Recent happenings!

Here are a collection of events! My parents took us on a faux-paddleboat ride from Harriet Island to the Minnehaha Falls dog park and back again. It was great, I would highly recommend it! Fiona was really excited. She told me she had to wear her "leash" in case she got too excited and accidentally ran away, so that seemed like a good idea to us!

 

Mum and Dad went home the next day and we had a week of being sad and lonely, then we cheered up and took the girls to their first twins game!

 

We headed out after the 7th inning (it was nap time) but we lost anyway! It was a fun time though! 

Later that week Ben impressed us with his duplo skills and made a duplo little mermaid (and attachable legs) and Flounder...

And I made an attempt at a little mermaid costume for Fiona for Halloween. She has this idea that I'll sew up the tail and carry her around but she's obviously delusional.  

 

Stay tuned for the big reveal! (Assuming she doesn't change her mind and want to be something else by Halloween!) Needless to say she's somewhat obsessed with the little mermaid right now :-)

In other, unrelated news I spotted these in Target recently...

 

Which obviously answers the question: "is nothing sacred!?"

And I saw this on my facebook news feed this evening...

Ah, cause and effect!

Visitors, Dinos and Adele's latest trick!

My parents are visiting this week and we've been doing all kinds of fun things. Today we went to the Zoo to check out the DINOSAURS! I thought the girls might be a little freaked out by the moving and the roaring etc., but they thought it was great. I didn't bring my camera because I had enough to carry but here's a picture of Fiona sitting on the one in the playground area...

(This was a special one, the animatronic ones were definitely not for sitting on!)

And the girls posing as a dino-riding, club waving cave-person... totally historically accurate!

Than later we went to Grandma and Grandpa's house for swimming and picnic dinner. The swimming was wonderful because it was a HOT, HOT day. And the dinner was great because it involved Grandma's potato salad. YUM.

Later, Adele decided she was ready to start standing up on her own! Last week when her physical therapist was over she was super happy with the progress Adele had made over the last month with walking and we made a plan to work on teaching her to stand up in the middle of the room so if she is walking and falls over she doesn't need to crawl to something to pull up on. Well I guess Adele was paying attention because today she did it!! She doesn't have her braces on (and that makes it easier because she can move her ankles more freely without them) but this is a really great achievement nonetheless! She was so excited about it that she did it a bunch of times and it's fun to watch it get easier and easier the more she tries. Here's a video!!

Look at that big smile on her face! 

I guess she waits for Granny to be here to hit the major milestones we're waiting for because she was here for the first unassisted steps last time :-)

My parents are here until Sunday so maybe by then Adele will be hopping and dancing a jig ;-) Who knows what else she could do with that kind of motivation!

Childhood Snack and a very brief catch-up.

I have not posted anything for so long that Blogger has gone and changed it's "make a post" format again. What would normally take a reasonable amount of time has, at the time of posting this, involved a new browser, a computer re-boot and a stiff drink. Good thing I'm not working on this on Monday morning...

 So much has been happening in the last few months and I'm not really sure where to begin!

The majority of Ben's family on his Mum's side were in town for a week or so for the big Erekson reunion - 67 people were in attendance and we had a great time meeting new people and reuniting with the rest...

The whole gang!

We met Laurie and Nate's beautiful little Virginia and Fiona and Adele are both completely in love with her...

Adele and "baby Ginna"

Laurie and Carol and their families were here for a few weeks after the reunion and it was lovely to spend some time with them before they went home to Utah and Switzerland.

Since then work has been getting busy in preparation for the Fall semester and we moved the girls to a different preschool. Both girls are very happy in the new place and their teachers seem really wonderful. The school has 1/3 special needs and 2/3 typically developing kids in each classroom so Adele has a lot of resources available to her.

We've been having fun and going places but since I have failed to take photos of any of these exciting excursions I'm going to skip straight to today's excitement - childhood snack!

I found these digestive biscuits at the grocery store and you don't normally find these here so it was quite exciting and I immediately thought that I should make the girls one of my favourite childhood snacks... I think my Mum had some kind of snappy name for it... something like "digestive biscuits with apple rings and jam on top"...

It's exactly what it sounds like.

 Fiona liked hers a lot...

Adele was not so sure and took hers apart and ate the biscuit and apple separately...

Even Ben enjoyed his and he fully subscribes to the theory that most Scottish food was based on a dare...




No offense, Scottish people... WE all know Haggis is delicious.

I promise to try and post more often now that the busy summer is starting to wind down. Mum and Dad are visiting at the end of the month so I'm sure we'll do something exciting then :-)

Kitchen!

As usual, a lot has happened since I last posted. Most excitingly, my cousin Catherine visited and after months of procrastination and detail changing we finally made our final decisions and got the great kitchen renovation going.

Having Catherine here was really wonderful. Either she was really happy to play with the girls non stop, or she was really good at faking it, but either way she could not have come at a better time and I was able to get a lot of work done and kitchen stuff done while she entertained my darling children. She probably needed a holiday after this holiday, but I was happy to take advantage of her kindness ;-)

She's not a fan of being in photos, so here are a couple of the girls, who were super excited about the presents she brought...

Thanks for visiting, Catherine! We loved having you and we miss you!

In kitchen news! It's almost done. In theory I was going to post a picture every day of the progress. Obviously that worked out.

So here's the sequence of events.

1. Emptied out the cupboards, cleared off the counters. We are, of course, doing this at midnight the night before constructions starts.

BEFORE:

Day 1. Wall comes down.

Days 2 and 3: Drywall, taping, plaster, painting...

Days 4 and 5: New counters and stove (not really blue, but almost gave me a heart attack when I saw it like this). Cabinets are re-hung.

Day 6: Tile backspash, bar top, pendant lights.

Day 7: Grout, touch-ups.

In the days after this we were able to put stuff back and get it all re-organized. In the process I found that we had 9 different containers with some kind of salt in them. And now, looking at this picture I realize the one we actually use is missing, so that makes 10. We were well overdue for a cupboard clear-out.

I also put together some bar stools, which Fiona loves. And then, finally, it was mostly done.

There are some final details to do and some tiling by the back door, and Ben and I have to finish painting the kitchen, but it's almost complete. It's complete enough to post pictures anyway :-)

We really love it!

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!

Mighty Mississippi

My parents left this evening but before they did my Dad wanted to take a walk and visit the Mississippi. We drove over to the Ford Parkway bridge on the Minneapolis side and walked around and across it. I only had my phone with me but we had never been there and I saw some interesting things so today cell phone photos will have to do! At least I took the first few with the app that makes them look all "arty" ;-)

We walked across the bridge first... a half naked guy zoomed up into the picture, but that's ok!

It's interesting that you can cross a bridge in the car many, many times and never really appreciate how enormous it really is, and how much work must have gone in to constructing it. When you're underneath it, it's a very different perspective!

We watched the scum floating about in the river and Fiona chattered away about all kinds of things, then we walked a little further down to the lock and dam. Turns out you they have a whole big area that's open to visitors where you can watch the lock and dam working and it's really interesting.

There are two locks, and I think they have some kind of generator in the other part of the river.

The lock on the left was in operation, but not the one on the right.

Boats coming in, waiting...

Here you can see the difference in water levels (and a couple of leaks).

Fiona is getting to be old enough to start understanding and having an interest in things like this, and it was fun to explain to her how locks and dams work and watch her figuring it out. It was a great surprise activity and I bet we'll be back again soon to just walk around and watch the boats.

Renaissance Festival

My parents leave tomorrow so today was our last day to do some fun things before they go. My Dad loves Scotch Eggs (hard boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat, breaded and deep fried) but apparently it's hard to find them in Scotland now, so it seemed like a good idea to go to the Renaissance Festival so he could have one. Our friends Tanya and "big"* Emily came along to join in the fun.

*Remember, big Emily is not really that big, Fiona just calls her that because she's an adult and therefore taller than little Emily, Fiona's cousin (who is also not all that little).

As soon as we got there Fiona spotted a dragon...

Coincidentally it was Scottish Day, so we saw some Highland Games. Unfortunately what would normally be a much more exciting spectator sport was made very family friendly with the addition of spandex shorts under the kilts so there was no bum flashing. Even without that the hammer throwing was a combination of impressive, and occasionally life threatening when one of the competitors accidentally launched it into the crowd...

Visiting the Renaissance Festival with little kids is a very different experience to visiting without... we didn't manage to watch any of the shows or attend the free wine or beer tastings but we did get to hang out with Fiona who we told beforehand about the prospect of face painting and animals to ride on, and after that she was very, very excited at the prospect of having her face painted and riding on an elephant and that became her list of goals for the trip. We strolled around a little and then inevitably arrived at the elephant spot.

She had such a nice time riding on the elephant... what next? Camels, of course! Oh, to be 3.

After all that fun we took a break in one of the few shady spots and ate some ice cream, then Fiona and Ben went off so Fiona could have her last special treat of the day and have her face painted. While they were doing that Emily, Adele and I checked out the other animals...

Adele really loves animals and found ducks, a Highland Cow, horses and ponies, and along the way I met a sweet talking pickle seller who was definitely my favorite part of the Fair. Yes, there are many pickle related jokes that could be made here, but I'm trying to control myself, it's a family blog after all...

There were lots of fun things to look at...

Fiona came back and was very pleased with her kitty face...

(There was a free wand making craft in the kids area so Fiona and Adele both made a wand too).

We met up with the rest of our party, and by then it was late in the afternoon and everyone was tired and hot so we headed out. It was a lot of fun and Dad even found a Scotch Egg to eat so everyone was happy :-)