Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

When I realized St. Patrick’s Day was on Sunday, I looked for Easter dresses with green in them. They can wear them again for Easter in a couple of weeks.

 

Saturday morning the girls woke up to some “leprechaun gold” and a new St. Patrick’s day shirt in their shoes. Sandy wore her shirt, Abby refused. I said, “Don’t you think the leprechauns will be disappointed you don’t want to wear your shirt?” Abby’s reply? “But the Easter bunny loves my dress!”

 

We’ve been doing some fun things to get ready for St. Patrick’s Day, like these rainbow cupcakes:

We frosted them with cream cheese - whipped cream clouds that were amazing! We made layered rainbow jello that turned out amazing but doesn’t show up in the pictures.

 

We also made rainbow bread.

 

It was an absolute disaster – food coloring, flour and bread dough everywhere.

 

 

We had more food coloring on our hands than on the bread:

 

 

And it didn’t turn out quite like the picture on Pinterest. I used the wilton gel colors and I think I should have used liquid food coloring. But the girls thought it was pretty amazing!

 

Sandy’s preschool learned about pets a couple of weeks ago. She came home insisting she had to take a pet to school and we needed to go to the pet store and get a puppy. A call to her teacher confirmed there was certainly no such expectation, but if a parent wanted to bring a pet into class, they could. We were debating what to do when Sandy’s primary teacher gave her a purple plastic fish. She begged to take that. So, a freezer jam full of water and a plastic fish and she was ready to go:

 

She took it to preschool and was thrilled. She’s carried it everywhere with her since. Every night, she transfers it to a smaller container so she can clean out her fish bowl. She’s quite a responsible pet owner!

 

We’ve been growing grass in Easter baskets:

 

 

This is the grass from a couple of weeks, it is growing really good now. I’ll have to take an updated picture.

 

 

We' have had beautiful spring weather this month! Here’s a picture of the girls swinging in the backyard. It’s been such a cold winter, that 50s or 60s feel awesome. So awesome, the girls keep asking questions like, “Can we run through the sprinklers? Can I wear my swimsuit outside? Why do I have to wear shoes?” If our Arizona cousins were here, I bet they’d be wearing jackets and my kids think they should be running through sprinklers!

 

We decided to do another swap package like we did at Christmas time. This time we are swapping with a family in Greece. Here is the package we sent them:

Marshmallow peeps, grow your own snow kit, a book about salt lake, Jello (with a Jello salad recipe), honey (with a honey butter recipe), fry sauce, and salt water taffy. Hope they enjoy it!

Family Picture

Sandy drew me a family picture today:

I labeled the people in her drawing, but she said, “Here’s my dad and my mom and me and my sister Abby and another girl and a baby and a baby and a baby. Oh, and there’s a baby in your tummy, too.”

 

No, I’m not pregnant. No idea where this came from.

Happy Presidents’ Day!

 

 

We decided to celebrate the day by making these finger puppets.

 

Also, does anyone know how to get stains out of hardwood floors?

 

I saw what I thought was a cute idea on pinterest. I used heart-shaped post-it notes with the intention of writing one thing I love about each of my girls on a note every night and sticking it up on their wall above their bed so they could find it in the morning.

On Day 3, I woke up to this. In the middle of the night one or both of the girls pulled down the post-it notes (and I thought I’d put them high enough to be out of their reach), shook their water sippy cups on top of them and left quite a mess. I’ve managed to clean up everything but this mark and it doesn’t even budge. I’ve tried scrubbing, hard wood cleaners, even my steam mop (which probably just set the stain worse) and nothing has touched it.

 

I’m not sure if the lesson from this is:

My kids would make a mess if they were locked in a padded cell.

or

Pinterest projects should be approached with extreme caution.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Yesterday was Sandy’s preschool Valentine’s party. She really wanted to make robot valentine’s, so we put together these juice box robots.

 

This morning, Bill gave each of the girls a pink carnation for Valentine’s day. (I got a bouquet of roses, which were beautiful, but it was even more fun to see the girls get so excited about their flowers than it was to get flowers myself.)

 

 

The girls in the amazing princess dresses their Aunt Heather made for them.

Daddy-Daughter Dance

 

Tonight Bill took the girls to a Daddy-daughter dance at the Stake Center. It was a 1950s theme, so I’ve been working on poodle skirts. I got my ideas from this tutorial and this tutorial, although they are both no-sew tutorials and I ended up sewing everything on instead of gluing it.

  

  

 

 

Think I can talk the girls into recycling them for Halloween costumes this year?

Hello, February

 

One of our favorite things these days is hot chocolate with strawberry heart marshmallows.

 

Here’s Abby enjoying some. Yes, that is marker on her face. She’s quite the artist.

 

 

Here are the girls at our Music Together class:

 

 

I’ve been working on skirts for the girls. Here’s an in-progress picture. More pictures to come when they are finished:

 

Sandy took a test late last month to see if she can get accepted into the Spanish immersion elementary school. It was a long test – about an hour. Afterwards, she told us she was proud of herself for “keeping her wiggles in” during the test.

 

Abby said one day, “I’m just pretending to be bad.” I can’t remember what she was doing, but I did say, “Let’s stop pretending to bad and practice being good.”

 

Sandy likes things clean. She’s gotten really good at making her bed and she will often do it in the mornings without being reminded. She takes all the blankets off, though, and they way she puts them back on is a little different than the way I do. I’m glad she does it, however she does it.

Getting Ready for Valentine’s Day

I thought I’d take some pictures and maybe do something with them for Valentine’s day.

 

I saw this kiss flip book and thought it was pretty cute, so I tried to get pictures of the girls blowing kisses:

Sandy wanted to take her own artistic pictures of her baby doll:

Abby was mostly interested in sticking the hearts on the wall (I found these heart sticky notes at Walmart):