Sunday, April 12, 2009

Easter week

We had a great Easter weekend. The week before Easter was busy with us trying to complete all our Easter crafts and the girls' dresses. I completed both the girls dresses on time and they were not as hard and I thought they would be. They actually turned out very cute and I really liked the way Julianne's dress turned out. The girls also both liked their dresses which is also nice so that I did not have to force them to wear them.
Here are some pictures from the Easter Egg hunt in our yard and the girls dresses.
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The kids are waiting downstairs while we hide the eggs.
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Detail of Julianne's dress.
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Mallory insisted on wearing her black tights and I let her since she thought it looked good. Sweet Mallory.
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We finally finished our paper mache eggs which took about two weeks to complete since we had put on several layers of the paper mache. The kids had fun making the eggs and it was nice because they were basically free to make so that is nice. Since the girls enjoyed making the paper mache eggs and we used all recycled materials I will try to incorporate more paper mache projects into our craft schedule. It is amazing how many different shapes, animals, etc you can make from paper mache. The options are limitless and allows for lots of creativity.
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I had a great idea, I read an idea of shredding colored paper for the Easter baskets grass, but my dilemma was that I did not have any colored paper and I did not want to buy colored paper for this occasion. So I reached into our recycling box and grabbed a some paper and put it in water with food coloring. Ta..da. Colored paper!! I was excited about the idea and the idea of reusing something. The kids did not care and did not even notice the paper and we did not have thrown always any silly Easter egg paper.
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Here is the colored paper. I also used blue KUB envelopes so the kids had a good mix of colors in their baskets.

No a side note, Nathan thinks that Mallory's name is "Girls". We have been calling Julianne and Mallory the "girls" ever since Mallory was born. Well we continued that tradition after we had Nathan. After Nathan it was "the girls and Nathan" or "our children". We when would address the girls in front of Nathan we would say, "Nathan why don't you play with the girls", or "Where are the girls", etc. So this past month and as his language has developed I have noticed that when Mallory is just home or we are in the car he will look over at her and say "girls". It is really funny. He can say "Julianne" but he rarely says "Mallory." So we keep trying to talk to him about it but it sure is cute, even though Mallory does not like it.

Things I am grateful/thankful for:
-Graters Ice Cream. Do I need to say more.
-Having a great Easter with the family.
-Almost fixing our patio door
-Completing the girls dresses on time and feeling happy with how they turned out

Monday, April 6, 2009

An evening at the park

On Saturday evening after dinner I got everyone out of the house and we went to the park with my camera in hand. We had a great time and D put up with me wanting to always take pictures of every moment. The light was great and it was fun to experiment with getting pictures and the light at different angles.
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D was tossing our hoola hoop to Nathan and he would catch it. I love this picture because of Nathan's face.
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We're off to the park with the girl towing their dolls. Julianne's face is priceless (you can't really see it from this picture but it is a kind of teenagerish look.
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D and Nathan. Another priceless facial expression.
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Nathan is yelling, "Girls!".
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The family.
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The only real sight of spring were these blooms. Knoxville is much prettier in the spring than Ohio.
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Nathan in the tunnel slide.
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This was the beginning of our parental torture, the "spinner!"
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Notice the headband.
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The result of the "spinner", crazy walking, falling down and good laughs.
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I think that Mallory is finished with the "Spinner."
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Nathan kept this expression everytime he was coming down from the being high in the air in the swing.
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After playing at the park I took some pictures of the kids in the grass. They had fun and I actually got some pretty good pictures of all three of them.
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On our way home.

Things I am grateful/thankful for:
-Having nice family adventures, even if it just is going to the park.
-seeing the kids have fun outside.
-Laughing at our kids, it was fun to torture them a little.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Butt, butts and more butts

Here are some pictures of the girls butts when they were babies that I uploaded from my older computer in the basement. I especially love Julianne's butt. It is so funny because her butt is almost as long as her legs were. Mallory was smaller and thus did not carry on that characteristic but hers is just as cute.
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Guess who this is? Look at the proportion of her butt to her legs and her thigh rolls.
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Mallory's butt.
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This was my favorite shot of Julianne when she was just one years old.
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This was Julianne when she had Hand, Foot, Mouth disease. It did not bother her too much it just looked bad.
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After she had Hand, Foot Mouth disease her eczema started to really break out. I don't know if it has any relation to it since it might have weaken her skin or allowed Google's dust, her favorite stuffed animal at left of her, to enter into her sensitive skin or what but it does seem kind of strange that since she had that disease her face always broke out in eczema. We know that Googles was a main culprit but she always had Googles since she was six months old.
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This was taken in our backyard just after she turned one and she wanted to collect rocks.
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This is Julianne asleep on D's shoulder after a hard day of playing. I think I see some of Nathan in this shot.
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This is Mallory in our sink when our bathrooms were under demolition and reconstruction. She was probably about one years old.
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Another shot of Mallory. So cute with her dimple.
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Mallory's butt, which looks very similar to Nathan's.
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A blurry picture of Mallory. I do love this picture because it shows her finger sucking, which she still does, and her inquisitive cross eyed look to her.

So those are all the old pictures that I downloaded. One of my favorite leisurely activities, when I have time, is to look through old photos of the kids. I can always remember what were were doing at that time, how the child acted during that time, how I felt during that time and I also like to see how my photography skills have progressed through time. So I will try to post older pictures more often so that I can also tell the story with the photograph and always have the story documented for the kids when they are older.

Well I think that Nathan had his first mini asthma attack from seasonal/plant allergies yesterday. So the past few days he has had a runny nose and then yesterday he started to cough more as the day went on. Well yesterday afternoon it was really nice outside so we went outside and he played outside while I cut down our winter grass, I don't really know what it is called but it looks like tall wheat and in the winter it turns yellow and actually like of looks like straw. Anyway, I cut it down and flecks of the plant were drifting into the air and I even felt like I had a sore throat last night. So after we came in he kept coughing a lot and his cough turned kind of barky, like a croup cough. Julianne had croup once and I distinctively remember the barky cough. He was also breathing harder but not as hard as when he is getting an asthma episode. He was also feeling warm so I took his temperature and it was 99.7 and he always has a temperature when he is breathing harder. So I looked online and I know that some kids only have cough-variant asthma where they just cough instead of wheeze or have labored breathing. But none of the sights discussed a barky cough. So I ended up giving him a breathing treatment before he went to bed since he was still having labored breathing and not feeling as good as he usually does. Well last night he did not cough too much and he is much better today. He also did not have the barky cough after the treatment. It did rain last night and it is cold and dreary out today so that may have helped him. So who knows. I like predictability and I kind of knew his asthma pattern of when he got a cold he started out with a runny nose and then it want to his chest for a few days and then he just had mucus and some coughing. This was different it was just one night and he is fine today and he does not have a cold. I am hoping that he only gets asthma symptoms when he gets a cold but this was not the case. I guess this spring will be a test to see how all the tree pollen and other allergies affect him. I did check the tree pollen counts for yesterday and both the tree pollen and mold were moderate so that may have not been a factor as much as him being exposed to the cutting down of the winter grass.

I had Mallory's school parent-teacher conferences yesterday and Mallory is doing well. The teachers really like her and say that she is a great friend to everyone, is very quiet when she speaks up in class, is reliable and will do her work when she is asked, loves to draw, color, paint and play pretend with her friends in the doll house. All her skills and abilities are all on line with where she should be at. She does have to be reminded a few times to clean up, which also occurs at our house, and she does not know all her letters all the time. So these are all things that we know and are aware of but it is always nice to talk to her teachers about her progress.

Things I am grateful/thankful for:
-running with a friend this morning.
- having a relaxed day today, Julianne did not have school
-having nice weather yesterday
-getting a good nights sleep, I have been going to bed too late the last few nights trying to work on Julianne's dress and so I went to bed at 9:30 last night and I feel better today.