What's On My Mind Monday

Linking up over here:










I.  So, I mentioned that Patrick would be moving to more of an office-y type position at work, and he will...eventually.  See, he can't leave his current position until his replacement arrives, his replacement can't leave his current position until he trains someone to do his job, and he can't train anyone to do his job until people in that department stop quitting or getting fired!!!  Very frustrating.  I'm ready for Patrick to come home clean, so he can grab Madison and I can go to the bathroom.  It's the little things, people.

II.  Patrick dropped two pants sizes in the last six months.  Between the two PE courses he took last semester, crossfit workouts, and our restricted calories, he's down to 160 pounds sopping wet.  We're going to buy some protein so his body can stop eating itself.   

III.  Owing to his weight loss, we needed to buy him some new jeans.  That's the office dress code (lucky!), and his two-sizes-too-big jeans just weren't doing the trick.  Since we're cheap, we tried out Plato's Closet for the first time.  I'm not really impressed with the store for two reasons.  First, you can get way better deals at a normal thrift store.  Second, they were playing extremely offensive music.  You know when I won't repeat what it said, it was pretty bad.  We ended up asking them to turn it off, which they did, but it still kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.  We did, however, walk away with two great pairs of jeans (nothing fancy, but well fitting Levi's Signature and American Eagle) for around $30.  New, they're each around $40..  The only thing I did like about the store was that they have their clothes (mostly) organized by size, so you don't have to sort through as much junk to get through the good stuff.

IV.  Madison is trying so hard to say "Mama".  She purses her lips together, focuses really hard on the task at hand, then says "babababababammmmba".  We try to include her in conversation, so at the dinner table last week I asked her who she thought was most likely to win the presidential election.  She replied "abamba".  I know you're not supposed to spank babies, but could you have resisted?  

V.  She's getting so good at walking that I don't think it will be much longer before she moves to the walkers class at church.  I've got mixed feelings about that; I think she'll enjoy it more, because at ten months old she's the oldest in the nursery now, but I don't think mommies are as welcome in there.  I guess I'll have to find my own Sunday School class.

 Note: Please do not call CPS.  I assure you the closest Madison has ever come to a spanking is getting burped.

Happy Monday!
-Kelli

What's on My Mind Monday

Linking up over here!


I.  As of yesterday, Madison is ten months old!  Some new things this month:

• Scooting  (really late, I know)
• Crawling  (ditto)
• Pulling up  (still kind of behind)
• Walking  (whoa!)
• "Dada"
• "Ba"(Ball)

Favorite things:

• Taking Bella outside
• Being tickled
• Hide and Seek
• Reading anything, but especially Dr. Seuss books and Duck In The Truck
• Cheese
• Walking
• Posing for pictures

 Least favorite things:

• Eggs (No worries, it was just the yolks, folks)
• Wearing bows (I've been told twice this month what a cute little boy I've got)
• Long car rides
• Afternoon naps (now officially eliminated)
• Falling down
• Being told "no"

 II.  Patrick's brother married one of my childhood friends on Saturday.  The wedding was absolutely beautiful, and I failed to take a single picture.  Boo hiss.  They are honeymooning in Rome and Paris for the next two-ish weeks, and they didn't offer to bring me along, so I guess they had it coming.  : )

Since the wedding kind of filled the whole day for us (his brother spent the night before at our house), Madison didn't get a real nap on Saturday.  She slept in her car seat for maybe fifteen minutes, and dozed in Patrick's/my/the bride's/my arms for all of twenty minutes.  This led to her very first high chair nap.  Notice the partially chewed puff in her mouth.  Don't notice the laundry, dirty dishes, and jacked up rug in the background. 

 III.   Remember how I said Madison loves to pose?  I think I figured out who she got it from.

Happy Monday!
-Kelli

What's on My Mind Monday

Linking up over here:

 I.  Madison is getting pretty confident with her walking, a LOT more confident than either Patrick or me.  She'll just take off full speed ahead across our hard wood floors.  So far, we've been able to catch up with her before any major wipe outs, but I'm sure I'll be sharing sometime soon about  her first second big fall.   

II.  We had a BLAST on Saturday at our niece and nephew's combined birthday party.  It was at Pump It Up, and while this was Madison's second time there, it was her first time to actually participate in the fun. I was shocked by how well she did; she made it through the big maze twice, once with Pat and once with me!

This thing was huge!

 III.  I watched Courageous last night.  Once I got past the cheese factor (you know there's got to be at least a little cheesiness with a movie this small), I really enjoyed it.  This is the first movie I've cried while watching since...oh wait, I cried during the last Harry Potter movie, too.  Scratch that thought.

IV.  Patrick accepted a new position at his current company.  For the first time ever, he is going to get paid for something other than sweating (unless the a/c goes out, in which case I guess he'll still be getting paid to sweat).  What I'm trying to say is that he doesn't have to sell his body anymore. Sorry honey, I couldn't resist.  What is it he'll be doing?  Ummm, you've got me there.  I'm pretty sure there's a paycheck involved, though.  Or at least that's the rumor.  : )

 V.  I do realize that I've never posted an Easter recap(I did write a post about her Easter basket, though), and I've since lost all hope for a full post about it, so here you go:

Cousin love

First egg hunt

She "found" this one herself!

If only she ate the eggs I cook this well!

Our best take at the bluebonnet picture; at least 2/3 of us are looking at the camera!

 The cousins picture was a bit elusive this year:

Take one

Take two

Take three

Hoppy Easter!

 And Happy Monday!

-Kelli

A Fourish Days Late Post about Madison's DIY Easter Basket

 Since I tend to struggle a bit with wordiness, I thought I'd try getting it all out of my system in the title.  We'll see how that goes.

I've been trying to write this post since Saturday, but between Madison walking (?!) and our internet being S-L-O-W for the last couple of days, my every attempt up 'til now has been thwarted.  I thought about letting it go and not sharing, because who wants to read about an Easter basket five days after the fact?  Then I decided that this post is not late, it's actually about 360 days early. 

I wanted Madison to have a cute Easter basket, but I didn't want to spend much money, so I decided to make trick out a basket myself.  Here's what I started with:

 It was about $2 at Walmart.  I probably could have found something cheaper, but I didn't feel it was worth the effort (and gas) to drive around town looking for a bargain.  There was pretty much nothing right about it.  the handle was almost as tall as Madison, and the colors don't relate to our Easter ensemble (fancy, no?) at all.

In a (fruitless) effort to make the basket more wield-able for Madi, I cut off the too-long handle, trimmed it, and wove it back into the basket, securing it with Liquid Nails.

 The handle ended up looking kind of wonky, but that didn't bother me.  I was going for a handmade feel, anyway.  At least that's what I decided once I saw the wonky handle.  : )

 Once I had the proportion issue resolved, it was time to get to work on the color.  Madison's Easter dress was a golden yellow (btw, thanks Christie!), so I picked...

 that's right.  I picked golden yellow, in a special solution of spray paint that not only changes the color of any object, but also the size!  Size 4 jeans, here I come.  Just kidding; it hasn't been approved for use on humans yet. 

Once the paint dried and the basket was back to its regular size (I guess it works kind of like Cinderella and goes back to normal at midnight), I got to work adding the fabric.  I chose my fabric from four options, all purchased for $1.50/yd for Madison's weekly photo project.  I put them all up next to our ensemble (everyone together now: oooh, aaahhh) and picked what I thought was the best option of the four.  I'm now having second thoughts, for reasons I'll share later on.

I used craft glue liberally to attach the fabric to the basket.  As you can see, I chose the blue, red, lavender, and white floral fabric.

 I used some thin rope that I had laying around to secure the flaps of the fabric to the basket.  I tied the ends together with jewelry wire leftover from making Madison's crib mobiles, then secured both sides to the handles of the basket to keep the rope from sliding off the bottom.

 I added a flower that came on one of Madison's diaper cakes,

 then tied rope around the base of the flower to make it stand straight out,

 and then covered the rope with a scrap of the same fabric, and stapled that sucker on.

Here is the finished basket!

Hopefully, I'll be back tomorrow with a recap of our Easter weekend.

Til then,
-Kelli

An Apple a Day Keeps the...Veterinarian Away?

Last night, Bella ate the leftover portion of my apple.  First, she nibbled all the remaining fruit around the core while Patrick turned it for her like a rotisserie chicken.  She used her front teeth, just like we do.  I've never seen a dog do anything like this.  Once it was clean, just to see what she would do with it, he gave her the core.  She broke it into two pieces, ate them both, then politely spit the stem out onto the floor.  Literally all that was left was stem and slobber.  

In other news, Madison is now crawling.  She started scooting on 3/31/12 (Saturday), then decided on Tuesday night that crawling was the way to go.  She was pretty far behind on her physical milestones, I think mostly because I caved too easily when she would get frustrated with her tummy time.  Oddly enough, right around the time I decided to let her fuss a little longer on the floor, she learned to move herself.  In the last week, she has learned:

• how to go from a sitting position to on her tummy without slamming her face into the ground every time
• how to go from her tummy to a sitting position
• how to scoot
• how to crawl
• how to pull up on objects (and or people)
• how to sit back down
• how to cruise on an object (but not go from one object to another)
• how to read (you know what I mean) books without eating them
• how to wave bye bye.

It's like she's decided to quit, cold turkey, being a baby.  She cries so much less now.  If she wants something, she goes and gets it!  It's strange how this has made my job easier and more difficult at the same time.  She's a lot easier to be around now, because she's not miserable all day, but at the same time, I'm terrified that she'll pull up on something unstable and crack her head on the hard floor if I'm distracted for even a second. 

And she moves so quickly now.  Our office is also her play room, so the other day I was reading a funny email while she was playing with a book.  I glanced over to check on her, and she had scooted (this was before the crawling thing, now she's even faster) all the way across the room and was enthusiastically sucking on Bella's chew toy.

So basically, what I'm trying to say is that I'm a terrible mommy/doggy-mommy.  I give dog toys to my baby and apple seeds to my dog. 

Let's play the "make Kelli feel better about herself as a caregiver" game.  How have you screwed up in your job this week?  Or ever?  Feel free to make up a story if you don't have any real-life failures that compare.  I don't plan to fact check; I'll be too busy trying to be a human airbag.

-Kelli

What's on My Mind Monday

Linking up over here:

 I.  I was able to finish Sunday School again!  Two weeks in a row, what what! 

II.  I just started reading Stuff Christians Like by Jonathan Acuff.  It's sooo funny.  I highly recommend it, unless you hate laughter. 

III.  Madison finally jumped on the independent mobility train this week (3/31/12).  She's nine months old, and just now started scooting to get where she wants to go.  I think she made the breakthrough now because I stopped caving every time she cried for help to get up and walk.  She also started pulling up and cruising a little, although she gets scared pretty quickly if she realizes that she's not in contact with someone while standing.

IV.  Patrick made me some brownie batter cookies on Saturday, which in theory was a really sweet gesture.  However, he made them much better than I ever have, so he lost all potential brownie points to my baking envy. 

Happy Monday!
-Kelli