Little Boy Blue

I just love these pictures of RUS wearing his Easter outfit and R's Easter hat!

R's Art Retrospective

For awhile now, I've been saving artworks of R's that I've been meaning to photograph and post on here. Only, I haven't been taking the pictures. I've just been storing them on top of a secretary dresser we have in our living room.

Of late though it was getting REALLY cluttered up there, and in my pre-Easter cleaning before Grammie and Grampy came over for Easter dinner, I decided to once and for all go ahead and get the stuff cleared off. So here are some photos of artwork R produced between January and March.

These are the valentines cards that Grampy helped R make for J and I. They came out SO GOOD!
Right around Valentine's Day, R's assistant teacher in her class at day care moved to a different classroom. A lot of us were really sad about this, so one of her classmates arranged a play date with several of the other kids from the day care class along with the assistant teacher just before she moved. At the play date the kids all painted photo frames, colored on the back of puzzle pieces taken from those cheap 25-cent puzzles you can get, and glued them to the picture frames. Her teacher then wrote "I Love You to Pieces!" on these Valentine's photos she'd taken in the classroom the week before and put them in the frames. I LOVED it, what a great crafty idea! The picture was proudly displayed on our piano for awhile but I've had to take it down and I'm honestly not sure where it's going to go now.Now, THIS--oh man, I was so proud of R for this picture. The two photographs below represent the front and back of the same piece of paper. The first picture (the front) represents dwarves on their ponies riding up the mountain (a definite The Hobbit reference, for those not in the know. It is one of R's favorite books; J has read it to her all the way through at least three times now).
And this second photo (the back) represents the mountain and all the secret doors the dwarves build and/or find (that part was not altogether clear to me). The doors are represented by the series of Ps, Rs, and Os drawn on the paper.This piece was drawn when R was just starting to get into drawing people and faces and I just thought it was really really good! It's a princess (of course) and a prince.
I laughed when she brought this one home from school in mid-March. It's Santa Claus and his bag of toys!
Over the winter term J taught an evening class from 6-10 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. On those evenings R missed him terribly. So we often wrote or drew things for him to pass the time. Here she's practiced her writing--she wanted to write him a letter and this is the entirety of the letter. She then added Toy Story stickers she received in her Christmas goody bag from one of her day care classmates.
and THIS, oh this remains one of my absolute favorite things R has ever drawn. The best pictures, in my mind, are those that are accompanied by vivid stories. This one was so good I tried to write down the story as R told it to us and explained what was in it.
The photograph below is my script of R's story of the picture, but I clearly missed a lot, since I only started scripting it on the third telling or so of what the picture was of. And since it's hard to read my handwriting, here's what it says:

"The princess is in the castle (the black-haired figure with the purple dress). The princess is looking out the window. There's a prince and a babysitter (in the lower right corner of the house). The bad guy is climbing up the steps but he's in a hole. (She had drawn the bad guy and then covered him with the black hole/cloud). That's the rainbow shed (said while pointing to the top of the page). This is a door. This is an open door. This is a not-locked door and this is a locked door." (Unfortunately I wrote this down sufficiently long ago that I no longer remember where all these doors are located in the picture).

Easter Pictures

A Preview of Easter Dessert

R and I made this cake this afternoon and had fun decorating it after dinner! We shared fairly equally in the decorating decisions which, I think, is well-reflected in the cake's final appearance.

Neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt

This past Saturday afternoon there was an Easter Egg hunt in the neighborhood. R and I headed down but RUS was napping (the hunt took place at 1 p.m. and he is usually down for the count by noonish).

Here she is at the start of the hunt:
And she was a little shy about picking up the eggs, but did end up with two!

Both of her eggs had chocolate in them, YUM. I couldn't stop her from eating them both right away--here she is, thrilled as punch, with one of them.
And there was a surprise appearance from the Easter Bunny!! I was so proud of R for being brave and approaching the bunny herself for a hug.

Baby Chick Cards

R made some Easter cards for her cousins and grandparents and great-grandparents. We dipped her heel in yellow paint and used that to make baby chicks. Then we feathered grass (or drew grass, in the case of the cards we made on white paper, which I forgot to take a photograph of before sealing them in envelopes) and added black legs and eyes and orange beaks. Finally she embellished the cards with stickers and wrote names on the backs of the cards.
EDITED TO ADD: I found this project online but what I read wasn't a detailed walk-through of how to do it, complete with pictures, but instead, a general description of the project. Later, I discovered some pictures of the actual final project and realized that I understood the instructions (and the image of the final project) entirely differently than was intended!!! So, I present to you the actual baby chick footprint card (below). Isn't it totally and completely adorable? I am even contemplating doing the project again, especially because I know R will be thrilled at the opportunity.

Luck o' the Irish

Do You Know All Your Festivus Facts?

I got 4 out of 6 on this quiz.

Happy Fourth of July!

I prompt R to say Happy Fourth of July and then start recording.
R: Happy July! Happy fourth of Julyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
S: Can you tell everybody what we're gonna have today?
S: What did Daddy make for the Fourth of July?
R: (looking down and not at camera) pie pie pie pie pie pie pie
R: puts grass in RUS's mouth.
S: Did daddy make a cherry...? (laughing) cherry.... Did Daddy make cherry cupcakes?
RUS: smiles and sticks his thumb in his mouth.
S stops recording video.
R: (as soon as camera stops recording) cherry pie!

(To my credit, R has been making up a lot of words lately, and she spends a lot of time talking like this "La la lu fa fi fefefefe FE!" so I thought she was just making up random words, not saying anything in particular, when she was actually saying pie in response to my question. Sigh.)

Cherry Picking

When I was growing up, for about five years my family lived in a house with a tart cherry tree in the back yard. I have vivid memories of picking cherries every summer with my parents. We kids would get the lower ones, occasionally standing on a kiddie step-ladder my parents had. My dad and sometimes my older brother would climb higher into the tree to get the fruit from the top. We'd harvest as many cherries as we possibly could from that tree. And boy, they were TART.

My mom would make some pies immediately, and then freeze leftover cherries for a later date. Every Fourth of July, we'd have cherry pie. MMMMM, cherry pie. I mean, MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

So when the orchard near us announced *ONE DAY* of U-Pick tart cherries last month, I seized on it, and J and I kept R out of day care for the morning and the four of us traipsed over there and picked enough cherries to make two pies. We made one pie immediately and froze the other cherries to use in making a pie for our Fourth of July picnic today.

Memorial Weekend: The Good, The Bad, and The Clean!

The Good: J and R and RUS and I have had the most lovely long weekend. On Sunday we had a big picnic at a nearby state park with Grammie and Grampie. (Oh, and Marisa, R's doll, who I am holding in the picture above).

It's a big park, with a huge playground and a lake where you can rent paddleboats and kayaks and sailboats and all.
When we were getting ready to go, R wanted to put on a dress. Unfortunately, most of her dresses were in the laundry, except for one dress she refused to wear because "it has a spot!" (a small stain that I've learned to just live with) and two other dresses she wouldn't put on because she wanted a dress without flowers. As it turns out-- I'd never noticed this before, but it's true-- all of her dresses have flowers on them. All, that is, except the one I finally did put her in. It's a yellow dress that was actually mine when I was little. I think my grandmother might have made it for me. My mother saves everything and pulled this out of storage soon after R was born and gave it to me.

Our picnic was so delicious. J made three kinds of salad: white bean salad atop freshly picked romaine from our garden, potato salad, and an easy rice salad. Grammie made blueberry pie. We were at the park from 12:30 until about 4 and it was the most relaxing, decadent time I have had in ages.
We just hung out, watched R run around and enjoy everything there was to see. Of course the girl did not nap. Thankfully, RUS did, at least until he was woken up by some shouting from a spirited basketball game going on.

The Bad: R spent most of today recovering from yesterday. We're not sure if she has asthma or allergies or what, but she was coughing all. day. long. today. J and I had been toying with the idea of taking the kids to a small zoo about half an hour from us this morning but R's cough pretty much ruled out any "going outside" activity. Good thing, too, because it was 90 degrees, really hot, and REALLY humid. Instead, R and I spent the morning watching "Peter Pan" (or, as R calls it, "Tinkerbell!")

And the Clean: J mowed the lawn and weedwhacked the heck out of the yard. Grampie also came over to help J clear out some branches and I spent the afternoon during RUS's nap scrubbing our screened-in back porch. Four buckets of soapy water later, everything on our porch is swept, cleaned, rubbed down, and wiped off. Everything, that is, except the grates on our Weber kettle, which I still need to clean before we can use the grill. Oh, and I did five loads of laundry.

Happy Mother's Day!

to all the mothers that are part of our lives-- thank you for all you do to help us all become better mothers and raise wonderful children.

And an extra special hug to Cali today. Thinking of you all.

May Day at Winterthur

We went to Winterthur with our friend JK on May Day--perfect timing to see all the azaleas blooming. According to one of the gardeners there, DuPont planted something like 8 acres of azaleas, and they are unbelievable.

But we didn't go for the azaleas. We went to take R to the children's garden, which she absolutely adored.

Here she is visiting the fairy picnic area.
Pumping some water. . .
Me and RUS in the fairies' cottage . . .
And R's favorite thing of all: fairy mist inside the fairy ring . . .
But be careful, or the mist might take you away!Family portrait in the giant birds' nest . . .
Whew! By lunchtime, R was plumb tuckered.