3rd Annual Spring Party

The sun finally showed its face today and gave us the most beautiful day that we've had in months so that the kids could enjoy their annual Spring party.  The snow melted and dripped from the eavestroughs and made our steps and pathways puddly and wet.  The kids squealed and ran and threw snowballs and built snowmen all without complaining of cold fingers or ears or toes.  They are certain that our Spring party has brought Spring to us and maybe they're right, maybe it's finally here. 

 

Here's what we got up to today...

 

 

 

Could those little faces look any happier to be out in the sunshine.

 

 

Nothing fancy on the menu.  I was pretty pleased with this cute little fruit plate though.  And the kids were excited about their little butterfly cupcakes that they decorated all by themselves.  Emma and Walker decided that all they wanted were puzzle sandwiches made with white bread.  I don't buy white bread so when they get it, it's a pretty big deal.

 

 

We made bird feeders made out of cute princess and race car shapes.

They were a little messier than I anticipated.

 

 

They also made these little flower, fairy headbands that they played with forever.

Walker opted to have a flower vine wrapped around his sword so that he could be the fairy prince.

 

All in all we had another successful Spring party and hopefully the warm weather will keep up and bring grass and blossoms sooner rather than later.

 

And because there were no pictures of Lillian here are a few.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!!

Over the last few nights we have been watching "Mary Poppins" a little bit at a time before books and kisses and bedtime.  How I love those old classics!!  What I love more is watching them with my children and seeing them enjoy them as much as I do, particularily the music.  They made me rewind this scene over and over again.

 

 

And I would give anything to own this dress!!

 

 

Happy Things

As a warning this post is going to be a little on the whiny side so if you don't want to read my whining you should stop now. 

Today has been one of those frustrating, exhausting, never ending days that seem to occur more and more often as our Edmonton winter drags on and on into March.  The snow has piled higher and higher over the last four days and the sun has rarely shown its face to help break up the dreary monotony.  On top of that, despite my optimism in the last post, we went nearly two weeks without any midnight puking incidents only to have Emma wake up with it again this morning.  Then with three children in tow I had to take Bridgett to the vet so that they could do this to her.

Our groomer didn't dry her well enough last week and that led to a skin infection all over her back.  Needless to say we are not very impressed.  Neither are the kids.  Emma had to wait in the van while we finished up in the vet because the sight of Bridgett was making her feel sick to her stomach.  Walker just keeps hugging her head and repeating "poor baby, poor baby" and Lillian cries and scrunches her face up every time she looks at it.

 

A couple of years ago, right around this time of year, when winter was starting to claw its way into my soul and my risk of going stir crazy increased each day I started a daily routine of writing down the things that made me happy.  It helped me appreciate all of the little things that I was grateful for despite the fact that temperatures continued to drop and snow continued to fall.  Eventually my mom and sisters joined me and each day we emailed them to each other.  We called them our "Happy Things".  I looked forward to reading what had brought joy into the lives of my favorite women each day and it brightened even the coldest and gloomiest days.  Over time as each of us started our own blogs the routine slowly ended, but today I thought I needed to get my happy things out of my head and down on paper...or computer...or whatever.  So here they are...

 

- a furnace that keeps us all toasty warm and cozy and that can be turned up when Walker refuses to wear anything but underwear.

- Netflix, that entertains the older kids so that I can get a few extra minutes of sleep after being up from 4-6am and how excited Emma was when she found Tinkerbell on it.

- a strong and healthy body that allows me to shovel our driveway without aching and hurting

- my meticulous and diligent shoveller.  Walker always gets his boots and mittens on as soon as he sees me out shove ling so that he can help.

- phone calls from Allan as he drives home from work (hands free of course).  It makes that last 30 minutes before he gets home bearable.

- perogies with cheese sauce and broccoli

- Lillian's spontaneous squeezes and kisses

 

I guess we can wait a little longer for Spring, but only a very little bit longer.

 

The Dreaded Stomach Flu

Since February 13th we have been dealing with one sick child after another.  For whatever reason when the kids got the stomach flu this time around it only affected them in the evening.  I spent night after night up with one child and then the next holding their heads over buckets or cleaning up soiled sheets, pyjamas, pillows and blankets.  At one point Emma threw up every night for seven days.  She was soon followed by Walker and then Lillian.  Luckily Lillian recovered quickly and was only up for a couple of nights but even she was sick enough that she got to the point that she would cry "my bucket, my bucket" when her little tummy would start to hurt.  Today I finally feel like we are coming to the tail end of it.  However, the fact that Walker went to bed at 6:20 tonight makes me think that his sweet little system still has some kinks to work out before he will be fully recovered like his sisters.  So there may be a couple more sleepless nights ahead but tonight is the first night in weeks that I don't feel bedtime looming over me like a puke filled cloud ready to rain down on me at 2 o'clock in the morning.  Sorry, that was graphic, but seriously I have done at least 30 loads of laundry in the last 3 weeks and only 8 of those were regular non-flu related loads.  Today felt more normal, with Emma anxious to go to school without complaints of stomach cramps, Walker eating everything in sight and anxious to be out and about like usual and Lillian being her usual goofy self.

It is amazing that this blanket isn`t fused to his body with the amount of time that he has spent wrapped up in it since getting sick.

 

Every day Walker helps Lillian pull every last one of her board books out into the middle of her bedroom floor.  She returns to them all day long or pushes them through the bars in her crib and then leads me by the hand to her room and says ``night, night`` which means that she wants to be in her crib with her books.  I love that we have another little book worm in our home.

 

 

This kid is talking up a storm and it has made things pretty interesting around here.  She can ask for nearly anything she wants...cheese, banana, book, Pooh, snack etc. which has taken the guessing out of things and made life easier.  However, she has also learned to say ``please`` and with that has come the expectation that anytime she says please she will get whatever it is she is asking for.  If she doesn`t get her way she clenches her little fists and hollers at the top of her little lungs until I can appease her with something else...usually a graham cracker or fruit snacks.  Hopefully I can figure out how to nip that behavior in the bud as soon as possible.

 

Well, here`s hoping that health has been restored to our household and life can go on as usual.  Wish me luck!!

Keeping Busy

We have been doing our best to keep busy here while we await Spring's arrival which seems to be far too many weeks away.  One particularly cold and boring morning I told Walker that we would make a volcano.  We got out our Play Doh that is a mish mash of colors and found our food coloring that was absent of any color resembling lava and we set to work.  Walker could hardly contain himself as I explained to him what would happen when we mixed all of our ingredients together.  He was pretty impressed with the result. 

 

We took the kids mini golfing for the first time as a Friday night family date.  It was lots of fun for the first nine holes until Walker got bored and Lillian started throwing her ball in the water every eight seconds.

 

Emma was a natural.

Watching Walker try and hit the ball like this had me laughing so hard I couldn't stand up straight.  He would not take Allan's advice and putt the right way.

Lilly Baby even took a turn.

 

The weather has been warming up and it is turning our snow into the sticky, wet stuff that you can turn into snowmen.  The other day while Kendall was here for a play date the kids spent forever playing outside and made a cute little snowman all by themselves.  I loved watching them busy themselves with the task at hand and cooperate to stack the big snowballs on top of eachother and then add his face and arms, complete with a scarf and hat.

 

 

Phases

If I have learned anything from my time as a parent it is that children go through about 1000 different phases a year.  Some of them are adorable and hilarious and I dread the day that they will grow out of them.  Others are slightly less adorable and I do everything I can to try and help them grow out of them as soon as possible.  Right now I am dealing with one of the latter for both Emma and Walker.  Emma is going through a little bit of a fibbing phase.  Her vivid imagination is leading to some pretty wild stories and last week she went as far as to tell her primary teacher that she has been to the Sacred Grove in Palmyra...she hasn't.  It was starting to make me a little crazy until I did some research on it and am feeling like I am a little more equipped for dealing with it.  Hopefully, as the research predicts, she will grow out of it sooner rather than later.

Despite her fibbing she is still pretty darn cute.  Last week in celebration of their 100th day of school the kids had to dress up like 100 year olds.  We raided Grandma Larsen's dress up box and came up with this little get up.  And yes Mom that is the dress that you wore in your engagement pictures.

 

Walker, on the other hand, has developed a bit of a phobia of being alone.  Whenever he has to go to the bathroom he insists that we "drop him off".  That means walk him to the bathroom and turn on the light.  He will rarely play in a room alone unless he is so caught up in his own imagination that he doesn't notice and prefers being two feet from me in the kitchen over watching TV.  While I adore my sweet boy the lack of personal space is starting to wear on me.  The other morning Walker was playing  with Play-doh at the kitchen table when I told him that I had to get in the shower.  He begged me to leave Lillian downstairs with him instead of putting her in her crib, which at her age is still a little dangerous, so I told him he would just have to play in the kitchen until I was done.  I put Lillian safely in her crib and went to wash my make up off.  When I walked into the bathroom to get in the shower a few minutes later I found this little set up.

 

Oh well, I guess I will just have to wait this phase out and be patient and understanding in the mean time.

 

These phases certainly keep things interesting and teach me something new every day.  Now if they could just start going through the same phases at the same ages I could really figure things out.

Our Goofy Girl

Looking through my last few blog postings it seems that Lillian in noticeably absent in many of the pictures.  The most logical explanation is that it is not very often that she is still long enough for me to get a good picture of her.  Generally she is either just entering or just leaving the frame as I snap the picture.  This week I made a more deliberate attempt to get some pictures of her.  Here are a few of them.

 

My ever helpful baby loves to "help" me make naan bread, or pie crust, or crescent rolls or anything that allows her to use the rolling pin and play with the dough.

 

 

(As a side note, Walker took this picture.)

 

 

This is typical Lilly Baby lately.  Her older siblings, with some help of a certain older cousin, have taught her "the pout".  She pulls this out at least 100 times a day. 

 

 

This is Lillian's latest habit and it's probably my least favorite of all of her habits.  She loves to eat ice off of our shoes.  This snowball happened to come from the inside of one of the kids' boots which is better than licking their boots which is what she typically does... and that is not an exaggeration.  She is like a vulture waiting by the door for Emma and Walker to come in from outside so that she can consume as much of the cold, wet snow as possible before it melts off of their boots.  We sure get a kick out of our little wild thing.