since all the rainbow stuff was so labor intensive, I decided to simply purchase the pie for Pi Day.  There was just no way I could make the pie on top of everything else.

We spent the late afternoon and night at AJ's house celebrating all 3 of these occasions.  First the kids played while the adults chatted.  Then they did a St. Patrick's Day craft.  Then we had dinner (with a fruit rainbow) and the birthday cake.

We didn't tell anyone that the layers were rainbow-colored so when RJ cut into the cake and took out the first slice, everyone gasped.  It was SO neat!  It looked great against the white icing and everyone thought it was yummy.

Then the adults recited their pi digits.  AJ said about 10 digits.  Then I recited about 40 digits, which was a few more than RJ.  So all that was left was B....he didn't break his record of 200 digits, but he still managed to get 120 digits of pi out. RJ said he is going to start practicing January 2014 for next year's Pi Day because he didn't know how serious we were about the holiday.  He thought he'd have us with about 20 digits.  Little did he know!  Now he's on a mission.

This year's prize for the Pi Day winner was a dorky book called Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks.  RJ was so sad he didn't win.  He kept flipping through the book and laughing....so when we were about to leave I told him to just hang onto the book since I see AJ all the time.  He was so giddy about it!  I think we've found the perfect people to celebrate this holiday with...

On St. Patrick's Day, I made the kids green eggs and I had them paint rainbow toast with dyed milk on bread.  Everything came out so pretty!

The kids also had a little scavenger hunt to look for some green prizes.  I also made it look like their leprechaun trap was tripped.

The best part was that I dyed the toilet bowl water green in a few bathrooms.   The kids thought that the leprechaun had made their pee turn green!  It was so cute!  Elina doesn't really believe in leprechauns, but she thought it was fun to play along.

We hope that everyone had a nerdy Pi Day and a fun St. Patrick's Day, too!

My Mom's 60th

This past weekend my parents came in for a visit.  My mom's 60th birthday recently passed, so we wanted to do something special for her.  A was out of town for a wedding, so it was up to me and J to come up with  a plan.

On Saturday, I set up a spa day for her.  She got a nice deep tissue massage and a fancy pedicure.  My mom's standards are high and she expects a lot so I was nervous about sending her to my spa.  But she ended up loving everything about it!  I was so relieved--I mean, happy.  =)

Then on Sunday, J and I took her out to a fancy brunch...just the 3 of us!

It was odd to not have a child to stare at, but it was wonderful to participate in adult conversation.  Then we took my mom shopping wherever she wanted to go--minus all the eye-rolling, complaining, and sighing.  She was ecstatic!  Even though the rest of the crew tagged along at her last stop, she still ended up having a great time.  The three of us even all wore stripes to match...because we're that dorky.

That night we had a yummy sushi dinner and followed it up with some ice cream cake at home.

We all had such a great time hanging out with my mom.  She's funny, straightforward, and just so helpful but not too overbearing.  Plus, she always cooks and cleans when she visits.  Don't get me wrong though, the lady has her quirks...but for the most part she's pretty lovable.  I've definitely learned to appreciate her more and more as I get older.  Now I can understand why she does what she does (most of the time).  I just hope that one day I can be as helpful to my kids as she has been to me.  I hope my kids know that when I visit them while they still have young kids, I'll not only cook their favorite dishes, but I'll also do the laundry and scrub some toilets without being asked.  That's what MY mom does...and she rocks!

Happy 60th, Mom!  We love you!

Science Hat Day

Elina's school has an annual Science Hat Day Parade.  At first I was confused...what's a science hat?  I don't get it.

Well, every child in the school gets a science-related word.  Then each kid has to make a hat that conveys that word.  The kids could either use a pre-existing hat or make it out of something else.  On the day of the parade, each grade takes turns parading around the whole school to show off their hats.  The younger grades got animal words, such as frog or pig.  Second graders, like Elina, got some words that were more complicated such as woodland and boulder.  The higher grades had to use words that were so difficult to represent--evaporation, solution, produce.  It was amazing to see some of the creativity in the hats.  A lot of the kids were really proud of their work.

Elina came home with the word "sound."  Really??  I totally would have rocked "woodland" and made it adorable.  I can see it in my head...a forest with some cute critters all around.  But sound??  Yikes.  B and I wanted to maybe draw big ears on the hat...I thought maybe we could use a baseball cap and stick a bunch of noisy things on it.  Elina had her own ideas.  After all, this is Elina.  What was I thinking?  So we listened to her ideas and helped her make the hat that she really wanted.

First she didn't want to use a pre-existing hat.  She didn't think that would be creative enough.  So she started by making a wide band that wrapped around her head.  Then she wrote the word "sound" out in block letters by herself.  The word came out nicely.  I was thoroughly impressed.  Then she drew and cut out big musical notes to stick on.  She also drew a sound icon.  (FYI, Elina says that this is her "new smile.")

Then she asked for help to dangle bells on the sides of the hat so that she would make noise when she walked.  We even glued on a little maraca for good measure.  Lastly, she drew and cut out a pair of hands that were "clapping."

In the end, the hat was really cute.  But most importantly, it was all her.  She was only one out of three who did not use a pre-existing hat in a class of 22.  I thought that was impressive.

After the parade, the 2nd grade class decided to hand out their 200 point AR trophies.  For those of you who don't know, AR stands for Accelerated Reader.  It's a reading program implemented in a lot of schools these days.  Every book is worth a certain number of points.  After you read a book, you take a test.  Based on how well you do, you earn points.  If you reach 75 points, you are invited to the Principal's ice cream social at the end of the year.  If you earn 200, you get a gold trophy with your name on it.  After 6-7 months of reading, Elina finally got her trophy!  She was so excited and we were so proud of her!  So far only less than 10 people have received a trophy.  Her hard work really paid off.  She and her friend GR are the first two in their class to reach 200 points.  Go, Elina!

What a great day for Elina!

A Few Fun Activities

I have to admit that ever since Eulee joined our family, I have not been a really fun mom.  I haven't really thought about crafts and activities for the kids like I used to.  I just haven't had the extra energy.

But now that Eulee can sleep pretty well at night and takes decent naps during the day, I have been able to setup activities and crafts for Eli and Evie.  It has been SO nice to feel somewhat normal again.  And it's been nice to spend time doing activities with Evie on the days that Eli is at school.  Now I can work with her on her ABCs, too.  She almost knows all 26!

Here are a few things we've been up to--

1. Magic Milk: This is AH-mazing and super easy to set up!  What more could I ask for?  You pour some milk into a shallow bowl, put a few drops of food coloring in randomly, then hand your kid a toothpick dipped in soap...then watch the magic happen!  Eli and Evie both had their mouths open when they saw the results.  They kept saying, "Whoa!"  It was so neat to watch the soap break the surface tension like that.  Even I was in awe.

(I'm whispering in the videos because I had lost my voice from a cold.)
Eli lost interest after he started mixing all the colors and ended up with brown milk.  Evie sat there for another 20 minutes just using her "magic toothpick."  Love it!

2. Recycled Rainbow: I brought out a bunch of crafty things (sequins, buttons, poms, etc.) that I had laying around and I had Evie sort them by color.  Then I drew a rainbow on a piece of paper with marker and had her glue the colored pieces in the right places.  I was thinking this would be a 2 day job for Evie, but she actually sat there for 30 minutes and completed the entire craft!  I was so proud of her for sitting there so quietly and for focusing for such a long period of time.  She was so proud of herself, too.  She had to show everyone her rainbow!

3. Disappearing ABCs: I wrote a few letters on a coffee filter in washable marker.  Then I gave Evie a dropper and a bowl of water.  I would say a letter and she would have to find it and then make it "disappear" by putting a few drops of water on the letter.  She loved how all the colors ended up blending together.  At the end, she even drew her own picture on another coffee filter and made it disappear.

It's been so much fun!!