Girls and songs.

Fiona likes for me to sing "you are my sunshine" to her, except using "goofball" instead of "sunshine". Today she was singing it to me and I managed to catch it on video. She was in a videoing mood, normally she clams up when I point it at her.

Not to be outdone we discovered that when you sing the beginning of James Blunt's Stay the Night (badly) Adele gets crazy excited! It is also adorable :-)

Fiona loves this song She calls it "wahoo" and asks for it all the time. She likes to watch it on youtube and dance around.

Here's the video...

And here she is singing it. She's singing "wahoo, wahoo... stay the night"

Tomorrow we are heading off to the Wisconsin Dells for a week with my Aunt and Uncle and cousins. It is bound to be a really fin time, but right now I an 3% prepared, so I should go and do some laundry!

Basement!

We began working on turning part of our basement into a habitable space back in early 2009. It took a long time, but now the walls are built, the ceiling is in, painting is done, the carpet is here! The basement finally looks like a real room! A real room with some questionable furniture, but a real room nonetheless!

Here is a before picture (from before we moved in) (you can read the post and see the pics from way back when we started here).

And here's how it looks today:

We plan to replace the ugly folding table with a desk and put a bookcase behind it to hold the various toys that are bound to migrate in here. The projector and screen need to be hung and the speakers need to have something complicated done to them. Clearly I need a real chair, and the walls need some artwork. But that stuff could take another two years, so for now we're basking in the joy of having a space that doesn't feel like a haven for hundreds of centipedes who are waiting to pounce. I'm so happy that we're finally here! Phew!

Only 48 hours and 7 minutes until Saturday!

Well I officially survived hump day of what might be one of the busiest weeks of work I've had. The end is in sight! I am desperate to go to bed, so I'm going to cheat tonight and share this with you instead of making a real post. I heard this song for the first time this weekend and I LOVE it. Enjoy!

Things that made me smile today.

Today was not the best day in the world, but I saw a few things that made me smile, and luckily I remembered to take their "picture".

Side note: I think I need a new word to describe the random (pretty poor quality) pictures I take with my phone. Crapshots? Too potty related. Blurraroids? Just sounds painful. Any suggestions?

1. I was at work and I passed this advert chalked on the ground...

(click to enlarge)

My first reaction was to smile. Who doesn't need more hugs in their day? And frankly, a hug would have been pretty great right then! In reality, the sign was a day old, and let's be honest, it was probably put there by the campus perverts society or something whose main goal was just to cop a sneaky feel of some unsuspecting hug starved student.

2. I got back to my car and found this!!

Car twins!!

I get a big kick out of parking my car next to another car that is the same, and I LOVE that this car parked by me. For the record, mine is the squinty-parked one on the left. And here's another let's be honest... it's possible they HAD to park there because my half-assed parking job left the space next to me open until all the other places were filled. But still - yay! Car twins!

3. I headed back into work this evening, and on my way out saw this!

That, my friends, is an i-pad release day length line waiting for free ice cream. And that brought me back to student-y days where I would have been more than happy to stand with my friends (or the Ben, if he had that kind of patience) in a line that wrapped round a building and far down the street for the promise of a free ice cream cone. And you know what else is in that picture? LEGS! It's warm enough now to stand in that line without getting frostbite. Good times :-)

Busy Monday

I work for a group at the University of Minnesota, and this week we're doing a bunch of events for graduate student appreciation week, so it's going to be a very busy week for me. This morning the girls accompanied me on a couple of trips up to St. Paul to deliver goodies to give out to the students, and in between those we had a trip to the park...

Fiona is funny sometimes. She wanted to climb a ladder that started out vertical, but then twisted to be sideways and horizontal. She began climbing and insisted she could do it because: "I'm a toddler Mummy, I'm so big!". Once the ladder began to twist she changed her mind and said "it's just too scary, I'm only a little girl". She makes me laugh.

On our way back from our 2nd St. Paul trip we stopped to have some lunch. Fiona loves to eat soup at the co-op, but Adele is quickly overtaking her in the amount that each girl eats at meal times.

After lunch we headed home for about 45 minutes, during which Fiona amazingly fell asleep on the couch. I think it's possible she is getting sick because she NEVER does this.

Sadly we were off for our next adventure - the car dealership. My car was in just last week for repairs but since then developed a weird squeak in the back. They have a playroom so the girls were entertained, but it was still a pretty boring 2 hours. Luckily they fixed it, and it's still under warranty so it was free!

Fiona loved rocking this bear in a cradle... she kept telling us to "shh" and that we'd get time outs for being noisy while her baby was sleeping. And this meant any noise whatsoever. So after 2 hours of that I was ready to be done!

Adele entertained herself by trying to chew on the metal windowsill. After 2 hours I was ready to be done with that too.

Then it was home time. Dinner. Then we went back to the park for a little play ebfore bed. Fiona played with Daddy while I pulled pieces of playground rubbery stuff out of Adele's mouth.

Then it was home to bed for the girls, and then I worked until 11 which explains the dullness of this post! And now I am off to bed.

Double park day!

This morning the weather was gorgeous! We took a walk and stopped at the park. It was sunny and warm and wonderful. Trees were in bud, birds were singing, skin was showing. Warmer weather makes me so very happy!

Fiona took a late nap, and then was all hyper and crazy so I took her on a late afternoon march back over to the park while Ben visited with John and Mike. Wow, did that weather change! No one was outside and the park was abandoned, and everything had this "pre-apocalyptic" feeling - like a scene in a movie where everyone is hiding out in their houses waiting for the meteor/tornado/zombie apocalypse that is inevitably coming. The sky was grey and ominous and Fiona kept talking about scary clouds and thunderstorms (like in Winnie the Pooh and the blustery day, her latest favorite show). We made it to the park and she played on the slides, but the wind was howling off the lake and we could feel drops of rain so we left pretty quickly.

We made it home without being blown away or struck by lightning. It was good for her to get out and get some exercise because she was pretty tired by bedtime. I hope it warms up again though, because that brief hint this morning was lovely!

The other zoo.

Warning: Today's post is from the zoo and contains scenes of a graphic and arachnoid nature.

We go to the Minnesota Zoo all the time (got to make that membership worthwhile!) but today we ventured North and East to Como Zoo with my lovely friend Emily. Fiona refers to her as "big Emily" which is not very polite but does differentiate her from cousin Emily, who is smaller (but only because she's a child!!).

We didn't take pictures of many of the animals because Adele was in the carrier and gets really angry when I won't let her grab the camera, but we did take pictures of the highlights, such as

Really Adorable Sloth:

Giant tarantula eating something incredibly disgusting:

And of course, Zebra with "appendage"...

As soon as Fiona walked into this enclosure she shouted "willy!". Girl knows her anatomy... And then when we saw the other Zebras she informed us "no willy". Right again Fiona. Ah, proud moments...

The last time we were here I was pregnant with Adele, and we tried to take a picture with both girls to compare how much younger I looked back then, but it was difficult to get both girls to look in the right direction!

Then. Wow, I look young!

Now. Wow, I look tired!!

And here's one of Ben with Fiona so he doesn't feel left out. And so I can take another one of HIM in the same location in two years to make him feel bad about looking so old and haggared. Awww, just kidding. He'll always look like a hot young thing. That's what getting more than 4 consecutive hours of sleep will do for you ;-)

Lookin' good! :-)

And that concludes the highlights from today so far. We're heading out to Grandma and Grandpa's house now to have a family dinner. My brothers in law John and Mike are visiting and arrived this afternoon, so it will be good to see them. And there will be cake. Fiona is excited.