Springtime

Isn't it lovely?! Well, selectively... We had a couple gorgeous days this past week. We got to enjoy them a little bit.  I finished up the fill-in work that I was doing so my house finally got cleaned this weekend.   I fall asleep right after work. I swear I had 7? loads of clean laundry to put away.  I hate laundry.  Luckily there is often a magic laundry fairy that finishes my laundry when I start it over at my parent's house.  This time my dad came and helped me put it away!  He also cleaned my kitchen for me this week...and babysat my kiddos.... and took me to a movie... I was one spoiled girl this week.  He had the week off.  It was nice!!  We saw Avatar.  I really liked it.  I kept expecting the girl character to break out into the "Colors of the Wind" song at any moment though.  Did anyone else just think of Pocahontas??

My pictures are always out of order, but here are ones from today of the girls in their Easter dresses from Nana Mykie.  I tried to get one of them standing so you could see it better but one of the girls was so wiggly the pics kept turning out blurry.   

I am a frequenter of Value Village...a frequent frequenter!...This week I found a set of play tents and tunnels.  The girls played with them inside for a couple days and then yesterday Gpa came over and they took it all outside.  I love finding things that both of them can play with together. It was a good find!

Danica had a double header yesterday.  It was sunny, dry and very pleasant.  (Not really warm...but pleasant)  She did great.  NO TEARS!!!

I love being able to do things outside.  I know it'll probably take a couple of months for there to be enough breaks in the rain for the ground to actually dry out but I'm looking forward to it. 

I realized I hardly have any pictures of Mira sleeping...mainly because she wakes up sooooo easily but sometimes I really, really enjoy when the sweet little girls are ASLEEP! ;)

 

Easter, Wester

Happy Easter! It sure is fun having little kids at Easter. Well, I mean it always is but holidays sure are loads more fun. ;) Our plans kinda got disrupted since Mira, Rob and I are sickies. On Saturday Danica and I dyed eggs. She did better at it than I. I had seen an egg dying kit in my parents garage so I decided to use that. It didn't work; apparently in the 15 years since it was mixed up something went amiss. We opted for using food coloring and vinegar instead. I tried twice to make purple with no such luck. The first one resembled a grenade. The second just looked like a wadded up piece of trash. I did learn when I rinsed the dark greenish one off when I was peeling it that it turns into a pretty pinkish purple. Go figure. Danica made pretty turquoise, green and yellow ones with glitter. We then made pink cupcakes with yellow frosting. They were okay. Better than I thought strawberry cake would taste. I stuffed Danica's eggs and hid them before going to bed. She came in a couple times in the morning to see if she could do the egg hunt yet but I kept telling her I was SLEEPING! Well when I did get up she magically was able to find most of her eggs right away. I wonder what she was doing while I slept? =) It was fun. We played the hot-cold game to find the last couple. Mira got a bear that had a recorded message from the rest of us. She did like playing with the eggs after her sister emptied them. These girls' grandparents sure spoil them! Well, Rob and I got spoiled too with yummy food delivered to our door since we were too germy to hang out.

Nana Mykie sent an "activity" for Danica to do. She loves activities, of all sorts. I sometimes label something as an activity just so she'll be excited about doing it...like folding laundry ;)
They also got matching Easter dresses. I hope to get a pic of them in them next Sunday. They are oh so cute!
Danica working on her eggs.

One of the few eggs she hadn't found yet...

With Easter baskets from Grandma Julie...

Mira sat there shredding all the tissue wrapping from Grandma Cindy's present.

I bet it could provide hours of entertainment.

Thanks to all who made Easter special for us!!

Jamboree...

So the first season Danica did soccer she loved it right away and would be working on "skills" while most of the other little kids were running around. The second season she was more interested in picking daisies than playing. So this time around I asked her if she wanted to play...yes... but then informed her that she had to actually play soccer, not just play in the grass....still yes. Oh man. I sure had to remind her of this today! We get to the jamboree and she is crying and crying that she doesn't want to play, it's no fun, she doesn't like it, she just wants to watch, and on and on. I was literally pushing her towards the field to try and get her to go out there. I finally threatened to take away her easter stuff if she didn't just try. Bingo. She stopped whining and went out there. We came home with a happy little camper.

Those little kids are so cute. I love how they are just a swarm of kicking that moves around the field together.
I'm not sure if the game was going on at the moment but she is totally trained to pose for pictures.

Totally awful picture, I know, but this is Danica scoring a goal. I was not looking through the camera... and I was cheering ;)

Mira behaved pretty well through the games. It was quite chilly. I was cold! I need to bring hot cocoa next time.

The absentminded toothfairy...

Oh dear. I'm an awful mother. I forgot two nights in a row to dress up in my fairy garb and tip toe into Danica's room to retrieve the prized tooth. She reminded me the first night...then hinted that I forgot again after the second night. Btw in my house Santa is not real, the Easter bunny is not real but the tooth fairy? She's the real deal all right. Anyhow. So I get home this evening and see that Danica has opened up the notepad application on my computer and left me this note. There was a lot of spaces(atleast 30 lines) in between the lines but I'll shrink it down for you.

"i
mom
mom you dint get my too
mom
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
mm
m
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
momy
mom you ceep e
mom you
mom you ceep for geti
tooth i love you"

Well the tooth fairy left the message up until she completed her job. ;) Mission accomplished.

Oh the...trauma.

I'm gonna talk about teeth so some might want to skip this paragraph. So yesterday morning Danica sits down to breakfast, tries eating a couple bites and starts crying that her tooth hurts and she can't eat her oatmeal. Oatmeal...that doesn't really require much chewing and definitely not with her front teeth so I figured it must be pretty bad. She ended up having some drinkable yogurt (that was all I could get her to eat) took some pain meds and went to school. I picked her up from school and was dragging her to the store to look at some scrapbook paper(I heart paper!) and decided to treat her to a jamba juice which she normally would be floored about. She gets it and says it hurt to drink from the straw and didn't want it. Well I tried to get her to use a spoon but still it hurt too much...then finally suggested she just drink from the cup. no such luck. Meanwhile she is crying off and on that this thing really hurts. finally I told her to let me see it. That poor tooth looked ready to spring from her mouth. I unwisely made the comment that it would probably just fall out if she closed her mouth. Wrong thing to say! She walked around for the next hour or two refusing to close her mouth! She held napkins up to it to catch the drool. Fast forward a few hours. She's doing okay. Crying off and on but got distracted by some new toys we got. (I heart toys too btw.) So after her dinner of tomato soup in a cup she was crying about it, or maybe crying about not wanting to brush her teeth? Anyhow. I told her that I was going to have to pull it out if she was going to refuse to eat and not take care of her teeth. She was already crying but agreed and went into the bathroom. Here's where the fun starts. I was flossing her teeth and she thought I was getting too close to the sore one so she jerked her head away from me. It started bleeding and she started screaming BLOODY MURDER!!! No joke! Anytime I tried getting her to open her mouth or touch the tooth or anything she kept up a running yell of "NO, NO, DON'T DO IT!!! AAAAAH!!!!!! NO!!!!!!!IT HURTS!!!!!!!!!!" For probably 15 minutes. It. was. epic. Well, eventually she said I could check to see if the tooth was still attached. (I kept asking her to touch it just to see if it was even still in there...) It wasn't. She knocked it out when I was flossing. All that screaming for a tooth that was simply lying in her mouth. I'm sure no one else cares about this but whatever. She thanked me a couple times afterward and said she was glad she didn't have that tooth anymore so I guess she's not traumatized for life. =)
Before the trauma. Notice she is using a package of tp to hold the track. So sad. I took pity on her and got some elevation ramps today. Well I could use the excuse that I got it for her but I totally played with it after she went to bed. I love toys!
The sad child.

Now she's even!

Oooh, more teeth stuff! Mira got her first toothbrush earlier this month and she was so excited!

She even was a natural at brushing.

Though I think she learned the hard way you don't want to stick it in so far you gag yourself. ;)

This child does not like eating mushy food! I finally got her to eat oatmeal by just dumping it out in front of her. I was going to try it with veggies too. The last couple days I can't even get her to eat pureed fruit which she had been doing good with. She just wants milk, cauliflower and broccoli.

Oatmeal is good for the skin right?

Do you hear what I hear? We took some 9 month pics. I can't believe she's 9 months! Time needs to just cut it out!

I think she's concerned about her lil friend.

She's excited because I kept trying to get her to stay by her "background" and she finally got right over to mama.

Another day I tried getting a pic of the girls in their dress-up clothes. It did not go over well. haha.

Danica playing in our lovely front "yard."

Danica and I were looking at pieces of our hair. Rob generously provided me with a blood sample later. I'm fairly certain he's never been asked"Hey, can I have some of that?" when trying to clean up an owie before. It was neat to look at! He appears to be human.

We had a couple days of great sunshine before springbreak. It made me really excited for summer! Too bad it's only a week into spring...

Bagels get a thumbs up!

She loves to push buttons. She turns the receiver, xbox and controllers on and off. Conveniently and not.

I took Mira out on another gloriously sunny day. She just scurried over to mama's lap as fast as she could.

She did find her own way of sampling what the outdoors has to offer...

Yum!

Hairy man!

I did my hair one day...out of the past year.

Danica and I painted a few eggs! We blew them and painted them yesterday. I was so proud of her. I prepared one egg for her(poked nails into the ends to make little holes you can blow the innards out) and she did her second one all by herself. I was cringing thinking I was going to be cleaning up a crushed egg and splatter. Nope.

Her eggs. She wanted them to look like easter eggs.

I painted my egg for her because lately she's taken to carrying around an egg I painted for my mom when we're at her house. We'll see how long it lasts. I painted the one for my mom in the 7th grade! ...the egg is still wet....

Danica had her first full soccer practice of the season tonight. It was freezing and rainy. Danica had on longsleeves and two jackets. Mira had on her hat, a jacket with a hood and was bundled in her sister's coat that luckily was in the car along with a couple blankets. It really is a good thing I never clean out my car. I was gonna say I wish I had a camera with me but..it was raining and I would never take Neil's camera out in the rain! Did you hear that Neil? I'm taking extra good care of it. ;) I borrowed a camera from Neil soon after having babes. It's a neat camera! He seemed to find mine lacking and not cool enough to properly document a little baby. I realized the other day that I've had it for a LOOOONG time and I don't think he had it for long at all when I borrowed it. He's such a good brother. I don't think he reads my blog. hahaha. He probably wouldn't appreciate this. =)

Back to the Trax! We really enjoy these. Sissy likes playing with them too. It involves a lot of destruction on her part. She let the train pass her several times this morning without knocking it car by car off the track. Tonight she was playing with the remote and starting and stopping the train. I think Danica gets a little tired of her sis following her around messing up the things she's building but she is pretty patient with Mira. I'm thinking I should probably give her some baby free time.

Babes controlling the train.

There go the cars...

I'm very impressed if anyone makes it through my posts. ;)