MOP WARS

I know, I am totally off the blogging wagon. And so much has happened that there's little point in trying to catch up.

So TODAY...

Tuesdays are our low key days. Fiona is kind of a homebody and likes to have a day where we don't need to go anywhere or do anything, or put clothes on, and that gives me a day to try to get some housework done. Today we really needed milk so we did make a trip to the store, but she wore her pyjamas. I figure if 2/3 of us are dressed that's good enough.

After we got home I had the bright idea of having the girls assist me with the cleaning. They both love spraying with the cleaning spray and today the floor needed to be mopped. It seemed like a good idea at the time to let them help mop with the toy mop they have. Little did I know that this would be the catalyst for the most epic mop war you have ever seen. They both desperately wanted to be the sole mop user. It was bizarre. At one point Fiona grabbed the mop from Adele, hit her on the head with it and ran away and hid. By the time we were done both girls were crying and I was bellowing the ever useful phrase "BECAUSE I'M THE BOSS!". Madness. At least the floor was clean though.

In an attempt to finish the small amount of cleaning I was trying to do I set Fiona up with her markers and some paper, and put Adele in a separate room with another toy. All was calm until I caught the hint of an ominous sound over the roar of the vacuum. After a sprint to the bathroom I found Adele armpit deep in the toilet proudly scrubbing it for all she was worth with the purloined mop. There was a significant amount of water on the floor, but thankfully I had already cleaned the toilet.

Shortly after that Fiona showed me what she had been drawing. Here it is:

According to Fiona from left to right, we have: Monty, Adele in possession of the mop (standing on the stool), with water on the floor, Fiona crying because Adele has the mop and me trying to make Fiona feel better. I know it looks suspicious but I'm HUGGING her, ok. 

And just to show that it's not all tears and drama, here are a few recent happy pictures.

Adele loves Monty so much. Monty is willing to tolerate her love. 

At the Autoshow this weekend.

Story time before bed.

Pictures with brief descriptions

I uploaded the pictures from the camera and I don't have much to say but here are a few pictures and brief descriptions of what we've done in the last few weeks.

Birdhouse painting. I don't know much about birds but I have to assume these houses are for pretty tiny birds. Hummingbirds maybe.

Taking walks and looking for ducks. Fiona likes to quack a them when she finds them because she thinks they will understand what she's saying. Because she's speaking in duck. She does the same for dogs.

Earning their keep! They love to clean and dust. I encourage that. Here's Adele making her MAD FACE.

Riding bikes! Fiona graduated to cousin Emily's old big girl bike. She's actually really fast, I have to run to keep up and you know how much I like running. Zero. I like running zero. But Fiona loves to ride her bike so I do it. She yells at me to go faster, it's like having a mean personal trainer but for FREE!!

Adele's still slightly to short for the tricycle but she likes to sit on it while Ben pushes. It's a good balance exercise for her.

Library! We love books.

Lake walks rewarded with ice cream cones! 

And last, but by no means least, Goslings!

Fiona was so happy to meet these little fluff balls on a walk with friends. Makes a nice change from worms!

Tuesday Fun!

Today it was really warm. It's been a very mild winter so the first real warm day isn't as noteworthy as it usually is, but it was in the 50s and lovely outside so after daycare the girls, dog and I headed to the lake for a walk. With 50s of course comes slush, mud and puddles and Fiona was very excited by this.

Towards the end of the walk the girls experienced the first swing on the swings of 2012.

Then we headed home, wet and sandy.

So what better activity for the afternoon than baths? And how do you get some stuff done while your kids take a bath?

Bath them in the kitchen sink...

Fiona spent her time carefully transferring water using containers, cups and a syringe...

and Adele went absolutely nuts drenching the kitchen in water...

After that the girls insisted on bathing the dog, who was covered in sand and mud, and it was way too chaotic to take any pictures but he's all clean and sweet smelling now, though the entire bathroom was left looking like I'd shaved a yeti.

After all that work I felt it was time to take a break and see what was going on on facebook, and noticed that they are now hitting my interests pretty much 100% with their targeted ads... here's what they were promoting to me today (click to enlarge)...

Creepily accurate.

Adele's big day.

I know. I'm sorry. It's been too long. Turns out those two additional PT sessions took up way more time than I anticipated and combined with getting very little sleep lately, I haven't had much energy to get anything done in the evenings. If you think this poor blog has been neglected, you should see the state of my house...

ANYWAY, my Mum is visiting this week and that's exciting for us, so I was planning to try to catch up on this, and a number of other things while she's here.

Fiona is very excited!

A couple of weeks ago Adele got a new AFO (ankle-foot orthotic) for her left leg - it comes all the way up to under her knee and allows her foot to lift up, but prevents it from tilting down. This is to stop her dragging her toes along behind her when using her walker. Well, today the extra PT, new AFO, and wanting to show off for Granny all came together and she took.... HER FIRST STEPS!! I don't know about you but I wasn't sure she'd ever get round to it, and I can't quite believe it happened!

She was so proud of herself, it was really fun to see. She is old enough that she understands a lot now, and she really knew what she was doing and wanted to do it over and over again. She kept saying "walk more" then she wanted to see the movie I made of her walking. Needless to say, I have many, many movies of her walking, so here's one for your enjoyment :-)

In other news, this month I had a birthday. Not a big one... though next year you'll all be invited to a super party!

Fiona got very, very excited about Valentines day. Her class at daycare had a party and she made each of her friends a card...

And when not being exhausting, the girls played, watched movies, and were cute...

I don't really have any other news! I'll try to take pictures while my Mum is here at least. And as Adele takes more steps, I'm sure there will be many more videos of that!

December Events

I'm sure you'll all agree that December was a busy month! Well it flew past here and now it's January already. Happy New Year everyone!

We had a lovely month - my awesome cousin Catriona and equally awesome sister Ali both visited and Ali stayed for Christmas.

Gingerbread houses were constructed by Ali and Fiona...

Christmas photos in cute matching dresses were attempted, with partial success, but they never made it into christmas cards...

We performed a dramatic enactment of How the Grinch Stole Christmas in the annual Hamer talent show. There were many other spectacular talents on show this year too... here's 10 minutes of the most impressive talent showing you've seen.

Santa Claus stopped by and brought Fiona the backpack she wrote to him to ask for. She had what she described as "the best day ever" opening presents from all the kind and generous friends and family we have. Adele had fun too but was a little overwhelmed.

Adele had a big assessment at Shriners, which is an amazing hospital for children specializing in (among other things) orthopaedics. We are lucky enough to live very close by and they provide services for free to people who do not have insurance or whose insurance doesn't cover the treatment they need. She's been diagnosed as having mild cerebral palsy which almost exclusively affects her left leg, and we're going to be doing physical therapy there two times a week in addition to the PT we do once every 2 weeks through the Minneapolis schools early intervention program. There's no reason she won't learn to walk, it'll just take a while, but all the extra PT will be great.

We headed to the U.P. for New Year and stayed in a log cabin in the woods with some friends.

Minneapolis has been eerily warm and almost totally snow-less so far this winter, so Fiona was very excited to stomp around in the snow up there.

Adele doesn't like to wear her mittens so didn't last long but enjoyed rolling around in it and observing for a while.

We had a great time hanging out with friends, and Fiona and Adele loved making two new friends of their own.

Today (and I did initially plan to just write about this before feeling a need to summarize the whole month) Fiona requested that I paint her fingernails (for the first time). She noticed a girl in her class at daycare had hers painted and asked me to do hers for her. She asked for red, which, luckily, is one of the two nail polish colours I own (the other being clear) so I painted them for her. I'm guessing that this is only the beginning of many requests for things she'd like because her friends have them...

She was so happy she kept bouncing around and it was very hard to get a picture in focus!

So that's the excitement for today. And who knows what tomorrow might bring!

Ben's Birthday

Last Saturday Ben had another birthday... and that meant a whole weekend of partying!

On Friday evening we got together with his family to have a joint celebration for him and his Dad. His Mum made an egg, black bean, salsa, cheese concoction which was delicious and served it with tortillas, avocado and crispy roasted potatoes. Yummy!

For dessert there were birthday cupcakes and apple cake. Together the birthday boys managed to blow out all 10 of their candles.

Fiona was very excited to lick the frosting off the top of her cupcake!

Saturday was Ben's actual birthday and what he wanted to do more than anything was go to the Zoo to meet Diego. Well, we had to oblige him, and Fiona was quite excited to do that too, so it worked out. At least, until Fiona actually saw Diego and then got kind of freaked out because he was too big and couldn't talk. I felt really sad for her and guilty for not explaining well enough in advance what Diego would be like in real life (i.e. a dude in a giant Diego suit). Oh well.

(Here's Diego, from a safe distance)

We had lunch at Fuddruckers which cheered Fiona up because she got to eat only chocolate milk and french fries and that's her favorite!

In the afternoon we had a dance party. Even Brodie joined in, which the girls love.

I gave Ben Robo Rally for his birthday and our friends Tanya and Boyd came over in the evening to eat pizza and play it with us. I failed to take any pictures but we had a really nice time.

Happy Birthday super love!!

Lazy Vegetarian: Day 28

Breakfast... tea and leftover pizza! Yay vacation!

Adele and Olivia shared some nutella and toast and chili cheese fritos. Breakfast of champions!

We headed down to Navy Pier and walked around a little, the had some lunch...

Lunch: Vegetable panini and waffle fries.

After lunch we went to the Children's Museum. It was so fun, the girls had a really great time.

Fiona loved the tree house area where she could fish...

And Canoe!

I have some cute pictures but it's taking Foooooorrrrrrrrrreeeeeevvvvvveeeeeeerrrrrr to upload them so I'll post them on flickr some time when we're back. Hopefully some time in the next year.

On the bus on the way back I spotted this fantastic advert. I'll leave the interpretation up to you, but I think it's very interesting ;-)

This evening we went to the rehearsal/family get together dinner before the wedding tomorrow. It was so nice to see and meet some of Ben's cousins and family (and family to be) and the dinner was really delicious! Fiona was surprised and delighted to come out of the bathroom and find... Grandma!!

Full disclosure: I had more salad and beans and potatoes than shown, but I had to borrow Ben's phone for the pictures (it has a flash) and kept forgetting to take the picture before I started eating...

Salad!

Mashed potatoes, red beans and rice...

Corn muffin. I love these so much.

Bread roll (shared with Fiona)

Pecan pie. Ohhhhhhh YUM.

It was super delicious. We went to this restaurant. Next time you're in Chicago you should go!

We're having a great trip and are so happy to be able to spend time with people we love who we don't see nearly often enough :-)

Lazy Vegetarian: Day 23

Breakfast: Fiona asked for pancakes so that's what we had today! I made them with whole wheat flour and they were yummy!

Today's mug is from the trip to Scotland we took in 2007. I won round trip flights for two to Dublin in a competition at the Fineline on St. Patrick's Day (just by putting my name in the jar, I didn't have to embarrass myself in any way!) so we flew to Dublin for a few days then to Scotland for the family holiday, then back to Dublin for a day before heading home.

Mum and I being statues...

Edinburgh

We stayed in a beautiful house way out in the country. This is the hill behind the house. You had to climb it to get cell phone reception... a bunch of us climbed it one day, which involved trudging though a stream raging river, climbing over some fences and staring down a number of sheep.

These little girls are not little any more. And that makes us OLD.

Catriona has never been more impressed with an activity...

We made it!! Who got text messages?

We stayed in a B&B near Dublin for a night on our way back but I don't remember where it was... pretty though!

It was a fun trip!

Lunch: We hadn't been to the mall for a while so we went there this morning. We had pita pit for lunch... YUM!! I had falafel and hummus and veggies and we all shared some fries.

Fiona chose the Blues Clues ride to go on.

Adele doesn;t like to go on the rides, but does like to watch her sister!

This afternoon we walked (and Fiona tricycled) over to the park for a while. She's getting really fast and is pretty good at steering now. It took a lot of practice - I think she got my coordination genes!

Adele went on a big girl swing for the first time and LOVED it. I have a cute video but it's upside down and it's going to take some time to right-side-up it, so I'll have to post that another day.

Dinner... leftover soup and bread and some frozen taquitos (well, they weren't frozen after I cooked them).

This evening I put my mediocre sewing skills to the test and worked on Fiona's halloween costume. She has a party tomorrow and I'll reveal the finished product tomorrow. Prepare to be underwhelmed with the effort on my part ;-)