Easter 2011 Part II

The Easter Bunny was not spotted on Easter Sunday, however he did leave behind some huge clues pointing to the fact that he had indeed made a stop on Livesay Lane.

 Kyle loved running around the house, spotting the HUGE eggs that were hidden here and there. That bunny sure was creative and clever in finding hiding places for such enormous eggs!

 Pure excitement over the gagillion goodies that were hidden in the monstrous eggs.

Grannie, Auntie Jess and Uncle Mark joined us for  dinner that night, and the eggs continued to entertain far into the night!

Happy Easter everyone!

Easter 2011 Part I

This is the first time in about 10 years that I haven't spent Easter in Jamestown with Travis's family. They all get together at Grandma Lillian's on Saturday, but I had to work, so no Easter dinner for this OT. I made sure to send the camera along, and to tell Travis to take lots of pictures. Some of the highlights included:

1. Miss Em in a super cute, super girly dress

 

2.

  

Easter art projects

 The Great Worm Hunt

Eggs

This is the first year that we colored Easter eggs with Kyle. Despite the 10 beautiful colors of dye he had to choose from, the only color worthy of his attention was, of course, wellow.

 

 Where does he come up with these poses?

 If Kyle was captain of this ship, all of the eggs would have been wellow.....

 ...just like his hands.

For those of you who noticed the wardrobe change, yes I actually did intend for him to wear a white shirt to color eggs. I figured if he got enough dye on it we would end up with a tie-dyed look and I could claim to be one of those super artsy moms who does fun projects with my kids all day. Unfortunately Kyle decided to have a little OCD moment and change the second he got a little, barely noticeable drop of color on his t-shirt, go figure.

Who needs a puppy when Emily is around?

Lots of families have puppies as part of their families. They love them, and play with them, and reap the rewards of the living vacuum cleaner at meal time. We don't have a puppy, but I'd place bets on Emily's ability to out eat just about any puppy when it comes to food on the floor.

Sure, babies are known for their unwavering determination to stick weird things in their mouths, this is how they explore their world, no big deal. Ha! Emily has made it her life's goal to find every little speck of anything on the floor and eat it. However, stick a cut up banana or carrot on her highchair tray and sit back to enjoy the look of pure disdain that she will surely shoot your way. Take this morning for example. She has sprung her two bottom teeth and so I've been trying to introduce soft solids into her diet for the past few weeks. First thing this morning when I knew she was starving I gave her some chopped up banana, and this is what I got in return

 You expect me to eat that?

 You eat it, puhleeze mama!

 Things she will eat include

 smushed up banana

 unidentifiable crumbs Kyle drops

cardboard?!?!?

Since we moved into the new house you can also find Emily cruising along where the living room carpet meets the laminate flooring in the kitchen, picking at the edge of the carpet until she finds the loose fibers, which must surely taste better than a chopped up carrot judging from the hundreds I have already wrestled out of her mouth in the past 2 months. She now realizes that mama and daddy usually win when it comes to removing things from her mouth, and she has started just sticking her tongue for us to take the (insert random non-food item here) out of her mouth. Sometimes when she sees us coming, she smiles sweetly and just handing us the (insert random non-food item here).

Another super talent of Emily's ~ the ability to crawl at moch 7 when she spies a tasty morsel across the room. Yup, my money is on Emily. If you find yourself with nothing to do some evening, just gather up your puppy and a couple of bucks and come on over.

Playing naughty; The good, the bad, and the ugly

"Mama, wanna watch naughty". Huh? "Wanna watch NAUGHTY!!" Naughty is the word of the month. It is used to describe anything that involves fighting with light sabers, hitting, kicking, pushing or knocking things over, but when you are an almost fwee year old little boy, naughty is also soooo much fun.Watch naughty is Kyle-speak for Star Wars movies. Play naughty with pillows indicates not only that you are about to be smacked across the knees or back with a pillow, but that you are expected to reciprocate. In fact, the harder you send Kyle flying, the longer he'll want to play.

 We've played naughty with pillows so much lately that he has even perfected his game face:

The Good: Kyle knows that Emily is too little to play naughty, and he respects that...most of the time. 

The Bad: There is the infrequent attempt at WWF-style wrestling, which surprisingly Emmie enjoys on occasion

The ugly: Regrettably there is a down side to the recent over-use of the term "naughty" in our house, as one member of this family now has the belief that being naughty has an element of fun to it.

Many of you may remember this unfortunate incident involving a tub of super strength diaper rash cream. Once in a life time incident, or recurring nightmare? If you guessed the latter then you win the prize. In the wee hours of Sunday morning I peeked into Kyle's room to check on him on my way to feed Emily. Apparently  he had gone into her room in the middle of the night, retrieved the tub of super-duper-strength butt cream, and returned to his room for a little late night art project. The damage appeared to be minor, a few small spots on the carpet and some smeared on a box of diapers. I took the tub of triple paste and put it in the bathroom, and before I left for work that morning I pulled up directions online for how to remove zinc oxide from carpet, leaving the supplies on the counter so Travis could clean up later. Fast forward to noonish when I arrived back home to find that those few, small spots had some how exponentially expanded to include large areas of carpet in Kyle's bedroom.

I will apologize to those of you who were unable to find any Arm & Hammer baking soda or Dawn dish soap on the store shelves this week, as I did have to use an alarming amount of each of them to remove all of the water-proof butt ointment from the carpet. I am pleased to say that Ky's carpet looks almost like new, and all butt cream is now kept out of reach of little hands. Some day this will be funny. Some day.

A taste of life with 3 kids

I am not too proud to admit that my son just may love his cousin, Brina, more than he loves me. Very rarely does he squeal with delight or chant my name as he does when he sees her or hears her name. Lucky for him, she reciprocates his affection, maybe not to the same degree, but there is occasional squealing when Brina sees Kyle as well.

You can imagine the delight and joy expressed in our house when I told Kyle that Brina would be coming to spend part of the day with us. I had Jessica drop of Brina's car seat when they came over so that I could take all 3 kids to the library for story time. They arrived shortly after 9, giving us plenty of time before we had to leave to make the final session that started at 10:30, or so I thought.

After gathering sippy cups of water, making sure there were dipes and wipes in the diaper bag, and that all three little ones had clean, dry clothes I headed out to the garage to put Brina's car seat in the truck. Attempting to proactively prevent pouting, crying or other unpleasant foolishness I moved Emily's car seat base to the third row seat and placed Brina's seat next to Kyle. I was back in the house in less than 10 minutes, but little did I know what I was to find.

What? You don't really see anything picture worthy? Ok, how about this one

All I have to say is this, while lotion may be super moisturizing on your skin, it does nothing for your hair. So instead of jumping in the truck for a ride down to the library Brina and Kyle spent some time here:

Miss Em supervised the whole time. Once she realized that she was not next, she expressed her displeasure by sitting on the floor by the tub and crying. Hard. I didn't happen to capture the moment on film, but it looked a lot like this:

All was not lost as we headed to the play land at Gateway Mall where the two naughty mischievous toddlers ran, jumped and squealed their little hearts out. Emily boycotted sleeping in her stroller, I'm sure she was worried about missing some of the action. She did fall asleep on the car ride back home where we had lunch, and Kyle and Brina kicked back to relax and wait for Jess to come rescue me.

Three kids, one adult? Nothing a little shampoo can't fix.

PBS programming: The mis-education of today's youth

Kyle has picked up a phrase or two from some of the shows that he watches. One of my favorite moves he has devised comes from a combination of two of his favorites: Pocahontas and The Lion King. It involves marching around like the hyenas while chanting "Savages! Savages!" Luckily it sometimes comes out sounding like "Sausages! Sausages!" so when he begins chanting and marching around in a circle while in public people don't give me the stink eye. He also loves Dinosaur Train which is on PBS. It is from this show that Kyle learned the song/dance "great big stomping dinosaur feet". Harmless little song and dance, right? Wrong! Usually when I hear Ky singing and stomping away it is no big deal and I usually pay little attention beyond glancing up at him for a quick giggle. Today he was helping me sweep up all of the puffs that Emily had thrown on the floor when I heard him start stomping around and singing about "dinoswar feet". Something caught my attention, an unusual sound accompanying the usual song and dance. 

As you can see my little man abandoned his broom and dustpan to don his snow boots and dinoswar stomp the puffs. In Kyle's defense, he loves to help me do all kinds of cleaning around the house. He jumps in to help whenever I am sweeping, doing dishes, throwing laundry into the wash or vacuuming. Taking this in to consideration I can choose to interpret his actions in one of two ways:

1. He so loves sweeping that he was saddened when the job was completed, and wanted to make more work for me himself; or
2. PBS is actually an evil station that subconsciously brainwashes susceptible little minds into doing evil little deeds.

The jury is still out.