Of course holding her new Happy Meal dolly that she can’t let out of her sight since she got it yesterday. 🙂
Category Archives: Kids
Cousins dining al fresco
Legos with Anna…again!
Owen brought a Lego set so he could do them with Anna like he did last year. He was so excited that within, I think, two minutes of walking in the front door of the condo, the box was already open! We did have him wait just a bit, and they started working after dinner. 🙂
LAST YEAR:
First trip to the beach with cousins!
Kidisms 6
Katie is watching Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and the dialogue says “He even has [chicken pox] in his butt crack.”
Katie, repeating: Butt crack. [Pause] I like butt crack. [Pause] It’s dirty and smelly.
Me: 😐
I thought I saw dried blood in Katie’s nose so wanted to take a closer look. After determining it was just a shadow:
Me: There’s nothing in your nose.
Katie: Yes there is!
Me: What?
Katie: Boogies!
Katie is SO excited about our upcoming beach vacation:
And I can’t wait for the sand and the water and the buckets and the shovels. And we’ll put our swimsuits on! I can’t wait to go to Florida!
Katie: She’s purring!


Grannie Lin makes really yummy seasoned oyster crackers that she calls Belly Buttons. I made something similar and told the kids they might not like them because they weren’t Grannie’s. They tried them and didn’t like them. Fast forward a few hours and Katie asked for a snack. She saw me reaching towards the counter where my crackers happened to be:
Katie, very worried: I don’t want grandma’s cracker bellies!
Me: Are you going to play with the dolls?
Katie: Yes. And the cups and plates and a knife and spoon and fork.
Tom: Owen, I’m going to eat your face.
Owen (completely seriously): I hope not.
Gramma Jean: Owen, how do you eat food without your front teeth?
Owen: I use my other teeth!
Welcome to the condo!
Elevators unsettle her.

Road trip dinner!
The kids’ first time at Waffle House—and both loved it (and both chose waffles and bacon)!

New headphones for the trip!

Unfortunately they didn’t work so now I get to contact the company. 🙁
Can you buckle the tent up please?
I don’t want to.
Katie didn’t want to finish her lunch.
Mama! Take a picture!
We were eating lunch and I was looking up something on my phone when Katie saw me and told me to take her picture. So I did.


Because I made her stop eating chips to eat her pizza.


And then…happy again!
Green Eggs & Ham
With all the recent snow days, Owen’s class was behind on celebrating Dr. Seuss Week, so the making of Green Eggs & Ham was this week. The teacher had emailed asking for volunteers, but with Tom gone and me prepping for our vacation, I opted to skip it. Then. The teacher emailed me directly asking if I could come in because no one else had volunteered. Hoo boy. So I said of course.
We got there as they were reading the book. Owen was, as usual, super excited to see us and gave Katie a hug.

While the teacher explained what the groups would be doing today, kk played in the kitchen.

And then it was time for centers. And as I had imagined, it was pretty much a cluster. Thankfully another mom showed up—as normally we’d have three 15-minute sessions of 4 kids each but since they were trying to make up time, we had three sessions of eight kids each. Yeesh.
There was cracking of eggs (after the mess the first group created, we broke the eggs ourselves), stirring of the eggs with food coloring in two bowls, sharing turns stirring, then cooking the eggs in an electric skillet and cutting the ham, the kids crowding around us trying to cook and us trying to keep them from touching the pan and burning themselves, trying to rember who can’t have ham due to religious reasons, then serving the eggs and ham and trying to keep things cleaned up while cleaning up the utensils for the next batch. WHEW.
The first session was SO crazy that I never had a second to snap a picture. Thankfully Owen was in the second group and we were getting the routine perfected by then.
Giving me a thumbs up on the green eggs!

Thankfully Katie is pretty well-behaved because I couldn’t do the eggs and watch her at the same time. I did see her with the assistant most of the time, and she was at a table coloring another time. I apologized to the assistant and she said no worries, Katie was really very good. PHEW.

And then just like that, it was done. And even though it was crazy, it hadn’t been that bad. 🙂
I’m savoring every moment.
I was going to get stuff done while she watched a movie
…but I can’t deny cuddles. Do you blame me?
Doing her homework

Katie is 2 years 8 months old today!
Lap full of kids
I wanted Katie to come sit on my lap and she didn’t want to so Owen piped up that he would. Well, of course then Katie had to!

First warm day in awhile!
I got this new outfit for Katie at Costco this morning. It’s technically a sporty (Adidas) outfit but it has a skirt so to her its a princess outfit. 🙂 She couldn’t wait for it to be washed, so here she is.
We took Maggie on a short walk at bus stop time because it was so nice!
TACKLE!!
How Katie watches the iPad.
Katie’s drawing
She has been carrying around this scrap of paper and drawing on it for WEEKS (using a pen of Owen’s, of course).

This is what it looks like. She apparently likes making circles.

Shopping hugs
I never get tired of this.
Katie wouldn’t cuddle with me so Owen said he would.
He told her she missed out. 🙂 And of course I got a crazy face first. 🙂


Birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese
Tom usually has birthday party duty but since he’s gone it fell to me. And of course I had to take Katie as well—so it was her first trip to Chuck E. Cheese.
Fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as crazy as I thought it would be. Of course it was Chuck E. Cheese so it was a little bit crazy but overall it wasn’t bad.

Katie’s skee ball style:


The Clifford ride it was super tame and she looked pretty bored…so the next one moved more and she quickly said “DONE. DONE!!”

Then it was time for lunch and the birthday show (Chuck E. Cheese comes out). Katie was EXCITED. She’s saying “CHUCK E. CHEEEEESE!” 🙂

Redeeming tickets!


And then it was time to head home. This is the toy Owen picked—a tiny blow up sword (which she said was his favorite thing about the whole day, LOL).

And a mustache tattoo he got in his gift bag:

And these were the cards we had printed! (I think these were the best deal of the whole place—one card for one token!)
Both kids had a great time!
Well, I wasn’t expecting THIS today!

He lost the other front tooth! I didn’t even know it was that loose until about an hour ago! It likely wouldn’t have come out today, but apparently he was using his teeth to get Legos apart. 🙂
Owen’s snow day homework
He had to draw a picture of what he did on the snow day.

He wrote that sentence completely by himself. (Emu meet is Emmet from The Lego Movie. The stuff on the right with the letters are the Xbox controls.)
Color me IMPRESSED.
Snow Day #10. Or maybe #11.
This is insane. I don’t think we ever got this many snow days in Michigan. Yeah yeah, it’s different down here. But still. Yeesh.
So, by morning (and after more drugs) I wasn’t quite as pissed about the snow and the kids wanted to go out…
But the novelty has still worn off—I only took about three pics and this was the best one. They were drinking from coconuts. 🙂

It was actually warm-ish and sunny so stuff was melting. But I still spent 45 or so minutes brushing off the car, shoveling the driveway (including the rest of the plowed-in entrance), clearing a path to the mailbox, and chipping ice off the sidewalk.
I’m so ready for winter to be over.


























