She's 7!!

Princess Sparkley turned 7 last Monday. SEVEN!! I can't believe it. We celebrated her birthday at Grandma M's in St. Louis as we passed through on our move east.



PS has taken after both of her parents with her love for reading. I keep having to remind her that bookmarks exist and that she should use them. She's up late at night in her bed reading books. And often times, she's so consumed by what she's reading that she doesn't even hear us talking to her.



Opening presents on her birthday in Virginia.



One of her presents that she requested, from Buddy, was a Fairy Cookbook. Here we are making these tiny fairy cookies.


At Friendly's with her Monster Mash ice cream sundae.

Visiting Washington DC

I plan to take great advantage of living so close to Washington DC over the next few years... especially as far as our homeschooling is concerned. We made our first visit to the capital as Virginians on Saturday and took in some sights. The kids were threatened that this was a preliminary trip and their behavior would effect the possibility of all future trips when I would be outnumbered three to one while B is busy and we're on "school" field trips. They did... okay.


The Capitol.



Buddy and PS at the base of the Washington Memorial.



The kids at the Washington Monument.



Baby X signing "bird" to me when he spotted some ducks.



We made sure to find the column for Kansas at the new
(at least since last time I was in DC in December of 2002)
World War II Memorial.



Baby X at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.



Baby X at the Lincoln Memorial.
I especially like how his binky looks like a big Italian mustache.



Cute Princess Sparkley.

The Move

We rented an enormous Penske truck for the move. I followed B (who either had PS or Buddy with him) in our car with Baby X and whichever kid wasn't riding in the truck. I took pictures from the driver's seat along the way.

We're Not In Kansas Any More

We have arrived in Virginia. We're mostly unpacked. I actually cooked dinner tonight. And tomorrow we're setting off to explore our nation's capital. Our email addresses and phone numbers are staying the same for now. If you need our physical address, shoot me an email.

Baby X "talks"

Here is Baby X saying "ball."

He says Mama, Dada, PS's name, a sound that he attempts when we ask him to say Buddy's name. He has sounds for blankey and binki that involve the /b/ sound. He makes an attempt at "cracker" and sometimes "milk." He makes a quack sound. And a Moo sound which is mainly just "MMmmm" when he sees a cow. He pants for a doggy (and most other animals, or just the outside in general." He still screams a lot. And most of his words are just the beginning sound without the ending sounds. Buddy is an expert of car sounds and sirens, I'll have to film it sometime. Baby X has picked up on this and drives cars around saying "vroom" sounds and airplanes that go "fffhew." Sometimes a sireny noise as well.

He knows the signs for: food, please, milk, more, all done, moon, light, bird, fish, book, and thank you.

18 months

Our baby is one and a half.

The stats. He went to the doctor on Friday, July 24th (2 days shy of his half birthday). He's one ounce shy of 25 lbs. He's 34.5 inches tall (or in B language, 1 foot 10.5 inches). And his head is 19 inches (same as his last check-up). His weight is about 40th percentile. His height is 95th. His head is about 70th.

He's doing really well. His speech is delayed, but way more advanced than Buddy's was at this age. His doctor says it's probably a slight delay, and might not even qualify for the kind of speech therapy Buddy had. We'll keep monitoring him and see what he needs, but I'm happy with how he's progressing. I'll try to add some videos of him "talking" to the blog later.



Here he is at one week.


Here he is at 6 months


Here he is at 1 year.


And here he is at 18 months.




This is what the photo shoot looked like trying to capture of picture of 18 month old Baby X lying next to his alligator. When I got out the alligator B asked if I was going to take his picture with the alligator when he left for college. My response... I'm only doing the big marks now... I did one an now I'm doing one and a half. But it would be fun to have a picture of him holding it when he left for college or something. But really, he's not all that attached to it. Sometimes he pokes it in the eyes, but that's about it.



Some recent shots of him.

Ambulance

Buddy drew this ambulance. Those are flashing lights on top. He draws a lot of vehicles with flashing lights. He also drew an excellent picture on Sunday of a crane... I'll have to take a picture of it to post.

Sunflowers

For a music class lesson on Earth Day, I read stories about planting flowers to help the earth be pretty and then we recycled egg cartons making them into little pots for a sunflower seed. I ended up bringing home a lot of extra seeds and planting them in an 18 egg carton. When they were all 2-3 inches tall I transported 3 little plants to a larger pot. Right before we left for Utah, B planted them in the ground hoping they'd survive not getting watered daily by being able to pull water from the soil. And they survived!! Here are pictures of the first one that bloomed about a week ago. They are taller than my kids (one is almost as tall as I am).

To Do in Kansas

This is my tentative list of things to do in Kansas before we move:

Eat at Lidia's in Kansas City (Missouri).

Tour the Kansas state capitol in Topeka.

Go to the Kansas City Zoo (again, Missouri).

Visit the Moon Marble Company in Bonner Springs, KS.

Take pictures of my kids in a field of sunflowers.

Last weekend we went to Topeka to return library books, find Alf Landon's grave (this was on B's list of "to do before we leave Kansas," we were unsuccessful), and tour the Topeka Capitol. B, Princess Sparkley and Buddy even got to go to the top of the dome and outside to see all of Topeka from a bird's eye view. Unfortunately no one bothered to tell us that Baby X would need to be able to walk all 296 steps on his own or would not be able to go on the tour. We'd already been past security, and through the gift shop where the worker there (who ended up being our tour guide) directed us to where we needed to meet for the dome tour, but didn't bother to mention Baby X would be unable to go on the dome tour. So Baby X and I hung out eating fruit snacks while he tried to escape over the back of the bench we were on, to fall 20 feet down the stairwell. PS and Buddy went to the top with Jed and were both scared, but very brave.

Yesterday I took the kids to Moon Marble. I may have been more excited about this than my kids, but I think they (well, maybe not Baby X) enjoyed it as well. The guy who started it used to be a wood worker. He was making wooden game boards that needed marbles but couldn't find any of the cool marbles from his childhood anywhere. He finally found a company in West Virginia that would sell him some, but he had to buy 12 crates (I'm paraphrasing and may not have everything right). When they arrived, they came in a semi-truck and there were over 5,000 marbles. He says he's been in the marble business ever since that day. I'm not sure how he got into making marbles (Baby X was fussy during this part... I wouldn't recommend this for the littlest kids) but part of the tour is watching him make a marble. It's pretty cool. He asks that if you take pictures, you do so without a flash. This is not good news for me since my camera takes horribly fuzzy and out of focus pictures when the flash is off. I'll include pictures, but look here for better ones.

The marbles he makes sell for $30+. If you look at the marbles for sale on the website, they sell marbles from a variety of talented glass artists and some are as expensive as $350. They also sell a lot of vintage games and cheap marbles they buy from somewhere else.

My kids each got a, handpicked by them, tube of marbles and a shooter marble. Buddy is obsessed with the game.

Princess Sparkley's Birthday List

Princess Sparkley has posted her birthday list on her blog, Unicorns, Fairies and Princesses.

Other pictures from PS

Princess Sparkley's take on vacation

PS inherited my old digital camera when I got a new one... and it takes WAY better pictures than the $15 kid camera we bought her last year. Here are some of my favorite pictures I discovered when I uploaded her pictures.



Top to bottom. Left to Right.
1. In the car
2. We spotted moutains
3. Buddy and B at Black Canyon of the Gunnison Nat'l Park
4. Grandpa's new dog, Fenway, taken from a safe distance
5. Grandpa and Fenway on the new cabin porch
6. Cousin N (almost 2 1/2).*
7. Cousin A (9 1/2)
8. Buddy's bum. There were two pictures like this. I have no idea why.
9. me
10. Flowers
11. Cedar Breaks National Monument
12. Grumpy Baby X in the car
13. Somewhere in Colorado on our drive home.
repeats... sorry, I just realized it repeated the first three pics again.



*This was the first time everyone but me and Baby X met N.

Denver and the drive home

We left the cabin early Saturday (July 11) morning, drove forever and arrived in Denver around bedtime Saturday night. Sunday we slept in, almost missed breakfast at the hotel because our hotel guest book said breakfast was served until 9:30 but when we arrived at 8:55 they were about to clean up because the sign there said breakfast was only served until 9. Argh. B and the kids "swam" in the hotel pool which was only slightly larger than a hot tub but still managed to have a range in depth from 3 feet to 7 feet.*

We took our hotel shuttle to Coors Field (which, much to my surprise is no longer Mile High Stadium) for a Colorado Rockies vs. Atlanta Braves game for $4 a ticket. We were there early, Buddy got a practice ball one of the players threw into the stands, received four miniature ceramic stadiums (which Buddy LOVES) and B and I got incredibly sunburned knees, but I guess we're lucky that's the only sunburn we got. It was hot. The game went long, but luckily for a good portion of it the clouds rolled in between us and the sun. Also, Baby X fell asleep which made him much easier to handle at a ballgame. The Rockies ended up winning in the 9th. But by the time the game ended, our hotel shuttle returned us to our car, and we ate dinner, it was nearly 8PM and we still had about a 9 hour drive ahead of us. Yuck.

We ended up driving in lots of lightening, rain, some hail, getting stuck in a muddy ditch at 1 in the morning (luckily a AAA tow truck was nearby and we didn't crash into the ditch, just accidentally backed off the road into it trying to turn around. And Baby X slept through it all.)

We ended up pulling over and sleeping in the car for a few hours around 3 or 4 in the morning. Then woke up and drove again arriving home around 9AM.

B vacuumed out the car along with a bunch of sand from Great Sand Dunes Nat'l Park and washed all the red dirt from the Utah mountains and the mud from our late night escapade in a ditch. The car has been unloaded, the laundry is washed (but not folded). There are stacks of stuff all over that I need to put away. And then the mass packing begins for our move in 17 days. AHHHHH.




Oh, and on this trip Baby X started this. He points and loudly declares Uh EH!!!!! And most things are also "Bbbb." Ball. Balloon. Bus. Etc. He does it a lot. And loudly. At first it was cute. After awhile, we were a bit annoyed with it. He'd keep it up until you acknowledged what he'd seen... even if you had no idea what it was. He did it loudly throughout the entire HyVee grocery trip I took him on yesterday afternoon after we got home.



*Why do they have such deep pools at hotels when they don't allow diving or jumping?? My kids can't swim. I wish all hotel pools were a maximum of 4 feet deep.

Up Cedar Mountain week 2

The second week up the mountain involved my brother's family driving home (they'd been there three weeks already) and my sister's family arriving.

Up Cedar Mountain

The first week we were with my parents and my brother's family. I've tried to create a slideshow movie... there were just too many pictures for a collage.

Day 3- Black Canyon of the Gunnison Nat'l Park

Day 3 was another long drive and another National Park. We got detoured off a US highway and ended up in the middle of cowboys on horses herding cows. I could have reached out my window and touched a cow... I settled for taking their pictures.





Mid-afternoon we arrived at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in southwestern Colorado, enjoyed the beautiful view, drove on 8 and 10% grades* (Slum Gullion Pass) and the kids became Junior Forest Rangers.

Late Sunday night we arrived up Cedar Mountain, saw a million deer, and met my parents in Duck Creek Village where we then followed them down dirt roads and through three locked gates to reach the new cabin. There will, of course, be more pictures and more posts... I just have to clean up some of my messy house first.

*The steepest grades B and I have ever seen, we had to stop and let our brakes cool off at one point.

Day 2- Great Sand Dunes Nat'l Park

We drove much further on day 2, but left our hotel in Hays early and stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park near Alamosa, CO at the end of the day and still got to the hotel early enough for the kids to swim (and get all of the sand off of them).


Day 2 brought the introduction of Baby X to the lollipop. Yea for Dum Dums! This helped immensely on the trip, except when I looked back to wipe up some colorful drowl and the lollipop was no where to be found. He quickly became a no handed expert.


Here are some pretty pictures of flat flat Kansas taken out the car window as we drove through hours and hours of flat flat fields. Don't you love Kansas clouds?


And then we spotted mountains (the Wet Mountains by Walsenburg, CO). About a year and a half after we moved to Kansas we flew to California to visit family. Buddy was almost three and spent the whole trip amazed at the "mountains." We didn't get quite the same reaction from any of the kids this time, but Baby X did notice them and point a lot. But he currently notices and points at everything. His favorites: buses, motorhomes, semi trucks, bridges, airplanes, birds, clouds, etc.





Great Sand Dunes Nat'l Park was awesome. Buddy especially loved it. B and I were surprised by how prepared all the other visitors were in their bathing suits for a tiny stream we had no reason to expect, but all these visitors were treating like a beach. Also, several people came with snow sleds (which didn't slide very well on the sand), snow boards, or cardboard sheets to slide down the dunes on. Buddy preferred to scoot down on his bum. We were surprised by how into this Buddy was. Walking out to the dunes he was way in front of us and frustrated with our slow coachness. Then we got to this super super steep dune (B estimates it was a 60 degree angle) and he just started scooting down it. I was terrified for him... then realized that he wasn't going to slide since sand isn't like snow. Even Baby X joined in on the scooting. B tried rolling and just got dizzy and queasy. I was in charge of holding all of our stuff so it wouldn't get covered in sand while B rolled down the dune. *



Sliding down the dunes and leaving.

*Sorry, there a so many pictures and they are so little in this collage. Click the collage to enlarge.

Cabin Trek 2009: Day 1

My parents built an A-frame cabin in the mountains above Cedar City, UT in about 1968 when they were living in Las Vegas. It was a bit further away when we were living in southern California during my childhood, but we still visited often. Over the past couple of years my parents and brother have bought land and built a bigger cabin with electricity and running water (the old cabin did not have such luxuries).

We left home Friday, June 26th in the afternoon, stopping at the library in Topeka to stock up on even more books to entertain our kids (mainly to PS since she finishes at least one library book before we've left the library parking lot) on the long drive and the subsequent time at a cabin lacking a TV or internet access.


Here's Princess Sparkley hurrying to finish a book before we return it.


Our first day's drive was not long... about four hours to Hays, KS.


Buddy and PS in their hotel bed.


Baby X did not do so well the first night in a hotel... here he is the next morning asleep in our bed. Luckily this horrible night did not reflect the entire vacation or we might have only lasted a day.

Baker Bob's

This was probably our 3rd or 4th time to Baker Bob's tour of Great Harvest Bread.

The kids were shocked this year when I informed them that Baker Bob throws out the dough he lets them roll on the floor and place on their heads, etc. Apparently, all these years, they've thought he's baked it up and sold it. ???

Pictures and post from 2007.

Food Thief

My book club last week read My Antonia by Willa Cather about a Bohemian girl in Nebraska. I was in charge, and I was bringing the food, so I tried out this recipe for Kolaches that was in Taste of Home magazine recently. The ingredients were 1 pint of vanilla ice cream, butter, flour and sugar. Dough with ice cream in it!! That's what attracted me to this recipe. I was intrigued. Anyway. I made them all up and had them on my fancy platter and I went upstairs to change clothes since I was covered in flour. Baby X was being suspiciously quiet. I was worried that he'd walked out the sliding glass door which was open (just the screen in the way). I peeked downstairs and saw him walking around the living room holding a kolache.



The scene of the crime.



After I captured him and put him in his high chair. I couldn't let him keep walking around, he had sticky raspberry pie filling dripping from his hands.

Bowling

PS came home from school with bowling coupons so we went bowling for Family Home Evening last Monday. It turned out it was dollar night though, so we didn't even use our coupon. Anyway, the kids had a blast. Buddy kept asking all week if we could go again.

B won. I was in the lead for awhile, but he beat me by a few points. I mostly like that it tells you how many miles per hour your ball is going.

Legs

How can this be comfortable?

Nancy Drew Birthday Party

Since Princess Sparkley's birthday is just a week after we move to Virginia, I promised her several months ago that she could have a party with her friends from school and church before me moved. Today was the day. I may have gotten a bit carried away since I too love Nancy Drew.* And all the white boxes are where I've removed our names.



The invitation.

PS didn't want to go with the typical, 1950s Nancy Drew cover, those books seem a little scary for her. These Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew books are currently what she's loving, so we modeled the invite after one of those books. Sort of.


The invite, once it was folded to resemble a book.


The inside of the invite. Click to enlarge and you should be able to read it.



I punched a hole in the top of these, typed the girls' names on them and had them draw their picture in the little box. These were their detective badges.

When the girls showed up at the party we made plaid headbands (more reminiscent of the recent Nancy Drew movie starring Emma Roberts). I bought the headbands (and most of the party favors) from Oriental Trading Company and we used glue dots to attach some plaid ribbon. They aren't fancy or fantastic, but would work great for dress-up. You'll have to scroll down for pictures of the girls at the party to see the headbands on them.


Each girl took home a Sleuth Kit. The Sleuth kit included: a pink pencil that said "Girl Detective," an finger print ink pad, a clue notebook, a small flashlight, and a tin box (altoid tins - thanks, Mom, painted and with a magnifying glass depicted on the front) full of lemon jelly bellies since Nancy (at least in the movie) carried around a tin of Hannah (her maid/nanny's) Lemon Bars or Blondies. We were supposed to do some fingerprint art ala Ed Emberley, but I forgot, and it was so windy we didn't really want to deal with paper any more than we had to, so I folded the sheets up and added them to their sleuthing kit to take home.

The "cake" was sprinkle donuts with craft lollipop sticks in them to look like magnifying glasses.



Hunting for clues. I hid 8 clues around the park, each leading them to the next spot and finally to the little tent structure at the top of the tall slide, where the presents were hidden.



Our Girl (and Boy, although Buddy's stuff all said "Dog Detective") Detectives.



Some more party shots. (The candle blow out is fake since it was way too windy to light anything.)

*To give credit where credit is due, I got a lot of my ideas here and here and here and here.