Weekend Fun + A Scary Incident

Reading to her babies in Daddy's chair. She has all of her back issues of Babybug up there. Check out that hair. No, I'm not trimming it. I put it up during the day. It's fine.

Putting on a finger puppet show, mostly consisting of throwing the finger puppets though the stage, at the audience. Ha, break a leg!


Eating crackers with a fork. We tried to explain that crackers are finger food and therefore quite correctly eaten with the fingers, but she insisted.

This was after I put some of our food on her plate and cut it up. She's definitely at the imitating stage.

Shortly after this was taken, she finished eating and we gave her Rob's glass with the last little bit of (iced) tea in it to drink. She finished the tea and started chewing on the ice. She loves to eat ice. I heard her making a noise and looked over and she was choking. It wasn't just a matter of something going down wrong -- that happens all the time. She really was not able to breathe. I grabbed her up and handed her to Rob and he flipped her over and kind of pulled up on her stomach and pounded on her back, then flipped her back up to see if she was okay. Nope, she still couldn't breathe. He did that several more times before she was finally able to get a good breath and start screaming. And scream she did. A sweeter sound has never been heard. I took her outside to calm down. As hysterical as she was, she managed to wave to another toddler on the way out. She seemed to be over the whole incident by the time we got in the car and headed home. We will say a few extra "thank you" prayers tonight.

Last night, I finally got around to embroidering a place setting place mat for That Grace. She had a lot of fun carefully putting her little dishes in the outlines.

Taking Down the Tree

This was a special type of cedar tree. It's supposed to "keep its needles beautifully throughout the whole season."


Well, I don't really have anything to add to that.

Lillian Grace enjoyed a little snack on the way home from the store.

Oh, look, her bruise matches her shirt. We've been going outside to play a lot since the weather has been so nice. That Grace fell and hit her face on a pole. It got much worse the next day but it's starting to clear up.

Here's the kitchen my babydaddy and I stayed up late finishing on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, I don't have any before pictures but it was just a wooden refrigerator and sink I found at a local thrift store. They're pretty common in churches and daycares. It was missing the faucet and the sink. Rob took off the top of the sink and replaced it with another one. He cut out a spot for the sink (a bowl from Target's dollar bin) and turned half of it into a stove.
He made the faucet out of some kind of gray tubing -- electrical conduit, I think he said, that we painted with copper paint. I painted the counter with Flexstone and painted the rest of it cream and pink. She has really been having fun with it. Every morning she runs into the living room, flings open the cabinets and the food starts flying. Watch out, Rachael Ray!

Working the Crowd

We went shopping with Caroline this morning. That Grace was very interested in the infrastructure of the store and spent a lot of time exploring it! After determining the racks were indeed sturdy enough to hold the clothes and didn't pose a safety hazard to innocent shoppers, she was satisfied. Tonight we went to a birthday party for a good friend of mine at her parents' house. Her oldest is a little younger than Caroline. Because she was the first grandchild, they let her decide what to call her grandparents. Apparently she ended up calling them what they called each other, so she calls her grandmother by her first name and her grandfather "honey." Now all of the grandchildren do the same. It's really cute to hear these almost-grown boys calling their granddad "honey."

That Grace was captivated by this doll chair and just had to sit in it. She was so intent on sitting in it that she willingly sat this close to my friend's husband. She had birthday cake again tonight. I thought, "Oh well, we're just going home and going to bed; what can happen?" Well, it's 12:28 a.m. and she's up playing babies with daddy. So much for that line of thinking! My friend's mother grew cherry tomatoes in her garden this year much like ours. That Grace saw them sitting out in a bowl and got very excited. She ended up eating four of them in a row. She wouldn't eat the little grape tomatoes on the vegetable platter; she wanted the home grown tomatoes. She turned out to be quite sociable tonight. She was a little clingy when we first got there but once she realized there was plenty of party food and lots of people willing to share, she was quite the social butterfly!