Snowy Days

We have had a number of snowfalls this year, but only a couple have stuck around long enough to really amount to anything. It has certainly been a chilly winter though! We are all looking forward to the warm weather actually staying, as we keep fluctuating up into the 60s and back down into the 30s or even lower. Brr. It wouldn't be so bad if it would just stay cold, but the ups and downs are not fun at all!

2.5 months old

 The kids had a blast in the snow that did stick around long enough to really do anything with. Rebecca insists she wants to go visit Cokum and Mooshum in the winter sometime. Perhaps someday I will be brave enough to drive up there during storm season, but I'm not really sure I want to do that with little people! It's hard to plan around winter storms when it comes to travelling.

Rebecca learned how to make snow angels this year. Elias is not yet quite coordinated enough to make them, to his frustration, but Rebecca made quite a few.

Justin built a snowman with them. It is just slightly shorter than he is, so I guess probably about 5 ft tall. Unfortunately it got knocked down within a few hours of being built, but it was fun while it lasted. I was impressed there was still snow on the ground when the snowman had been built. Elias actually recently brought me some pecans in their shells asking if they were there because the snowman was hiding. We had used pecans as the buttons for the snowman.

3.5 months

Rebecca has been begging me to teach her to knit, so I sat down with her this winter to teach her to do so. She still needs a refresher every time she starts to knit again, but once she gets going again, she actually does pretty well! She says she wants to make a scarf for Esther. We'll see. She keeps getting bored and leaving it behind.

Rainy Day

Rainy days can be long. Especially with little ones to keep out of trouble the whole day! Thankfully, our day started with library story time this morning, which took care of the morning. They do both nap still, so that took the first two hours of the afternoon. The rest of the day though (from around 2pm until 6pm) needed to be filled! And, with lightning and thunder (and thus warnings of cloud to ground strikes), it wasn't wise to entertain them by taking them out in the rain. 

My little lefty :)

We spent some time doing school. Rebecca worked on a counting/colouring sheet, and Elias started working on yellow stuff, so he coloured a crayon yellow with his yellow crayon.

We talked about peanuts and George Washington Carver for Rebecca's school time today, and one of the things we were supposed to do is make peanut butter dough (like playdough) to play with. It's a great idea, especially with Elias involved, because he believes in eating regular playdough. However, we are a peanut free home! We have a peanut allergy!! So, we used sunbutter in place of the peanut butter. As it turns out, sunbutter must be slightly drier than peanut butter, because I had to add extra liquid. We had sunbutter crumble instead of dough! So, a tablespoon of orange juice later, it was ready to go.

And then, when they were tired of playing with and eating their dough, we put it away and exchanged it for coloured noodles, which I had coloured last night. As it turns out, the recipe I was following wasn't nearly as detailed as a recipe I found later on, and I probably would have had much darker, brilliant colours, had I read the second recipe first. However, both children enjoyed it anyway!

The "brown" is actually purple.... it really didn't want to take.

Elias struggled a bit with getting the noodles onto his yarn, so he got a lot of help. He had fun trying, and then every time would look up and say, "Help!"

Rebecca was very focused on making hers work. She loved the activity, and I'm sure she will ask to do it again soon.

Rebecca made a "Noah's Ark" necklace

Elias was very pleased with the results of his (Mummy's) hard work! :)

We also read a number of books which we brought home from the library this morning, and watched the Veggie Tales movie Where is God when I'm S-s-s-s-s-s-scared... and watched a portion of March of the Penguins, because Rebecca wanted a penguin movie to watch.

Painting and Swinging :)

Rebecca just loves to do anything related to arts and crafts, and I found this little picture frame at Target in their dollar section, so I picked it up for Rebecca to paint for her Grandma.

Elias fell asleep in his carseat on the way home, holding onto a glowstick he was given at the black light mini golf place, so I took the opportunity to test out the tripod Justin gave me for Christmas. :) These are old pictures of him, I believe from January, as he no longer rides in the infant car seat. We have since switched him into a MyRide 65 convertible seat since he was getting too big for the infant carrier (as you can somewhat see in the pictures, actually).

And, still one of Rebecca's favourite activities, is swinging. Because Elias uses the baby/toddler swing, and she is (usually) pretty good about holding on to regular swings, we decided to get her a "big girl" swing instead of getting her a baby swing as well, so now they can both swing at the same time. Maybe one day we will have a swing set for them as well, but for now the porch attached to the garage (for the FROG) suffices. I'm not sure how we'll mount a slide for them, however!

And, while that is all I'm posting this evening, I do have many, many, many pictures coming, it's just going to take me a few days to get to them all. :)

Some pictures I'd forgotten about!

A number of churches in the area do harvest festivals and such over the weekends of October, so we spent our weekends in October going out and having some fun as a family. On October 31, it's rather customary to go to these events in costume, so we took Rebecca to one of them, went to a trunk-or-treat event, and then went to visit all the neighbours.

She got up the next morning, found her monkey costume, put it on, and informed us, "I want more deedee" (deedee = candy). It took me almost four hours to get the costume off her again. Later that day when we went out for a walk, she tried to go up to every house to knock on their doors, and every time she started walking down a drive way she again informed me she wanted candy. Somehow I think she's got that concept DOWN!

Elias very much enjoys his jolly jumper. He's figured out how to make it bounce, and he'll spend an hour in it (when happy). It's great for when Rebecca's doing nursery time and he's refusing to nap! I just wish he'd be happy at 4:30pm, when I need to make dinner!

Rebecca painted with pudding as part of her nursery activities last week. We were doing a "brown and blue" day (the first week is completely colours themed), and I was supposed to have a blue paper plate for her to paint with brown pudding, but I just couldn't justify getting a package of blue plates for ONE activity, so I improvised!

And, as it turns out, she LOVES chocolate pudding!

Some Pictures

We took Rebecca and Elias for a walk, and Rebecca fell asleep. Then, just as we were getting home, she startled and ended up with her hands staying in the position shown. Justin said she was dreaming about being a bunny. :)

Elias, on the other hand, did NOT fall asleep!

It is REALLY hard to get a good picture of Rebecca-- she's constantly on the move!

But, it appears I managed to get at least one!

Rebecca just LOVES to use scissors. If she's given the opportunity, she'll use them for 1/2 an hour or more!

Computer Troubles

Well... the biggest reason I've not posted much on here in the last month or so is that my computer is having troubles. This means that all the pictures I have on my camera haven't been transferred to my computer, and that I haven't had the opportunity to sit down and write a 'newsy' post either (not that I can think of any news anyway)! Every time I try to do anything with my computer it either shuts down completely, or restarts without being told to. Justin says it isn't an issue with the CPU overheating, and it isn't an issue with a half dozen other things, so he's pretty sure the motherboard is cracked... and we're not sure how that happened exactly, but it's not worth the time and money to attempt to repair the machine. Soooo... this means I need a new computer so that Justin can keep his 'toys' for his own purposes... which means I get to use one of his until we can afford a new one. I think this is going to mean I'm adopting the desktop computer in the FROG which we rescued from the trash pile. We priced laptops and netbooks yesterday (found one netbook I would be *okay* with, the rest I do not want), and we've got a lot of savings ahead of us to replace the computer... maybe Christmas... or my birthday next year(?), I suppose!

Anyway, something we have been saving and watching for is an inexpensive propane grill/BBQ, which I happened to find... yesterday! It was posted on Craigslist, just a few years old, everything on it works, and so now I'm looking forward to a grilled hamburger for supper this evening! Justin happened to have a 3/4 full propane tank, while it is a little rusted on the exterior, it holds the gas just fine, so I guess it just needs sanding and a new paint job. :) However, we do have a new tank in case they refuse to refill that one, as we're not sure anyone will be okay filling it.

Rebecca is now talking a steady stream to us, though we only understand about half of what she says. She seems quite certain she is communicating a message though, lol! Pretty well every sign she knows is accompanied by it's verbal word now, and we're working to teach her even more signs, so we'll be able to more clearly understand what she thinks she's communicating to us!

We had a week of sickies this past week, which started out with me not feeling too great, and then Rebecca started running a fairly high fever early Wednesday morning, continued through the full day, was fine Thursday until late afternoon at which point her temperature spiked up again, and then she's been fine ever since. I guess it's just going to remain a mystery as to what caused it, as the only other 'symptom' she has is an incredibly runny nose. Perhaps it was the flu.

Rebecca's current all time favourite thing to do is get her hands on any crayons or markers she can, and any paper she can find, and just COVER the paper with colour. She'll sit for 15 minutes or more at a time just colouring on a sheet of paper, and the thing literally has colour on it from one edge to the other when she's done. The results make me rather thankful that I purchase washable crayons for her! She actually is always fascinated by anything that is 'art' orriented any time we are in the stores-- she is always attracted to the Crayola kits on the shelves, and all the colouring/painting supplies they have, and it seems we essentially have to drag her away from them. And... speaking of colouring and such, we discovered something in the last couple of weeks we never thought we would need to know-- they use soy based inks print on many commercial cards (particularly ones made with recycled materials or other 'green' companies), and they use soy to make some brands of crayons! I never thought I was going to have to be careful what sorts of inks or crayons I got for my child!!

And, with that I should be off, we've got church this morning, and then hopefully a prenatal appointment this afternoon-- with all the sickies at our house, and then my midwife having 4 births this past week, we haven't had the opportunity to do the appointment that was supposed to happen this past week yet!

Spring Party

Rebecca has taken a liking to stickers lately, and she just happened to find this sheet of coloured dots sitting in our front yard one afternoon last week. :)



Justin's work had a Spring Party for the kids, so we took Rebecca to it. She completely fell in love with glitter. I'm not planning on getting any for at least another year or two! What a mess!! She figured out how to pour it and if she could have figured out how to get glue out, I'm sure she would have been gluing and glittering all by herself!

I found the letters for her name, she stuck them on... hence the fact her name is apparently Rebceca instead of Rebecca. :) She followed instructions on order until we got to the C's... :)

Glitter on her hands!

Juice break

A basket hat...? Interesting use for a basket!

Visiting with the Spring Bunny. She was convinced to go to him using the little frog in her left hand, and when she sat with him, they gave her her own little bunny to take home... the only thing was, she wanted to take the frog home and leave them with the bunny! It took a few minutes to convince her to leave the frog behind!

And then everyone headed out for an egg hunt. :) It was quite successful, and they had made a separate hunting area for the 0-3 year olds, so they got the chance to pick up their own eggs. It was quite a successful practice/learning run for Rebecca, as she did a hunt this afternoon as well, and needed no prompting to pick up the eggs and place them in the basket. :)