Saturday Morning Biscuits

I love that Doug loves to cook and bake - he's really gotten into making biscuits from scratch.It's so cute how Eli is so interested in "helping." Love watching father and son have such fun moments on a Saturday morning!

Sweet Moment

Sunday morning. The usual hectic routine of getting both kids fed, diapered, dressed - myself fed, showered, dressed. Doug is on set up team this month, so he leaves early.

Analise was crying as I was rushing around the kitchen, getting her bottle ready to take to church. I asked Eli to go play with her (scary, as he could have taken that to mean, "go wrestle!"). I overheard him say, "Let's read a book," so of course I went over to the den....and there he was, "reading" her a book, saying sing-songy type phrases as he turned the pages. I actually took the time to grab the camera off the table and take a quick picture. So glad I did - this would be an easy moment to forget. And I want to remember it ALL.

Wordless Wednesday

Rolling Over

I need to post about little bit's milestones, so I don't forget! When I get back to working on her scrapbook, I can check the blog for these dates to make sure I get it right.

Earlier this week, Analise finally rolled over - consistently from back to tummy, and tummy to back! It was so fun seeing her figure that out. She loves rolling over - although, once she is on her tummy, she starts getting mad and doesn't always roll back over to her back, I have to go help her.

So, here is our documentation!

Getting started!

Getting some encouragement from big brother.

She was starting to roll over but was gripping her play mat, and Eli said, "no Analise!" and stopped her. I guess he didn't want her bringing her mat with her.

So, it didn't look like I was going to get a picture of the rolling over sequence.

Eli, on his own, decided to lay down by his sister. He can be really sweet to her!

Seriously one of my favorite pictures - I love how they are looking at each other!

Now she is trying to eat his fingers.

A little later, I discovered a caterpillar on our butterfly plant!

It was fun showing the caterpillar to Eli.

The azaleas were so pretty all in bloom - so I tried to get a good picture of Eli in the flowers. In this picture, I was trying to get him to put his hands in his pockets. When I asked him, "where are your pockets?," this is his response..."Pockets?"

Which then turned to, "peek a boo," so I admitted defeat and we went inside!

Oh, how I love my children!!!!!

water fun with our neighbor friends

I absolutely love having two neighbors so close with children so close in age to my own! And they are really cool, nice neighbors too!

After nap time (you know, that time of day that DRAGS, everyone gets kind of cranky, you tend to look at the clock a LOT waiting on Daddy to get home) - we headed over to Beth's backyard to play with the water table.

I tried a second time to make fishing poles, and this time they were much more successful. Used already cute dowel rods, stronger magnets, fishing twine, and packing tape to secure it all together. Maybe packing tape wasn't the best choice, but I was in a hurry, and it seemed workable at the time.

The magnets started falling off eventually, so we used some super glue to keep them going. The kids loved trying to "fish" for the letters.

Analise hung out on the blanket with Beckett.

See, she wasn't the only baby there!

Beth has an "official" water table, which they loved, but they really loved the big tub of water below. (camera strap got in the way of this picture). Notice the shirt was already off?

Eventually more clothes came off, and all three climbed in the big tub! They were having a blast.

Thanks for the fun times, friends!

The Great Pantry Clean Out of 2012

Seeing all these organization tips on Pinterest, and reading a few articles about organizing the pantry in recent magazines - I decided my pantry was quite unsatsifactory. When I say "read" I mean "skim while ignoring Caillou on the t.v." Anyway. My friend Angie loves to organize, and offered to help me while our kids played. This was one of those projects that I did need a little extra motivation to complete. I would stand in front of the pantry, look at all the stuff, sigh, and figure I would get to it later. So it was great having a good friend help attack it!

 I put a card table in the kitchen and we unloaded shelf by shelf. I couldn't get over how many of the baking items had expired. I then remembered, Doug went on a baking kick either when I was pregnant or when Eli was very small. So we had all kinds of flours, etc. - which had expired in the last year or two. Makes sense; since I've been staying home, I've done more of the cooking - and I like to bake, I just don't do it from scratch like Doug! So I hadn't been using a lot of that stuff.

I'm kicking myself I didn't take a "before" picture of the pantry, because it was a hot mess. Here is the After.....drum roll please.....

Ta-Da!!! Ok, it's not the best picture. But it will have to do.

Here are some changes: the square basket on the bottom shelf is full of Eli's snacks. Lately he has wanted to pick out his own snacks, and I don't want him choosing Doug's fiber bars. I put "our" snacks higher up in the baskets in the middle. We had cleaned out enough stuff the bread basket actually fit in the pantry instead of being on the kitchen island. The biggest change was getting the recycle bin out of the bottom of the pantry and getting rid of all the plastic grocery store bags. We put that out in the garage and just a few plastic bags in the holder in the bottom of the pantry. Now hopefully seeing the bags all the time in the garage will remind me to take them to the store with me to put in the special plastic bag recycle bin there. Moved the dog food container to the bottom. Put a plain white trashcan with a lid outside of the pantry, for recycables - when it gets too full, we can empty it in the big recycle bin outside the back door. Angie started in on the spices while I was feeding the baby. I never (well, rarely I should say) ever look through the spices to see what has expired. There were a lot that had expired, and some didn't have dates. I looked online, and on the manufacturer's website you can put in the date on the bottom of the jar, and the city where it was made, and it tells you the date when the spice was manufactured.....

Can you see that date? 1998. NINETY-EIGHT. We figured these must have just moved from either mine or Doug's (or both) apartments when we were single, to our "together" apartment, to here....and obviously weren't used very much!!!!

Good thing we can recyle all those bottles!

I have to say, I love having a newly re-arranged pantry with all non-expired foods in it! Big shout out of thanks to Angie for helping!!!

No one really understands

No one can really understand the relationship between the adoptive mom and the birth mom. Four and a half months in, I'm still learning - it's a gradual process. We didn't have the chance to get to know our birth mom ahead of time, like some adoptive moms do. We spent a few hours with her, and got a feel for her overall personality, but she had just given birth two days before, and was in an emotional place - so I know we didn't get the full picture.

Complete strangers will say to me, "how could she just give up her child?," with looks of disgust. Caring friends have innocently said the same thing. My first thoughts are, "you weren't there!" You weren't there to watch her cry as she held this precious little girl that she was placing in a new home. You weren't there when it was time to leave and she said, "make sure she knows I love her." I wasn't there whenever she found out she was pregnant and made the decision to place her child for adoption. I WAS there when she said she didn't believe in abortion, something we of course are eternally grateful for.

I don't know all her reasons, what affected her decision making process. I know she is young. And has two other children, very close in age. I know she lives with her mother and step-father, and doesn't work. I don't know the relationship between her and A's birth father - I know he has seen pictures, and she sent me a picture of him on my phone so we know what he looks like - but I'm under the impression they are not together, and haven't been for a while.

I think it's kind of funny when people are surprised we have so much contact with birth mom. Today's open adoptions are very different from how it all "used to be" years ago. She CHOOSE us as a family for her baby, we met and talked with her. She said she wanted to see lots of pictures, so I do my best to uphold my end of the bargain (which let's face it, sharing pictures is no hardship for my camera obsessed self!). A has a facebook page solely for the purpose of communicating with her birth mom; I tend to post pictures on it about once a week. T is always grateful and makes lots of comments. I've noticed she doesn't initiate asking for pictures, or ask questions about her - but when I post things, she always comments, and sometimes asks questions. She says things like, "that makes me so happy to see she is happy," and "love you guys!," and "you're taking such good care of her and I love you for that." I think she tries to not be intrusive, but I'm sure she wants to know how A is doing. And I guess I want her to know too, so she knows she made a good decision about choosing our family, so she knows this baby is LOVED beyond measure, so she can have peace.

I think about her almost everyday -how can I not? I see T's face everytime I look at my daughter. I wonder what kind of personality, hobbies, traits that she has that A might inherit. I study T's facebook page, and have gleaned some information about her homelife and personal life - but of course I want to know more. But I also don't want to be too intrusive. It's a delicate balance, one I'm still learning about. I'm sure will be learning about for years!

I hear as time goes on, contact with the birth mother fades. I can see that. I wonder if she will want to meet A one day, and I'm ok with that - but nervous too. I do want A to meet her half brothers, and have a relationship with them, if she wants. And, she can have a relationship with T too - it will be up to her, really. Up to Analise, I mean. I've heard of some birth moms who have had NO contact with their adoptive families, and the adoptive families are a little sad. I would be too. I'm glad we've had contact with T. I'm glad we've been able to give her (hopefully) some kind of peace of mind that her baby is safe. Loved. Happy. And is now our baby girl.

I can't think of a way to wrap up this post - but baby A is helping me, because she has woken up and is crying so I need to go take care of her! As usual, thanks for reading this post and sharing in a piece of my heart!

Rainy day project FAIL

Some days, I have too many expectations of what all I can accomplish in a day. For instance, unloading AND loading the dishwasher. Yeah, having two little ones makes it difficult to get most anything "done" these days! Well, it's been raining lately, so we are cooped up in the house. I saw this cute idea on Pinterest about having your child fish for magnetic letters, putting the letters in the bathtub with water. Now, I must say, I used to do fishing all the time when I was doing speech therapy - in fact, we did all kinds of creative stuff while in therapy! But for some reason I forget to try these things with my own child. Anyway.

I figured I could get E set up with fishing, and that would keep him busy while I did some house stuff. I found a few extra magnets in my craft room stash, some ribbon, hot glue, and got a stick from outside.

I even took a picture of my supplies!

I hot glued the ribbon to the stick, and wrapped some around the sides of the magents (put two together) and hot glued that as well.

I put some water in an ice bucket, and put the magnetic letters in it.

We sat down to play. Well, the stick was too long. And the magnets were not strong enough to get the letters out of the water. I put the magnets on the floor, thought we would try it that way. Nope, didn't work that way either.

I told Eli that we would just have to try it again later, when mommmy could find some stronger magnets (and use a shorter stick, and maybe wait 6 months for his motor skills to improve so he could actually do this game alone).

So, just wanted to post that sometimes, we have ideas, we try them - and they fail. But it's ok. It's all about trying, and learning from our mistakes. All that cliche stuff - it's true.

And, I DID get a few things on my to-do list done that day - just not as many as I had hoped - and that's ok too. 

Planting

I've been itching to get some new plants planted in the front yard - but not quite ready to do it ALL just yet. We picked up a few plants to put in our big flower pot in front of the garage, and some for a smaller container near the front porch. I thought E would enjoy getting involved in the planting process - afterall, dirt is involved!

Of course Ms. A was there to supervise the process.

Putting in the dirt. I have to say, I was proud of myself that I remembered to put a hole in the bottom of this red metal container. I got this at a garage sale a while back, and always wanted to plant something in it but it's just been sitting on the front porch!

To be honest, Eli really didn't want to mess with the plant. I kind of "encouraged" him because I wanted a picture of the sequence of planting! He would much rather just dig up dirt!

Finished product in the front yard. E actually picked out these flowers at the Home Depot, so hope they enjoy their spot in the yard (not sure what kind of sun they need!).

Eli really enjoyed pouring dirt ON the flowers.

Yay Mommy, more dirt!

I decided to plant these three plants together - I love vine-y type flowers, and combinations of flowers - so am hoping these three get along just fine in the flower pot!

Ended our planting time with blowing bubbles - or attempting to - got one of those spill proof tumblers,and not all that impressed. Or maybe it's the bubble juice. We are picky about our bubbles around here!!

almost spring play time

Since winter barely visited us this year, we've been enjoying the weather outside lately. There's only so many cartoons one can watch, and trains one can play with - so we go outside pretty much everyday!

Sidewalk chalk is always a winner.

Sometimes in the afternoons when we are outside, I think A would rather be napping....

Eli loves to walk this scooter thing around. Sometimes he will sit on it and scoot, but usually he just "walks" it. Like the chalk on his rear?!

She enjoys sitting in the swing, but, we can't push it too much.

Wheeeee!

Check us out! (but please pretend not to notice the lack of mulch behind them).

Trying out sidewalk crayons today.

I drew an atypical hop scotch - E loved jumping on the squares and counting, and made mommy do that a few times too.

Looking quite serious once again.

Check out my dirty hand!!! Good thing this sidewalk crayon stuff washes off easily!