m sings

Apparently the wheels on the bus is best as a solo. Especially the "beep beep beep" part.

Rolling catch

m got an awesome haul for her birthday, all of which is currently in the crib with her (it's getting pretty crowded in there). The lady bug kick-ball is definitely near the top of the list though, because it enables this:

Bunny cake

Sitting around the night before m's birthday this weekend, it took us way longer than you might expect to figure out when we started the build a special cake thing. Turns out that it wasn't until we looked through old blog posts that we remembered that the elephant cake in Tully was the beginning of the tradition for us. Since we firmly established that posterity is important, I give you the making of a bunny...

After floating between cow, cat, dog, and monster, we finally found a bunny

we then figured out that I have no idea where my ruler is, so drew a grid roughly the size of a posted note

 And as luck would have it, a posted note grid fit on our board - hurray!

Alex gets all the credit for the blue...

...and Grammy gets credit for the letters. Ta Da!

Birthday Girl!

Birthdays are exhausting!

for all parties involved, that's for sure. More posting to come, but rest assured we had a wonderful celebration including zoo time in the morning...

... and some serious cake in the afternoon

It's good to be two :o)

Big C little jane

You know that moment when you fall in love with a picture, but then it hits you like a ton of bricks that your baby's no longer a baby when compared to an actual baby?

Yeah I just had that moment.

Puppet Show

Puzzle!

We ventured over to our neighbor's house today, who's daughter recently had a birthday. To our great fortune, she received two of the same puzzle and decided to give the extra one to c. Needless to say, we were home for about 5 minutes before we needed to crack it open.

I did the boarders and Alex helped a bit sorting pieces, but for the most part c did the whole thing independently.

And was pretty proud when she finished it up :o)

M was pretty proud of her too.

More Art

M's moved up to the big girl room at school. Lots of good things with the move, and lots more art.

Story time's always better with Saba

We were lucky enough to get a quick visit from Saba last week. The girls wasted no time taking advantage of a new reader, and this one even brought fresh books!

Arches

Last blog post from the Moab trip I promise :o) Today - the best of the arches.

Delicate Arch

Delicate Arch from within a nameless arch a bit up the trail

Landscape arch

Private arch

Double O arch

Pine Tree arch

And Double arch

Notice Alex trudging away from the camera - he was pretty done with me pausing to take pictures by this point :o)

Three sisters

Well technically they're called the three gossips, but my favorite formation by far within Arches national park were these guys:

The pictures don't do a great job of capturing just how big they were, yet you can still very clearly see where they get their name.

The sky in these shots also gives you a feel for the conditions we were hiking in on the second day...

needless to say the camera stayed safe in the bag during most of the hike :o)

Ute rock art

So much of the west is so new - it's very cool to get to see some very old up close. Very near the trail head for delicate arch we stumbled upon this...

In which Sarah wishes she knew more about photography...

So I'm starting to go through my pictures from Moab. There are the ones that I got lucky

And then there are a large batch where I wish I knew how to work my camera.  Like how to change aperture so I have near focus instead of far

Or far instead of near

Luckily, the landscape is amazing enough that you can still capture some neat things.

Like a batch of color in the very brown landscape hiding in the shade

or in front of a rock that seems too cool to be bothered by gravity.

The cutest little dementors you've ever seen

It's still very much sweatshirt weather here, so we have piles of them all over the house. And why on earth would the girls choose to wear their own when they could instead have fun with dadas?

Rainy day fun

The wet spring weather continues. We find our own fun.

Mom - I see a little of my early tennis career in c in this one :)

First of the good shots

After a fantastic weekend in Chicago (more on that to come), I came home to the hardware needed to both transfer the pictures off of my camera and start to restore the files from the backup of the dead PC. While those things are humming, here's the first of the good pictures of moab to hold you over :o)