School Easter Egg Hunt

The Friday before Cat's spring break, her class had an Easter Egg hunt. Her teacher told the class that each child could find 5 eggs for their basket. I'm proud of my eager little beaver, err, bunny. See her running so fast? She was the first one done. AND, she even counted to five correctly. (Turns out, the excitement of an Eater Egg hunt makes many 4 and 5 year olds forget how to count to five.)



Cat's teacher hid a few extras for younger siblings. But Jack didn't care at all about the Easter Eggs. Why would you want a plastic toy with candy inside when there's mulch to play with?

All done!

General Conference is coming up!

I try to keep this blog about the kids, but this post is a little more about me...

I LOVE General Conference. It just gives me a boost. I love seeing and hearing the leaders of our Church. I love being immersed in the Spirit. I feel renewed, and reminded of the things I need to be doing. But of course, it can be challenging to get as much out of Conference as I'd like to with little ones to keep happy and content and quiet. We've tried lots of things, and I don't have any great secrets, but this year I'm adding a new technique to the mix.


For several months, I've ripped out the pages from The Friend magazine that I thought would be useful for future FHEs or stay-quiet-activities, including the coloring pages. So I decided to laminate all of the coloring pages and a few of the simple activity pages, and I'll give a couple at a time to Cat during each session of General Conference along with a bunch of dry erase markers. Hopefully this will help her be happy and quiet (if not exactly reverent) so that I can listen and enjoy Conference a little more.

The trick will be policing Jack when it comes to the dry erase markers. Because this is what he did last time he got one in his hand, and Cat wouldn't let him have enough coloring space on the white board by the computer.

(Side note: Notice the awesome crown molding that Ben recently finished putting up! We love it! And, yes, that is the wall we just painted a couple of months ago.)

1 Month Old!

I can't believe it's been a month already. As weird as it sounds, it is hard to remember what it was like before Eliza was born.

Cat and Jack are adjusting wonderfully to life with their baby sis. We are very proud of Jack, especially, for doing much less throwing things at Eliza. We let him "hold" her for the first time last week and he had the biggest smile on his face. He loves holding her now and we just have to make sure he doesn't try to do it on his own!

Our Favorite Things (or, current obsessions)

Jack: anything that makes a variation of the sound, "vroom." This includes helicopters, busses, trucks, and tractors, but his favorites are trains and cars. He recently discovered "Thomas the Train" and now asks for "choo choo" about 300 times a day, and loves it when I sing him one of the songs from the video we have. Those songs have become his lullabies of choice at naptime and bedtime too.

He loves to zoom around our house, mostly on our tile hallway/motor speedway on his knees, with a toy car/train/tractor/truck/helicopter/bus in each hand. He's logged so many miles on some of them recently, that apparently they needed to be laundered. This is what I found in our dirty clothes hamper this morning:


Cat: The Sound of Music. I first started playing the CD for her in the car a few weeks ago because I thought she'd like "My Favorite Things," and she was hooked immediately. I was really proud of her that as soon as she heard Julie Andrews' voice, she said, "That's Mary Poppins!" Atta girl!

Last week I let her watch the first half of the movie, and she loved it too. She now asks to watch it several times a day, and she's learning the songs. This was the kids tonight after dinner and baths:

(Yes, of course she's wearing a leotard and tutu. What else would you sleep in??)

To view Cat's debut in the part of Maria, click here.

St. Patrick's Day Festivity

Yes, we only had a single "festivity" for St. Patrick's Day. I haven't been up for the usual "festivities" recently, but at least one is better than nothing.

Our festivity consisted of making Oreo-type cookies and dying the center frosting green. (I wanted to also flavor the frosting with mint extract, but I didn't have any. So we had green vanilla-flavored frosting.) They were delicious, and I was glad that we did something St. Patrick's Day-ish!


Cat's day was a bit more exciting... a leprechaun visited her school, and although her class chased it all over the school, they couldn't catch the little booger! And by the time they got back to their classroom, he had made a huge mess of everything. But at least he left some "plastic gold" behind, and an awesome new necklace. Maybe they'll catch him next year!

Good Siblings Are: Helpful

Cat has been begging to feed Eliza, so when it was time for us to try out giving her a bottle, we let Cat do the honors. She did a wonderful job, and lasted through almost the entire feeding before getting bored.


Jack was very helpful while Eliza was eating too. He protected her paci from evil paci-snatchers.

Stylin'

You know, there is no denying that Cat has a style all her own. She's gone through a few spurts where she wears these cowboy boots every day for 1-2 weeks straight. Here she is in December, when in the same week she wore the boots with skirts, shorts, and pants.


I get less excited when Cat has free reign of her closet and puts together her own outfits. This is what she came up with on Saturday, and it's a pretty good example of her very favorite ensembles: pink, twirly, and layered. She was wearing that pink striped cardigan on top of everything for most of the morning, then decided to tie it around her waist.


I shouldn't leave Jack out, though. This is what he wore all day on Saturday. Daddy helped with the clothes, but Jack added the hat all by himself.


Maybe my kids will match one day, without me having to actually choose their clothes for them. But, they're only young once, right?

Pre-Baby

You may or may not have noticed that before Eliza was born, I didn't post anything for several weeks. This wasn't so much a deliberate decision, or a result of a lack of interesting things going on in our family, but mostly just because I kept thinking, "I'll blog about that later..." and later never came around. But I've decided it's finally time to do a little catch-up. Here's a glimpse of the 6 weeks or so before Eliza was born.

Rainy Day Fun

We needed some simple entertainment during a very rainy afternoon in January, so the kids decorated this big box we'd received late Christmas presents in. Then they used it as a puppet theater and dog house/play house. It actually lasted for several days before it somehow ended up in the outside trash can.



Painting

Cat stayed up late with us one Saturday night while we painted our hallway. She saw it as an opportunity to practice her spelling.



Happy Birthday to Me!

The best part of any birthday celebration: CAKE!



Valentine's Day

We kept our Valentine's tradition of a family fondue dinner this year, but made it even simpler by having a main course of alfredo sauce with various dippers (French bread, grilled chicken, broccoli, penne pasta.) Of course we had chocolate with marshmallows, pretzels, strawberries, and bananas for dessert. Not the healthiest dinner, but we all loved it!



Random

We had this gargantuan strawberry in a quart I bought at the grocery store. I thought it was worth documenting. This is me holding it...



That about does it.
Thanks for joining me on a little trip down memory lane.

My New BFF: Dr. Thompson

I have seen our pediatrician more since Eliza was born than I have any of my friends in town.

In less than a week, each of my three children has been to the pediatrician for a sick visit. I joked with him about it today and he said it's normal when you have 3 kids. I asked him if I could get my own parking spot. (He didn't make any promises, but I'm sure that when we have #4, I'll have some more bargaining power. Not that I'm making any announcements about a #4.)

By the way, the kids are fine. We have been battling colds and the fun side-ailments that come along with colds in kids, but overall we're hanging in there. At least spring is arriving in our neck of the woods!

Second Week

We are in Eliza's second week now, and slowly getting things figured out. Thankfully, Eliza does a whole lot of this:

Which we are very thankful for! She has slept in every room of the house, usually in her bouncy seat. Today she slept in the Baby Bjorn with Ben as they spent some time playing outside.

She was awake for a few minutes today, so Cat and I thought it would be fun to put all the baby dolls together. (The one on the far right was mine when I was a little girl. Different dress, though.)

We've had some fun experiences with the older siblings since we brought Eliza home last week. Here are a few highlights...

• When we brought Eliza home from the hospital she was sleeping in her carseat and Cat immediately brought her another blanket, a big pink teddy bear, and a binky leash.
• Cat asked me one morning, in one breath, "Why are there babies? And why do they come out of Mommy's leg? And why do they sleep in Mommy and Daddy's room? And why do they drink Mommy's milk?"
  
• Eliza has slept through vacuuming (in the same room), the keyboard, the television, and Cat and Jack!
  
• Cat organized Eliza's diapers by which Sesame Street characters were depicted on the front.
• Jack did a lot of hitting Eliza and throwing things at her for the first few days, but he really doesn't do that any more. Now he usually sits on her, which is actually a sign of affection for him. (Whenever Ben or I am laying down on the floor, Jack likes to sit on us. Most of the time, he sits on my face. Thankfully, he hasn't sat on Eliza's face. Yet.)
  
• When I asked Jack to bring me a baby diaper so that I could change Eliza, he brought me a big container of wipes, a diaper, another diaper, another diaper, another diaper, a pacifier, another pacifier, and a bulb syringe.
• Cat and Jack discovered lots of new uses for a breast pump.
  

The Third Musketeer

We're sure to have plenty of new adventures with this little one around! Meet the next adventurer:

Eliza!

Eliza arrived a full 11 days early, catching us all by surprise. She has been a wonderful addition to our family already and it's great to see Cat and Jack interacting with their new sibling.

Our wonderful Mema took care of Cat and Jack while we were in the hospital with Eliza. Their visit to meet Eliza is a pretty good indicator of their respective levels of interest, I think. Cat wanted to hold her immediately, and did so for several minutes. Jack took a look at her, said "baby," then tried to eat Mommy's dinner. We managed to snap this picture before the chaos really erupted...


While Mema enjoyed some baby time, Jack discovered that the bassinet was on casters!! And then Cat couldn't be outdone, so they both went as wild as we could tolerate before Mema took them home.

That's pretty much been how things have gone since we got home, too. We cycle through periods of interest and uninterest. Usually longer periods of interest on the part of Cat, and longer periods of uninterest on the part of Jack. But overall, we're adjusting well and we are so very thankful that Eliza is a healthy, happy baby.