I love Spring Break

I have so much more time to do things when I don't have to work! Amazing. Even having that extra hour between the time I would be leaving for work and the time the kids go down for a nap when I'm home is like a crucial hour. That's the hour where projects get finished instead of halfway started and then never returned to again because I get home from work and then go right on with cooking dinner, feeding hungry mouths, cleaning up, bathing, bedding, etc.
Like this project. Which...alright, I admit, I actually finished like a couple of weeks ago, but the point is I have time to blog about it. That's the important part.
So I have to give a shout-out to my good friend Katie, who's creative mind I dip into everytime I look at her blog, hippos and dinosaurs. That's where most of the inspiration from this came from. She's making a quiet book out of felt for her kids, but I'm not so good with my sewing machine, so I thought, I could make it with paper! Well...yes, I made it, but I'm not so sure how kid proof it will be. It looks so darned cute, though. I still have to find a stapler that will clamp this sucker together, but other than that, it's been sitting on our counter waiting to be put together so she can use it on Sunday.








Instead of doing the whole alphabet, I just made a page for each letter of her name. Hopefully this will be something she will actually use while we are at church! Keeping them contained lately has been a challenge, but projects like this keep me motivated to...not give up. :-)

I have to say, though, that the one I will be making for Linus will very likely be made out of felt like Katie's, which means I will have to conquer my sewing machine once and for all and just do it. This paper book wouldn't last two seconds with Linus. I left it a little too close to the end of the counter the other day and of course Linus's "trouble" radar went off and he went straight for it. I was on to him the second I saw him head that direction, but in the two mili-seconds it took for him to take it off the counter, he was already attempting to yank some magnets off and pull the laminate apart by the time I got to him. So, dear felt and thread...thou shalt meet thy match, and be conquered.

Been hangin' around

Better post our St. Patrick's Day shenanigans before March is over!



Those pesky leprechauns turned our pancake dinner green. Chloe and Linus spent the rest of the evening turning over every corner in the house looking for where they ran off to. Initially I think Chloe was kind of freaked out (I haven't done much with St. P's day in the past, so this was a new thing)- I got all excited and announced when things had mysteriously turned green (like our apples for the pancakes, pictured here) and Chloe got all startled and looked nervous like the leprechauns were going to come out and turn her green too, but once Linus got into it, her fear disappeared and they demanded to know what they looked like. I then had to pull up some cartoon images of what a leprechaun looked like on google to show them (had to put the "cartoon" part in the search engine, otherwise images from that weird horror movie about leprechauns would pop up...and would probably not aide in Chloe's nerves at all). Linus loved the pancakes (everything was green, pancakes, apples, and whipped cream...the leprechauns missed the OJ, though, oops...), Chloe took some convincing that they tasted the same, as you can see.

A couple of weekends ago, Craig washed the car with the kids. They had a blast, and I think they dumped more water than actually got on the car.

We're on Spring Break now, which has and will include hanging around the house, playing outside and at the park when it's warm, baking cookies, organizing those disaster corners of our house, making real meals every night, spending a night in Denver with my parents, going to the zoo, and then general conference this weekend (where leaders of our church speak to the entire worldwide congregation, always a much needed spiritual rocket-boost for me). Woot!

Thirdborn

Our little blessing. In so many ways. Our struggles to get her here were well worth the wait and we can say that from the absolute bottom of our hearts. Odell is a treasure to have in our home and is just cherished from head to toe by all her family members.
Every morning she wakes up gurgling and cooing. She'll lay there doing so for as long as it takes to get the other two ready for the day and sometimes it's a while before I get in her room to get her changed for the day. The second I come into view her little eyes squint up with a bright smile and her entire body starts flailing with excitement. She continues to gurgle and coo while I change her out of her pajamas and into some clean clothes, occasionally grabbing her toes and trying to gnaw on them a bit or attempting to roll over on the changing pad (she's getting to be a real pro at that, it's about time!!) so she can better grab at the wipes and diapers. After I nurse her (still clinging on after 7 months, but I unfortunately I don't think I'm going to last much longer, not being able to pump at school has put a damper in my supply ever since Christmas- I'm taking medication so I can cling on at least until flu season is over and out and we'll see where we are after that), she eats a heaping bowl of rice cereal with applesauce. She LOVES eating "real" food. I put her in her high chair, which is still too big for her, and she sits there and kicks her legs back and forth until I get her bib on and get her ready- by then she's about hyperventilating with heavy breathing and smacking lips waiting for that spoon to go from the bowl to her mouth. The rest of the morning is followed with lots of gabbing (another new talent she's picked up), lots of rolling back and forth and back and forth on the floor, and a nap. She puts up with almost everything Linus and Chl-...no, just Linus....throws at her (unfortunately I don't mean that metaphorically so much...). When I get home from work, she gets nursed again, rolls some more, gabs some more, eats some more, sits happily in our laps when we read books to the kids and read scriptures with them before bed, and goes to sleep with them around 7 p.m. And sleeps through the night with no problems. Angel baby.
Things I love about Odell:

• I love it when I hold her close and she puts her hands on my face. She doesn't really squeeze or grab, she just wants to feel my face. She stares at me intently and goos and gabbles sometimes, but I just love it. I will miss that when she's older.
  
• She's figured out how to make her "d" sound now and she sounds so cute when she starts babbling with "da-da-da-da-da". She loves to make herself known when we're sitting at the dinner table and she's in her high chair.
  
• She really likes music. I used think that was just parents being overzealous when they said their babies liked to listen to music, because my other two could really care less until they were about 18 monts old if music was on or not, but Odell just smiles and kicks around when I have music on (more so than usual). And she loves it when I sing. She will stop what she's doing and just stare at me, then flash me a HUGE smile and coo at me loudly, encouraging me on. I've actually sung to her before bed, which I haven't done as much with me other two. It brings a nice spirit to our home.
  
• Sometimes she doesn't go to sleep right away and will cry for a little while, but if I catch her right as she's about to fall asleep, I sneak in her room, wrap her up in her blankets and rock her to sleep in my arms with the lights off. I cherish every moment of just holding her sleeping body in my arms and listening to her breathing and watch her dim, cuddled up form in my lap.
• She is so ticklish. On her tummy, under her arms, on her legs, on her toes and feet, she just giggles and giggles. It really is hard to resist sometimes.
  

I have to say that I already miss her being a newborn. Like way more than the other two. It's harder to spend as much time with her as I did the other two while they were that age. And you know how the squeeky wheel gets the greese? Well she never squeeks...so sometimes I put her to bed at the end of the day and go...oh, hi Odell...I barely remember getting you out of bed this morning, where did the time go?? But we are extremely blessed and extremely grateful to have her in our home at all. This girl is going to move mountains one day and I'm so glad to be a part of it.

Secondborn

Remember what I said about the second child proving to you that what worked with the first won't work the second time around? Well this little two and a half year old is the reason for that statement. Our mornings go a little something like this:
6:15 a.m. The alarm hasn't even gone off yet. I hear a soft thump and little pitter patter of feet, then the door opening, then more pitter patter, closer now, and then:
"MOMMYYYYYYYYY!" in the loudest, hissing whisper he can fathom. "ARE YOU AWAKE?!!!"
"Mm-hmmm...."
"CAN I GET DRESSSSSSSSED?!?"
"...mmm...yeah, hun....*trying to think of something that will occupy him, safely, so I can buy a couple of more minutes*....hey bud, why don't you go find your Buzz toy?"
"BECAUSE I WANT TO GET DRESSSSSSSSED!" (every sentence starts with "because" or "probably" with him, can't tell you why...)
"Okay.....do you want to go play in the basement?" (last ditch effort, basement works every time).
"BECAUSE I WANT TO GET DRESSSSSSSSSED!"
"Okay okay....can you give Mommy just a couple of minutes?" (couldn't hurt to ask....)
"OKAY!!!!" he complies, then more pitter patter. Did that really just work? "I GO WAKE UP CHLOE!!!!!!"
"WHOA, hold up! I'm up, I'm up, let's go get dressed, bud!"
"Because I want to get my diaper changed!" he protests, at the door with his hand on the knob. I feel something like a policeman trying to talk a man out of pulling the trigger on his gun.
"Okay, okay, well just let Mommy do it, okay? Just take your hand off the door, don't go in there or you'll wake up-" too late. He barrells back into the room and starts yanking at the stiff dresser drawers, making an aweful creaking noise and banging them shut as I start to approach.
"I wanna wear green shirt!" he demands. Green shirt. His best friend in the whole world. Actually, this is green shirt #2, the first one got put away, so he latches on to another one. He even points it out in pictures like it's one of the family ("Mommy, Daddy, Chloe, Linus, Odell, aaaaannnnnd GREEN SHIRT!!!!"). Unfortuantely green shirt can only be worn once a week, so the other six days I have to come up with another way to convince him to wear something else. As queitly as I can, I pull out shirt after shirt desperately trying to convince him that the red shirt with the hood is super soft, here, feel it, or the grey striped one has buttons, look, or this one has a basketball on it, isn't that cool? Finally, something clicks and he eventually chooses another one. He barrells back out of the room, Chloe thankfully slept through it all, and I collect the rest of his clothing and head downstairs. We get his diaper changed after about ten minutes of negotiating. "I want to take off my pants! Where's my shoes? Where's my socks? No, I want to lie down MYSELF! I want to take off my diaper! I want to wipe! I want to put it back on!" and then, the kicker. "PROBABLY I DON'T WANT TO WEAR THESE PANTS!!!! NOT THESE ONES!!!" And I've had about enough. It's these pants or nothing, bud. But, ah, I don't actually say that outloud because I know exactly what he'll chose and it won't be the pants. So I collect him and the rest of the clothes up, carry him screaming into the basement where he can't be heard and we put the pants on, after which he immediately calms down and says "Oh. I like these pants!"
Breakfast is another ordeal, you can imagine, and the entire morning mostly revolves around him. It's not all bad, though, and in fact he is improving little by little. I've definitely found that the more calm I am about things, even if it takes longer to convince him to do what I ask, he eventually does it, but if I lose it, he loses it and kicks his heels in deep.
He and Chloe certainly have vivid imaginations and will come up with the most hairbrained games and situations that they act out. I love it. Mostly it involves them running around the house, averting and sometimes getting caught by "the bad guys" or "the monsters". Linus's favorite monster is one by the name of "Neenano". I have no idea where he heard that or where it comes from, but I often hear him in the other room, running around with Chloe until he exclaims at the top of his lungs "OH NOOOOO, CHLOE! IT'S .......... A ........... NNNNEEEENANO!!!!" He LOVES to eat. Every morning is constantly interrupted by a question about when snack time is or when lunch time is or can he have an orange or can he have some raisins. That is, until it's dinner time and then whatever we're having is "GROSS" until we manually shove it in his mouth and then it's the best thing he's ever had (remember the pants? See a pattern immerging here?).
What I love about Linus:

• When he cries, he's always up for a cuddle. That's usually how I calm him down is just kneeling down and opening up his arms and it doesn't matter what he was fussing about, he comes right over and colapses in my arms with racking sobs.
  
• He's very helpful sometimes. Sometimes when I don't need him to be, like when he discovers my dresser and unloads everything off of the top of it to bring to me. A lot of times I'll be making bread and I turn around and find little presents he's left on the counter for me, like my cell phone, my glasses, a necklace or two, some spare change, etc.
  
• Getting a BIG wet slobbery kiss before bed every night from him.
• When he says his prayers at night (that is, when he's not being silly about it and we have to start him over twenty times because he just wants to be a goof-off) and he quietly prays for everyone in the family and prays to be a good boy and listen to Mommy and Daddy. Sometimes that makes it all worth it.
  
• He loves to make me laugh, always a clown. One night I was getting them ready for bed and after he pulled his pants up, he pulled them halfway up his chest, then slumped down like an old man and began hobbling around the room with a silly grin on his face. I lost it and just started busting up laughing. What two year old walks around like an old man? I can see I'm going to have a tough time with him when he's a teenager...
• He's super smart. He talks a mile a minute, repeats anything you say (not always a good thing), and is learning things just about at pace with Chloe, who is two years older than him. Well...not quite at pace, she's starting to make some leaps and bounds herself, but as far as kinesthetic things, like fine/major motor skills stuff, he really excels (big surprise, right?). I'm told that juggerknaut speed he takes crashing into things every minute of every day will pay off on the football field one day. :-)
• He. Is. A. Boy. Love little boys, and they will grow up to be good men.
  

Firstborn

A girl at church told me a while ago after the primary program, after lavishing on how cute Chloe is, that she looks like a little secretary with those glasses on.
But come on...she is pretty cute in them isn't she? :-) Wherever we go when it's the two of us, people stop and giggle at her and then look at me and exclaim about how she looks just like a mini-version of me. And she does!
It's really fascinating to watch her grow and develop. I think every set of parents has a unique relationship with the oldest child in the family because they get to go through everything first (...then the second one comes along and proves to you that just because it worked with the first child doesn't mean it will work with the second...). Sometimes she will do or learn something and I think "Oh my gosh, I have a genius child, no other kid her age can do that!" and then other times she will get together with a group of friends and I come home and think "She will never be ready for the world, all of those kids could do X and Chloe's not even close to learning how to do that!". But most of the time? Most of the time we are just friends, and I don't care if she can write her alphabet forwards and backwards or recite the Declaration of Independence verbatim, I'm just glad to be around her and she's glad to be around me. I hear that the ages of 4-10 or 11 (preteen) are the golden years of childhood because they are not teenagers yet, they can do most things like going potty and getting a drink of water, etc. by themselves, and they still like to be around their parents. Chloe's graduated into these golden years with flying colors and she is such a help around the house most of the time.
Socially she is doing very well. She's in a playgroup with a few other moms and their four year olds as far as I know she does a good job with the other kids and enjoys it greatly (at least she does when we have it at our house!). She LOVES to play Mommy/Teacher. She will pick Linus up in her imaginary car (or airplane sometimes too) and take him to school or church for me. She will sit him down and try to be his teacher, but it doesn't always work out so well because she must think that every teacher talks in a foreign language- whenever she starts talking to him as "teacher" she will make up words and speak in tongues and Linus will give her a guffaw-like stare for a few minutes before he gets bored and leaves (which for a teacher, naturally, is very rude, and so it will usually end up with one of them wrestling the other to the ground- she will have to learn about corperal punishment before she gets her liscense obviously...). She often comes up to me while I'm feeding Odell and say in a very lady-like voice "Oh, HI Anna! Is this your baby?!" *she will often call me Anna or another name she can think of and gets quite affronted when I don't play along, to the point where I'm not even allowed to call Odell by her name, I have to think of a different one for her because obviously Anna AND Mommy can't both have a baby named Odell...*. "She is SO cute," she continues, then dotes on her and wants to hold her and love her or will gently wipe her mouth with the burp rag or get her a toy. She has also started with the "Why?" game.
"Mommy, why do we come home all the time? Mommy, why do we drive in the car? Why do we go to bed? Why do we go potty? Why do you have a baby? (have successfully avoided that one when manageable) Why do I get up in the morning? Why do I eat food? " Then she'll ask questions that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. I think she does it just to make sure I'm paying attention. "Mommy...why does he sing the song ALL day?" *me looking around wondering who "he" is, what he is singing, and why he sings ALL day...and "I don't know, honey," is NOT a sufficient answer, so by the end I have to make up something like "Well, "he" is in a hot air balloon and up there you have to sing to be heard, so he just has to sing all day long!" until she is satisfied.*
Some of my favorite things that she does:

• I love it when she sings. She LOVES to sing. Me being called as primary chorister made me about one of the coolest people on the planet. For family night sometimes we will let the kids share their talents and Chloe usually always sings. Just like her made-up teacher language, she stands up on something and belts out nonesense words at the top of her lungs, then occasionally will add something that might sort of sound like a primary song in there, so it will end up sounding something like this: "Faaaah cha ko-chi ka ka saabaaah faaaah Iknowmyheavenlyfatherlovesmeeeeeeeeeeee seeee ka chokey faaah saaaa lllllaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!"...then a pause and a bow to let us know she's done, to which we are to promptly reply with vigorous cheering and clapping.
  
• Sometimes she wants to show me a "ballerina dance", so she'll sit me down somewhere, then she starts to dance, except she's clearly somewhat embarassed because she doesn't really know what she's doing, so halfway through twirling and stretching her legs around, she watches me smirk a little and then she breaks into giggles and grabs her cheeks to stop herself from smiling so she can finish her dance. Obviously if her hands are covering her cheeks, I can't see the smile and it still counts as a serious ballerina dance.
  
• I showed her how to play five notes in a row with each finger for each of her hands on the piano and she is THRILLED that she can do it by herself. She still can't find middle C, so it's always something somewhat obscure sounding, but she's excited to do it and she practices on it almost everyday. Gotta start teaching that girl piano!
  
• Speaking of obscure sounding, she also has a small child-sized cheapo guitar that my mom gave to her for Christmas a couple of years ago. The thing can not be tuned, despite my desperate attempts to do so, the pegs are just cheap and won't stick, so the strings are mostly loose and the ones that are tight are not near the right notes. I don't remember when this became a tradition, but somewhere along the line while Linus is taking a bath on any given night, Chloe gets to play the guitar, and vice versa when Chloe gets in the tub. I think I must have done it when we stopped giving the kids a bath together (they fight too much over the toys and we end getting more soaked than they are by the end) so that the other had something occupying to do...so Chloe will sit on a stool in the bathroom while I'm giving Linus a bath, serenading me with this very mid-eastern sounding out of tune instrument, belting out her nonsense/primary songs. It's about as cultural of an experience this mother of three little ones can get each week. Maybe next week I'll dress up and make some hors doeuvres to munch on and bring a cool nightlight to plug in or something exotic like that...
• I love it when she tries to teach Linus how to talk. The fact of the matter is, Linus is an exceptional talker for his age (not always a good thing), but it doesn't matter what the word is or how correctly he's saying it, it's not correct enough. "Linus say 'pet."
  "Pet."
  "No no no, say 'PEH'...."
  ""peh...."
  "TUH!"
  "TUH!"
  "PET"
  "PETUH!"
  "Good job! Mommy, Linus can say 'PET!"
  "YEEEAHHH! Mom, I can say 'PET'!!!"

Chloe is also learning how to draw. It's funny how one day they just scribble, and then the next day they can draw you with such stunning acuracy that your heart just goes a-flutter. For example:I mean, really! She's captured my mustache-like eyelashes perfectly.
Love that girl. :-)