We Have A Birthday Girl

We have a three-year-old now! I can't believe Winnie is three, even though she usually talks like she's 15. I don't ever want her to grow up, but I also enjoy her more and more all the time.

We had a fantastic day. It included a trip to our favorite park, pizza, dinosaurs, doll houses, new books and new dresses.

The cake (you're looking at 10 eggs and 1 1/2 pounds of butter right there).

The candles

The presents. (Someone should brush that poor girls' hair--or at least wash her face. What was her mother thinking?)

The dolls on the cake go to this doll house.

A set of sporty red wheels.

Winnie got a bucket of dinosaurs from her cousins. I think they were her favorite toy of the evening. Even still, she told everyone they could chose one to take home. Only Luke took her up on the offer, though.

As Winnie went to bed tonight she was singing "Happy Birthday" to herself.

And my baby is

On Luke's first birthday he. . .

weighs 23 pounds.

isn't very interested in learning to walk.

says about 10 words.

is almost all smiles--even when he's sick.

loves blankets.

is very patient with his sister, who often isn't very patient with him.

Meal Planning

One of the goals I made in 2009 was to start making weekly meal plans and shopping lists. Having a meal plan for the whole week has definitely cut down our trips to the grocery store, wasted groceries, fast food lunches at work/school, and dinner-time dilemmas about what to eat. Coming up with a meal plan is still a struggle sometimes, though. I've gotten a lot of ideas from other blogs I read, so I've decided to post my meal plans on my sidebar. I get a lot of recipes online and will post a link when available. We try a lot of new recipes, so I can't vouch for every dish, but most of the new recipes come recommended by someone.

Rambling recent developments

A few weeks shy of 1 year old and Luke has finally decided he can sit. To clarify, he's been able to sit for months and months--he's just had no desire. If you tried to sit him down on the floor he'd immediately arch his back and refuse to bend. A couple of months ago he started kneeling on the floor when he was playing and now he's started to sit and kneel about equal amounts. I can't believe he's almost 1!

Winnie got a very cute haircut Saturday and I thought I had good pictures of it until I looked at them on the computer. On the computer I could see that Winnie had a goopy nose and some left-over soup on her mouth. We'll try again tomorrow.

Matt took the bar last week and we're now all enjoying a life of luxury with no studying in sight. No job in sight, either, but let's try to stay positive, shall we?

On a slightly related note 261 E 100 N went under contract on January 29th, right after I had settled on a fabulous "black bean" paint scheme. It had been on the market somewhere around 8 months! Couldn't it have waited a couple more months??? Who buys a house with broken windows in the middle of winter, anyway? I've been obsessively checking the county recorder's documents to see if anything has recorded showing that the sale has gone through. Nothing yet, so I still have a slight hope that the sale will fall through and we can snatch it up! I haven't been able to bring myself to drive by for fear I'll see vinyl replacement windows going in. Oh the horror.

Saturdays

Today I did 9 loads of laundry (3 loads of bedding, 1 load of towels, 2 loads of light clothes, 2 loads of dark clothes and 1 load of underwear), loaded and emptied the dishwasher multiple times, cleaned the kitchen, changed the sheets on all of the beds, made lunch and two dinners, fixed the kid’s blinds, made and played with salt dough, made menus for the next week (hooray for none of our menu items requiring a trip to the grocery store!), administered 3 time-outs, vacuumed the downstairs, changed 6 diapers (3 poopy), read 5 stories, gave 2 baths.

Today I did not get my kids dressed, iron, clean the bathrooms, finish the touch-up painting in the bathroom, vacuum upstairs or the stairs, mop the kitchen floor, wash my white slipcovers (never fall for the lines in magazines where mothers claim that white slipcovers are easy), wash the windows (they get a lot of condensation on them and the kids like to “draw” in it), exercise, or start reading any of my library books due this coming Friday. And yes, I really thought I could accomplish this as well as what I actually got done.

The mischief a two year old can do. . .

during the time it takes to change one poopy diaper.

She cut all of this hair from the right side of her head (see how it looks a little sparse over her ear? She basically left a thin layer from the top of her head, but cut all the hair underneath). Ironically, her hair took forever to fill in on the sides and it was just recently starting to really grow there. This afternoon, before this happened, I'd scheduled Winnie's first professional haircut. We were going to just trim the back up to match the length of the sides. Now that the right side of Win's hair is only 1" long, I think that plan is out.

Family Projects

I bought Winnie a pair of slippers. She doesn't love them, but guess who does.

All of my seed catalogues started to arrive last month and I got a real case of Spring Fever. Winnie loves anything that involves scissors and glue, so we planted a garden. Winnie named it the "E" garden--and no, I don't know what that's supposed to mean, either. I'm not sure this garden is doing anything to make me more satisfied with my 120 square foot yard, or the contents of my refrigerator where it currently resides.

We got a second set of Duplos for Christmas and Winnie has started to want to build things other than plain stacks of Legos. Matt is always assigned to build the animals that Winnie sees on the sides of the bucket. I was busy trying to get everyone looking at the camera in this shot, and didn't notice that you can't really tell what they built, but it's a dragon.