Beach time and Park time

Last weekend we headed to the beach after Mass on Sunday for some sunshine and salt water. The girls all love the water and are always looking for a new adventure, whether it's cavorting in the waves, hunting for sea creatures, or constructing a sand structure, generally a castle.

I enjoy all those things (and more!), but I also love to just soak up the sun and read or take a nap (it doesn't happen when you go to the beach with little kids). I did get a few minutes to catch some rays when Chris took the girls on a short walk down the beach a little ways. They soon returned and joined me for exactly 6 seconds, during which Chris snapped these shots.


the last one CRACKS ME UP! My torso and Ava's rear create quite a sight. bahahahaha!

We often go for family walks in the evening after dinner and stop at various parks in our general area. Chris snapped some cute pictures of the girls tackling and conquering some challenging playground structures.


Ava is currently now going down slides of all kinds by herself fairly confidently. She still goes through phases though where she will sit down at the top and then decide she doesn't actually want to go down and come back down the stairs, but most times, she plunks herself down and sails down, hair static, and a big grin on her little face.


Kayla and Elise love the teeter totter and Kayla is finally big enough to push off and make it go herself. Elise can do it if Kayla is at the other end, doing the brunt of the leg work.


I have no doubt that even with large amounts of sunscreen, we will all be quite tan by the end of the summer, because we are outdoors a whole heck of a lot. Father's Day weekend is no exception- just wait and see....

Happy 3rd Birthday, Elise!

Dear Elise,

You are 3 years old, and I am a bit late writing this to you since your birthday was more than a week ago. As I reflect on the past 3 years and your womb-time, I am completely in awe on the one hand and laughing to myself on the other hand. 3 years ago on the day of your birth, you made your grand entrance and you made it quickly. It was as if you were saying, " Here I am!!! Are you ready for me, world?" And you haven't stopped saying it. You don't say it in those exact words, but each day you say it in new ways with your personality and your actions. Each day you surprise us with your silly, often loud, and joyful antics.

You remind me of myself in many ways. I remember my own mother telling me to "be more quiet and gentle like Our Lady" and I struggled with it and still do. I am impulsive and headstrong. I am excitable and expressive and not in a quiet, controlled way, but in a big loud way. I am forcefully passionate. And I see many of these qualities in you even at this young age. This great emotion has potential to be both a great strength and a great weakness.

Already you are proving that point. At times, you sit, tense and rigid, unable to control your emotions enough to even move. We speak to you gently and direct you step by step to breathe, and let go of the emotions that seem to hold you captive at times. At other times, your passionate emotions burst forth in the form of impulsive hugs, smiles that reach from ear to ear and make your eyes squint, and giggles that bubble out from depths of the joy you hold inside.

You are by far my most cuddly kid. I never would have guessed because as a newborn, you weren't about the cuddles much at all. You rolled over early, you crawled early, you walked way early. It was like you had better places to be than hanging out in Mommy's arms all day. Apparently at around age 2 1/2 you realized that Mommy's arms are actually quite nice and very comforting when you are tired, cranky, or scared.

I admit that I often don't know just how to handle your extreme emotions. You have been waking up a lot at night and often have a hard time getting back to sleep on your own. Perhaps you are having nightmares, or perhaps you are just very disoriented, having woken up in the middle of a sleep cycle. Whatever the case, I often climb into bed with you and snuggle. Sometimes I hold your hand, and sometimes you rub my arm as you fall back asleep. Part of me is so tired and frustrated, but another part of me is embracing this period of extra snuggles.

But your emotions are also a true joy for us to experience. Daily you make us all smile with the funny things you say. You love to copy Kayla and often repeat things she says in a unique rendition of your own. You laugh at the silly voices Daddy makes, and you guffaw (yes, guffaw) when he tickles you. And the faces you make crack each and every one of us up right down to Ava. You scrunch up your nose at us, you stick your tongue out, you purse your lips, and you draw your lips in a pout, and you smile so that it feels like a ray of sun shining down on us.

You are our little monkey. You are our silly pants. You are our "Leesie". You are our princess. You are our pumkin. You are our cupcake. You are our little squirt.

More than anything, you are our daughter, our precious gift from God, our Elise Marianna.
Happy Birthday, Sweetheart! We can't wait to see what this next year holds with you!

OCD much?

I have OCD. Not necessarily about everything. I have a compartmentalizing sort of OCD, meaning certain things really bug me, while other things that really could bug me, don't.

Let me give you some examples. I have to have things in order. However, the order itself doesn't necessarily have to be really cut and dry and neat. I can't leave a huge stack of dishes in the sink for very long before I'm crazy, BUT my floors don't have to be sparkling clean every day of the week. The bookshelf that holds our DVD's and Kayla's books is rather haphazard-looking with books and DVD's thrown in every which way. BUT if any of those books/DVD's is on the floor, it drives me bonkers. I can have messes of papers and other things that need my attention, BUT they have to be stacked in a pile so that they aren't taking over my entire table or desk area. I don't always put my clothes back in the dresser/closet, BUT they have to be in a folded pile at the end of my bed.

Anyway, Kayla takes after me. She is, as most kids her age are, rather egotistical, but having OCD on top of that is making it difficult to teach her how to share and play with her sister. When she plays, everything has to be set up just so. If Elise touches any little toy it messes EVERYTHING up.

Having a touch of OCD makes group play rather difficult, but it DOES makes her awesome when it comes to amusing herself. She will take out her shoes (all the shoes we have ever had for her from birth until now) and arrange them in pairs and rows. It takes her forever. Then the shoes will "go for a trip" and she moves them all slowly a few inches ahead until they have arrived at their destination. She also likes to take the books out of her bookshelf and arrange them in rows. Sometimes she will end up sitting down and reading half of them and then she will continue putting them in rows columns. And it's not just shoes and books. Anything that there is more than a few of will get "organized". She found some of my sewing ribbon and fabrics the other day and organized them.

(You probably can't tell, but Elise is at the very bottom right corner of the picture, and she just messed up some of Kayla's organized books.)


She's also obsessed with things being in the right place. The other day we were at the store, and she grabbed something off a rack, and I told her we needed to put it back. I did not put it back in the exact place she took it from, and she insisted on putting in back exactly where she had found it. Someone else had put something back in the wrong place, and she corrected their mistake too, found the matching items and put them where they belonged.

She's a funny kid. But we are still working on sharing with Elise. Elise doesn't seem to care if EVERYTHING is completely out of order as long as you are smiling back at her. She's a funny kid too.

8 months!

Elise is now 8 months old and a total ham for the camera. There's really not much new to say in regards to her. She is still eating tons of food; she still nurses some and eats two LARGE solid meals a day. She is standing up on her own all the time now. She is crawling every where and getting into everything. Old news. I feel like she has been doing that her whole life. She is a sweet little baby, but active as can be. I guess I should have figured considering she just about ruptured my womb from the inside with her kicking and punching. ;)

Isn't she adorable?

This shows you a comparison between Kayla and Elise. Kayla is nearly 2 1/2.

I often say "Look at her. She's standing, Kayla." Kayla has picked up on this and the other day she was so excited to report to me that her baby was standing! Here is a picture of the "proud Mama" and her "standing" baby.

B is for baby, C is for cute...

One of the things I love most about my life right now is the fact that I get to be home with my girls. It is absolutely hilarious and incredibly sweet at the same time, to watch Kayla play with her baby doll.

Recently, she piled just about everything but the kitchen sink in Elise's car seat on top of her baby doll. She had paper, library books, toys, markers; you name it, it was probably there. That poor baby doll was smothered, but I think she was trying to be a good mom and give her baby lots of entertainment while she sat in her boring old car seat. :P

We went on a little walk around the area the other night as a family and I strapped Elise on in the Bjorn. Kayla wanted her baby strapped to her as well (I did this one other time using a scarf of mine because she and Lily were fighting over the one available baby stroller at the time). The picture below is adorable, but doesn't even do justice to how cute she was in real life, walking around with her baby on front.

Another of my favorite "Kayla-isms" is her current use of the following: "Maybe." "Actually." and "Thinkin' bout it." Let me give you an example. Kayla has been keeping her diapers dry during naps and even through the night. She no longer gets a treat for using the toilet, but I have started giving her a treat now that she is apparently able to hold her potty through her sleeping periods of the day/night. The other day when she woke up from a nap dry, I asked if she wanted fruit snacks or candy for her treat. A typical response here would be "thinkin' bout it." Eventually she would add, "fuit snacks, actually". Later when she's finished her little treat, she might look up at me with those questioning eyes and plead, "Tayla doh outside, maybe." (She turns a lot of letter sounds into "t's" and "d's" when she talks). Maybe is a word she uses when she wants something and is basically trying to ask for it, though she says it like a statement. "Kayla cracker, maybe." Actually is used when she is trying to get a point across. This is also said as a statement (and rightly so). "Kayla just sittin' here, actually."

Besides the letter C being for "cute", it is also the beginning of many other words that Kayla and I have been exploring the last few days. We studied a Saint for letter C; Saint Cecilia who is also Kayla's patron Saint (Kayla Cecilia).

We also baked up a batch of German cookies with jam in the middle. YUM!

And we painted a pretty picture of some cookies as well.

Our dinner last night was laden with letter C as well. I planned to make Chicken Casserole because it started with C, but I promise that all the rest was just coincidental. The only veggies I had left in the freezer were peas and carrots. And Chris served chocolate milk in lieu of our normal white milk...plus there was even cream of chicken soup and celery in the chicken casserole. CRAZY!

Oodles of Noodles!

The other day I was feeling particularly creative plus Kayla was having lots of fun so we just went from one project to the next. After painting with apples, we used food coloring to dye some penne pasta noodles to make into a necklace.

First Kayla put some noodles into two separate zip-top bags (so we could have two colors on her necklace).

Next I poured a couple drops of food coloring into the bags and closed the top.

Then I let her shake the bag all around to coat the noodles with the food coloring.

We had to let them dry for an hour or two. Then the next step was to string them onto the necklace. I just cut off a thin fabric, but yarn would probably work well since it's thinner and the little hands might have a better chance of stringing the noodles on themselves. I had to help Kayla get the noodle on and then she pulled it down the string.

The OCD in me wanted to show her patterns and make her do yellow, red, yellow, red, but she's still a bit young for that, and I wanted it to be HER design not mine. There will be plenty of time to work on patterns and make more necklaces without being a control-freak Mom the first time we attempt one. :)

And here is the final product! She chose the colors: red and yellow which just so happen to be the colors of MY two favorite football teams, the USC Trojans and the San Francisco 49ers! Raising her right! :)

And don't you worry, Christopher. I've got ideas to help them become little Bengals fans too...I just don't have black and orange food coloring. :)

P.S. this project isn't just popular with girls. The boys like it too (in my experience as a classroom teacher) because the necklaces aren't particularly feminine looking so they enjoy making them as well. And if you've got an ULTRA masculine boy, he can make Mom or Grandma a necklace instead...just a thought.

P.P.S. We used whole wheat penne, but the colors show up more vibrantly on the regular pasta. We just only had whole wheat on hand.

June updates

A lot has been going on here this month. We have been traveling, the girls have been tackling and conquering milestones, we will be moving, and Chris and I have both been working like crazy. He has been busy with Pledge Drive at work and I have been cooking up a storm recently and packing, cleaning, and packing some more.

But let's show you the lighter of our lives, which is the crazy antics of our beautiful little girls.



If the guitar Chris is playing sounds weird and out of tune to you when you listen to this video, then there is a problem with our camera. Anyway I can guarantee that Chris is an amazing guitar player and that his guitar was in tune when I recorded this. So if it sounds funny, I'm sorry; just enjoy watching Kayla trying to be just like her talented Daddy.



Here is a video of Elise rolling over. Now that she's done it once, she wants to do it all the time.

Kayla's first cookie baking experience!

In retrospect, I realized that she is still probably a little young for making cookies with Mommy, but we had a fun time anyway!

First, we mixed the dry ingredients, and she taste-tested the flour! Yuck! The she helped me stir the dry ingredients and we got a good amount of it on the floor. haha, so far, so good. So we went on to the wet ingredients, and I got smart and just let her lick the spatula with the peanut butter on it while I threw the stuff in the bowl.

Next step was mixing it all using the beaters! She really liked that. And no, I am not a bad parent. I turned it off and unplugged it for the picture. ;)

And of course, we had to lick the beaters...oh wait, this is where we realized we'd done something wrong!! Here's a new lesson for me. Shortening goes bad. I did not know that. I especially did not realize it went bad after only a few months. Maybe we just got a bad batch. Anyway, I sent Kayla to play with her baby doll while I made a second batch of cookies that would taste GOOD! and THEN I let her have some beaters to lick!

And the last part of cookie making is....EATING the cookies!!

YUM YUM YUM!