Halloween 2012

So most of you (or those of you who do the facebook anyway) are probably aware that Adele had a scary (for me) issue on Sunday and had to go to the emergency room. She had a rectal prolapse which basically means that the inside of her butt fell out. Yeah, really. It was not fun.  Luckily it seems that it was most likely caused by constipation and having general muscle weakness anyway, and by treating the constipation it should hopefully not happen again, but we're still waiting for the blood test results to rule out a variety of much worse possibilities. She seems to have recovered from the experience though I'm still anxious every time she goes to the bathroom! In more positive news she has been working on potty training and is doing a really incredible job! She's a superstar.

So after that was this week which contained today - the most wondrous of all days - Halloween. Fiona has been extremely excited for Halloween and wanted to decorate and carve pumpkins and watch scary stuff on TV and anything else halloween-y. So we did. On Monday we made cookies, and on Tuesday we frosted them...

And decorated them...

 

And then we carved some pumpkins... the girls made some delightful faces as they scooped out the guts!

 (Adele is refusing to let me remove her hospital bracelet and I don't care enough to fight her on it)

Fiona designed the face and I wielded the tools. The girls were pretty happy with their creation!

Spoooooooooooky!

Then today was the big day! The girls got to wear their costumes to preschool and that was very exciting. Then this evening we headed down to Apple Valley to trick or treat with the cousins.

On the way there is this house... we pass it a couple of times most days and the girls are fascinated by it. They call it the spooky house. After preschool we stopped and got out of the car to have a closer look at all the spooky stuff. Fiona was nervous but Adele reassured her and told her there was no monster. This guy has been setting up for weeks and goes all out with the creepy decorations including tableaus of real flattened roadkill squirrels being pecked at by real taxidermied birds. I would not be in the least surprised if he has the corpse of his mother in his basement. We didn't linger long as Fiona was becoming increasingly agitated, but the amount of scary stuff packed in there was impressive!

The sun set while we were driving and I took this picture from the bridge over the Minnesota river on 77. 

Then... trick or treating time!!

The whole gang...

Adele waked the entire way, including up a large hill. At one of the houses there was a guy in a really impressive home made robot costume handing out candy and as soon as Adele spotted him she froze and refused to go any further. She squeaked out a "no, thank you"  when he took off the head and offered her a treat and backed away immediately. She's still talking about the "scary robot that was too scary".

Fiona somehow remembered that I love almond joy (bountys with a nut on top for the Brits) and she specifically picked one out to share with me. As soon as she got it at the house she was at she showed me and told me about it. She's awesome. 

Happy girls!

In the end Fiona changed her mind about the mermaid costume and wore her cat costume from last year. She really loves that cat costume!

We had a great time! Happy Halloween everyone!

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!

Fiona's bad day

Today started well for Fiona. She was up and at 'em at 5.45. Had a cookie for breakfast. The cookie had oatmeal in it so it's healthy. She played with Daddy and Dell-Roo and then made some paintings with her feet (her new favourite game). She sat in the kitchen sink for a while to clean her feet (and she cleaned the sink too, so that's pretty nice!). Then she dried off and played some more. I made her a totally awesome duplo helicopter...

Then she got a BIG owie. She closed a door on her thumb and somehow really, really hurt it. She tore a big flap between the knuckle and the nail and it clearly needed stitches, so off we all went to the emergency room. She was hysterical, it was awful. Luckily there was no wait and they saw us immediately. I think running in the door with a child screaming that loudly will get you attention in most situations, and this time it worked to our advantage.

They x-rayed it and found that she'd actually managed to fracture it. Poor, poor little thing. They had to put in an IV and very heavily sedate her to make her comfortable enough for them to get a good look at the wound, and it seemed she'd nicked the tendon, but it looked ok. THAT was a relief. The doctor gave her 4 or 5 stitches and bandaged her up, and then the sedation started wearing off. Despite the awfulness of the whole thing, it was kind of amusing to see her all goofy and happy after being sedated. She was rambling on about the stars on the ceiling and seeing two mummies, and two Dells (double vision, totally normal), and was, at that point, pretty happy with the world (although she looks totally miserable here, she's not, she's just really zoned out).

After watching the whole "Finding Nemo" movie and eating two popsicles, she was sober enough to be allowed to leave.

She needs to see the doctor on Thursday to have it checked and make sure it's healing properly, and then the stitches come out in about 10 days. She has been in pretty good spirits this evening, and is sleeping peacefully. Hopefully tomorrow will be ok. It's going to be sore for a while.

Since I feel like we should have a happier picture in here too, here she is a couple of weeks ago modeling the hat we made for Adele's friend Aubrey's 1st birthday. I had to have her test it out to make sure it looked ok on on a real live person. And she was just so cute in it, I'm making her one of her own...

Spring = Yard Work

Since October last year we've had a giant pile of leaves sitting in our back yard... they were raked, but never quite made it into bags. Since then, more leaves fell, as did tons of nobbly offerings from our neighbour's tree, which we are so lucky to have half of hanging over our yard. During the winter we cleared out our basement, and some of the old shelves and junk took up residence outside. Combined with six months of accumulated dog poo, all we needed was a car on cinderblocks to complete the picture. It looked bad.

Last week the sun came out, and I was wishing that Fiona could feel the warm grass between her little toes, but sadly you could barely see the grass under the... well... you know. So this weekend Ben and I decided to tackle the mess. 

Fiona was hungry, so Ben fed her lunch while I raked the leaves. This is her 'no thanks, I'm done' face.

Here I am... working so hard! See how much better the first half looks! During my excavation I found all kinds of things like old lost bones and rarely seen white dog poo. Exciting!

Here's Ben picking up the leaves. You can see where the pile used to be.

I even managed to decipher the heiroglyphics included with the play set that Ben's coworker donated to us and I built a little swing and slide for Fiona. And here's the finished product in our newly tidy back yard!

It looks much better. The only downside is that despite it only being April, my freakishly pale Scottish skin managed to soak up enough sun for a toasty sunburn. Time to break our the factor 45!

Booties

Fiona and I are leaving for Scotland tomorrow, and I have a really long list of things to get done before we go. So I thought, what better time than now to attempt to make a pair of booties!

Fiona has some booties, but they keep falling off, and I was worried that one of her feet would be cold on the plane (because by the time we made it through the airport and onto the plane, I guarantee that one of them will be lost). So that's why this project couldn't wait. Really. It's not becuase I loathe packing and am a horrible procrastinator...

I had some really cheap fleece that I bought for sewing practice, and it seemed like a good thing to make booties with, so I thought I'd give it a go. I tried to draw round her foot, but she just thought it was a tickle game, and kept wriggling away, so I guessed the size I needed to make them...

It took a few attempts, but I think the first one turned out quite well, considering that booties are more complicated than napkins...

The difficulty came when trying to create a matching bootie... The second one (on the right) was significantly bigger, and looked kind of deformed...

Ben said they looked like Smurf shoes. I assumed that was a compliment. Still, I thought they'd probably do the job, so once Fiona woke up, I tried them on her feet...

After I knew where her feet were inside them, I trimmed the sides down a little (or a lot on the oversized one!) and now they fit really well. See, it was two hours well spent!

And now I need to get going, because between making the booties, and blogging about the booties, there's a lot left on my to do list!

Fiona's new, super awesome, baby carrier

When Fiona was teeny tiny, she only liked to be carried, so we spent a lot of time wearing this...

And it worked great! We'd take a walk, and she'd take a nap. But she was also significantly smaller and lighter! Recently, wearing this has been really painful, and I started looking for a different kind of carrier - one that didn't put so much stress on my upper back and shoulders. Fiona has specifications... she likes to be able to face outwards so she can see what's going on. And I have specifications... it has to not cost an arm and a leg. So after doing some research, I decided I wanted to try a Moby. The people I talked to said it was actually fairly comfortable to carry a larger child, and the child could be worn in front - facing either way, on your back, or on your hip. And for little babies, you can snuggle them inside it. Miraculous! And what's even better? 

I could make it myself!! 

Ok, stop laughing. I can, really! I am that good. You'll see... 

Ben gave me a sewing machine for my birthday, and the two napkins I made turned out great, so I thought it was time to try something more advanced...

I started by buying some fabric. 16 1/2 feet of fabric... and I cut it in half down the middle. The fabric was only $8, so this project already meets my 'cheap' requirement.

Then I hemmed the three 'unravelly' edges...

Then it was finished! Yay! But wait... what's that you say? It's just a 16 foot strip of fabric? Well, yes, but it aspires to be so much more! With some wrapping and tying, it becomes a...

Brodie carrier!! I was too excited to wait until the morning to test it on Fiona, so Brodie had to do. 

And here are a couple of pictures with Fiona. She got up at 5.45 this morning, so don't judge my appearance too harshly!

And when I flipped her round, she was much happier!

The beauty of it is that it wraps under her bum, and then the fabric is tied round my waist and rests on my hips, so there is much less pressure on my shoulders... the weight is more evenly distributed, so it's less uncomfortable. 

Of course, as soon as I got her in it, she barfed on it, so now it has to go in the wash.

So far I really like it... and the best part is that if I decide I don't want to use it, I didn't spend a fortune, and I can use the fabric to make some more napkins or something instead. Because that's all I can make. Really, this is just a really big, super long napkin!