three years old

diane turned three today. i can't believe it. she has really hit a developmental/growth spurt lately and she feels so old all of a sudden. randy keeps scooping her up and telling her to stop growing. she's leaving that squishy toddler stage and starting to say more grown up phrases and act older. still a toddler, but barely. she is her own little personality and it's fun to see it as she grows up. 

these are a bunch of pictures from opening presents this morning. madeleine was right in there and we finally had to tell her she couldn't stand next to diane if she didn't let diane open her own presents. let's just say she had a hard time having the focus not be on her. this afternoon, she said, "where are diane's other presents?" at first i thought that it was a commentary on how many presents diane got and thought that was odd. i told her there weren't any more and she said, "no, the ones she opens at night!" then i realized that she was referring to how presents work on her birthday. i reminded her that not everyone's birthday starts with christmas presents and ends with birthday presents. diane gets all of hers in the morning.

madeleine showing diane the book she made her. it has a picture of diane and a number three on the front.

showing diane the mermaids (notice there are two? how convenient!) that madeleine picked out at the dollar store for diane.

diane showing off the bracelet and ring from the petersen family. i just like that she looks like she's singing "i'm a little teapot."

 

later in the day, we decorated diane's cake. i went to frost it and it started tearing up the top of the cake. frosting fail. so, the cake was really beautiful. fortunately, diane didn't seem to care one bit. she was just excited to put sprinkles on it.

i love the sheer joy on her face here. i made a dress for diane to match the one i made madeleine for her birthday. of course, they had to be twins today.

this was the finished product on the cake. the girls each ate about half of a little piece. none of us are big cake people and always end up throwing about 2/3 of it out, but the girls love the concept of making and decorating a birthday cake and then singing and blowing out a candle and insist on doing it for each other. cheap thrills.

 

i love this girl.

here are the two parts of her birthday video interview. it's pretty long, but she sings in it and is pretty cute all around.

star wars quilt

started: november 7th, 2012

completed: january 28th, 2013

dimensions: approx. 72"x90"

notes: back in october, my friend, robynn, was trying to pick out a quilt to make for her son's bedspread. i sent her a few options, including this one, and volunteered to make it for her since i love to quilt but don't have the budget to run out and buy a bunch of fabric right now. it was a win-win situation. so, i made up a pattern and got her a list of fabric requirements and she went out and picked out and bought the fabric and shipped it to me (fabric is much cheaper in utah than washington, plus i wanted her to pick out the fabric that she wanted). her son just got new star wars sheets, so the fabrics go with that theme, including the backing, which is an actual star wars print (of course, i forgot to get a picture of the back before sending it off). 

i got the fabric at the beginning of november and had the top pieced and pinned to the back in three days. it was a really easy pattern, with lots of strip quilting. robynn still had to pick out the binding fabric but we both got sidetracked by christmas projects, so it took a while for her to get me the binding and then it took me a while to get up the desire to sew again after all of my christmas projects. i started quilting it about a week ago and spent a lot of time sewing while chatting with my mom during her visit this past weekend. i really wanted to get it done so that my mom could take it back to utah with her. my mom was kind and put on the binding for me (she is much better at machine binding than i am) and we finished it up a couple hours before she left. it means that i didn't have time to wash it before i sent it off, so the quilt didn't crinkle up before these pictures, and i forgot to measure the finished quilt and take a picture of the back. 

i hope that the young jedi knight will enjoy his new quilt.

my mom visits

as a birthday present to herself, my mom came to visit us last weekend. i, of course, thought it was a marvelous idea. she came last wednesday and left monday. it didn't seem nearly long enough, but i'm sure that would be true no matter how long she had stayed. unfortunately, the day that she arrived, my kids all got nasty colds, so we really spent most of the weekend just sitting around and visiting. i didn't mind, and knowing my mom, she didn't mind either. by some miracle, she seems to have avoided the cold, despite having the kids climb (cough, and sneeze) all over her, so hopefully that stays true once she's home. 

her actual birthday fell during her visit, so we made a cake. she turned fifty-six, thus the five and six candles. the girls decorated it.

 we never did get a picture of my mom and all three kids, but did manage to snap them separately.

i would have liked to have hog-tied my mom and made her stay forever, but i'm pretty sure that she would have gotten sick of it pretty quickly and my dad would have been pretty upset with me. love you mom; thanks for coming to visit. 

bookend photoshoot

pictures of my bookends.

meanwhile, diane was napping. 

visitors

randy's parents came a couple days after christmas and stayed through the new year. it was so fun to have them here and their visit went by much too quickly.

mostly, we spent a lot of the time hanging out around the house. the kids talked their grandparents' ears off, and when they weren't doing that, bob and jeanie were reading to them or playing games with them. my kids were in heaven. 

 

we did manage to get out of the house a few times, one of which was to go to the zoo. for christmas, my in-laws got us annual zoo passes. i am really excited about this. they got a pass for me, as well as a flexible guest pass. so, randy can join us, but if he can't come, i can also take a friend, or grandma.

i think we'll use the zoo pass the most during the summer, but i want to make sure and get there in the winter too. the beauty of having a pass is that we can go and stay for a couple hours and leave without feeling guilty about wasting money.

we went on monday and it was pretty cold (although not as miserable as diane's face would suggest), but we saw some animals and then ducked into the indoor play area that they have and warmed up before eating lunch and then seeing a few more animals on our way out. while we were at the zoo, randy and his dad headed to pike place and got some seafood for new year's eve.

 

randy's cousin, jessica, and her family just moved to the area and were able to join us on new year's eve. it livened up what would have been a pretty pathetic excuse for a party otherwise and it was really fun to see them. the kids had a great time running around together, allowing us to catch up. we'll have to get together with them more often.

 

and of course, we ate lots and lots of delicious food with them.

we love having visitors. come often and come soon!

fresh start

i'm a few days late to the blog resolution party, but better late than never, right?

last year, i had one resolution: survive 2012 (with grace).

i'm not joking. that was my one, bona fide, write it down resolution. i had seen the writing on the wall and knew that 2012 was going to be a ride. so, i had realistic expectations and didn't set my usual more detailed list of resolutions.

the good news is, i survived 2012. i think i survived it with a little bit of grace. i'm going to pretend i did.

2012 at a glance:
randy had a masters recital in february. we had a baby at the beginning of april, randy graduated in the middle of april, and we moved at the end of april. we weren't planning on moving until july, but our landlady gave us an offer we couldn't refuse ("i'm moving back in, you have 30 days to move out"). we moved to seattle and randy started his piano studio. it's been a little slower going than we planned, but the students are coming, slowly but surely. i have a hard time with the infant stage and feel like i have been sleep deprived and hungry since june, but jonathan is almost 9 months old, so i'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel (i am slowly ramping up my dairy intake, hurrah!). we are making new friends and enjoying time with our little family in the longest house in kenmore. we survived.

but now it's 2013. on to bigger and better things. i'm still keeping it pretty simple because i do still have three small children, one of which is still an infant. my two big resolutions for 2013 are:

1. more purposeful screentime; and
2. work on the tone that i take with my children.

screentime
i started out thinking that i would say "less screen time," but decided that that's not really what i meant (although i do think that the final version will definitely result in less screen time). i love my iphone and actually think that's it been my sanity with three small children and very few friends. it allows me to keep in touch with far away family and friends and also allows me to remain productive without having my back to my children at a computer. but it also means that i goof around a lot on it too.

most of all, i've found that it's become a thought replacement. all too often i find myself pulling out my phone automatically during quiet moments (and some not so quiet moments) instead of sitting and thinking. it's become a way of avoiding thinking about what i should be doing or dealing with the stresses in my life. i'm sure that i miss moments with my kids because of it, but i also do it when they're asleep and i'm winding down and just don't want to think.

i don't think this is going to be a huge change for me. it's not like i'm constantly on my phone and i don't think my phone's evil. i just want to change some mental habits associated with my screen use.

tone
similar to the other resolution, i've worked on the wording on this one. originally, i thought i would work on my tone of voice, but i think that it needed to be more broad than that. tone includes not only the volume and edge in my voice, but the words that i use and my general attitude toward them. it's not like i'm yelling at my children all the time, but i do raise my voice more often than i'd like and i am way more impatient than i should be. i know that everyone says you should have high expectations of your children, but i often have far too high expectations and need to remember that they are five and unders (trust me, i have plenty high expectations in most areas of their development).

i like to blame my current shortcomings on the fact that i'm not getting any sleep, but that's probably not going to change for the next twenty years, so i should learn to control myself regardless. i know that if i can control my tone, it will have a trickle down effect on my family interactions in general, so i'm choosing to focus on that and enjoy whatever else comes along with that.

here's to improvement in the coming year.