Dinosaur birthday party

We celebrated Eleanor's birthday a little early today with a dinosaur birthday party.  She was thrilled!!  I got there early to set up and when she arrived later she spent about 10 minutes walking around and taking everything in.  At one point I found her standing next to the cake, just staring at it with a huge smile on her face.

Come on in!

She requested these three dinosaurs on her cake

Pretzel stick pterodactyl nests with grape eggs

Hamosaurus sandwiches

Cheese stegosaurus spikes

T-Rex watermelon

(tutorial here)

Veggies, dip, and baguettes

Fossil sugar cookies

Dinosaur tails for everyone!

Swamp punch - the added lime sherbert made it extra swampy looking

Arthur loved the mirror

How many dinosaurs can fit in the little baby pool?

Eleanor sang the Happy Birthday song along with everybody else!

Mmm, cake!

Dinosaur baseball

(T ball with tails as bats)

Slipping into a sugar coma

Present time!

Sweet friends

Arthur enjoyed the party, too

Creating new dinosaurs

Because who doesn't love gluing feathers and pom poms?

All worn out!

Four years ago today I got the news that Ada no longer had a heartbeat at 23 weeks 5 days.  Today I got to watch the pure joy on Eleanor's face as we celebrated her three years of life.  What a day!

9 months

I'm a little late with this, but Arthur turned 9 months old on the 4th!  His checkup isn't until later in the month so I don't know how big he is officially yet, but he is definitely a growing boy!  He mostly wears 12 month or 12-18 month clothes, though some of his 12 month clothes are starting to be too tight if he's wearing his cloth diapers.  He now has his 4 front teeth, tons of hair, and a huge personality!  Here are just a few of the times he has made me laugh in the past few days.

• Yesterday I ran some errands by myself and came home to find Arthur looking at a book on the floor.  He saw me and his face broke out into a huge smile and he started army crawling towards me as fast as he can go.  He got part way to me and then turned around, grabbed the book he had been reading, and brought it to me.  He wanted me to read him the book!  He sat in my lap and we read it 3 times in a row.  And he didn't even want to stop then - the boy LOVES books!  Here are some of his favorites if you want recommendations.
• His new favorite game is to be chased!  If he thinks that I'm going to pick him up, he giggles and starts crawling away as fast as possible.  He even does this in his crib, which is pretty funny because it's not like he can go far!
• The other day I was giving him a bath and he peed.  He looked down and watched the little fountain he was making and was extremely interested in this new discovery.  He thought it was hilarious, and spent the rest of the bath looking down and waiting for it to happen again.
• Last night I was giving him a bath and he was playing with a cup.  I put out my hand and said, "Can you hand me the cup?"  After saying this several times he smiled and handed me the cup.  This went back and forth for a while and I called Hunter in to see it.  Arthur handed me the cup again, and then Hunter put out his hand and said, "Can you hand the cup to Dada?"  Arthur grabbed the cup, giggled a lot, and crawled away from Hunter as fast as he could.  Of course he could only go like 2 feet because he was in the bath, but he made his point!  He has quite the sense of humor!
• He is all over the place now, and of course sometimes we have things lying around that he shouldn't get into.  The other day I was fixing dinner and Arthur started crawling right up to a tool that had been left out that he shouldn't touch.  He was clearly going for it.  I used my stern voice and said, "Arthur, no touch."  He stopped about a foot away from it, looked up at me, and smiled his biggest smile.  I didn't smile back and I kept saying, "No touch."  He kept smiling at me, like he was trying to get me to smile back, and when it didn't work he finally moved on and didn't touch it!  I just *know* that if I had smiled back at him, he would seen that as permission to touch it.
• His list of potential words ("Is he really saying that?  Or am I just imagining it?  Was that just a coincidence?") is growing.  There's now "nana" for banana (that one is pretty consistent), "dada" (he seems to just say this when Hunter is around), "mama" (though this seems to mean food, not me), and "bah" for ball.  "Eh-nor" (Eleanor) and "eh-che" (leche) have disappeared.  I remember Eleanor doing that too - she would use a word for a month and we would be all excited about it and then not hear it again for 3 or 4 months.
• Arthur is LOUD.  I love him and his hilarious personality, but I really, really wish that he had a volume knob sometimes.  Usually when he starts getting loud it's because he's tired or hungry, but sometimes he just starts screaming when he's frustrated with a toy or book.

How my baby sleeps

We contained him!  Temporarily...

Arthur and his cousin chasing the dog

Playing with Micah

9-month-old cousins!

You can see the bottom teeth

 

Getting into his books

And just to balance out the Arthur pictures, here are some of my sweet girl!

Licking the spoon after making rice krispie treats for the 4th

Budding scientist

P.S.  This is my 500th post.  Whoa!

Books we love for babies

We have a very large selection of board books, and when Eleanor was about 9-12 months old there were some that were clearly her favorites and some that she got bored with after 2 pages.  (Sandra Boynton books, for example.  She never liked any of those books until she was probably 18+ months old.)  Now that Arthur is getting into books, it's pretty interesting to me that the same books are *his* favorites and he gets bored with the same ones she did.  So, I just thought I'd share a few of their favorites if you're ever book shopping for a baby.  You can click on any of the covers to see them on Amazon.

And these are some that Arthur loves but we didn't have when Eleanor was a baby:

Rainy days

We had to come up with some new ways to keep busy these last few days!

This is what you do when you need to clean the kitchen but have two kids who want to be right next to you

This is a bird sensory bin I made for her recently.  Filling it with bird seed sounded like a good idea until I kept stepping on it everywhere no matter how much I swept it up...  This time I was actually smart enough to put a blanket down first.

Forget the birds.  Dinosaurs have invaded!

Dinosaurs took over the water table, too.

Working out with Daddy!

Update

Well, it's been a while.  Here are some of our latest little happenings:

Arthur is growing!  He has officially grown out of some of his 12 month clothes, though it depends on the brand.  I'm really glad there's a consignment sale next month because he'll probably outgrow everything he owns by then.  He is also quite mobile now.  He's not fast and he doesn't just go, go, go, but if he sees something he wants he goes and gets it...including Mama working in the kitchen.  Yesterday I spent about 2 hours cleaning the floors, under furniture, etc. to make sure everything is clean for him.  A crawling baby is big motivation to keep your floor clean!  Oh, and he is also definitely a little people person.  We had VBS this week and Arthur was in the nursery while I volunteered.  One of the nursery workers told me that he is the happiest baby she's ever seen.  She knew Eleanor as a baby too and said that Eleanor didn't cry and liked to observe everybody, but Arthur just smiles at everybody all the time.  What is this extroverted little boy going to do in this family?

Eleanor is growing up and really turning into a little preschooler...or maybe I should say teenager because she already thinks she knows more than me.  The other day around 2:00 she said, "It is not evening."  I said, "You're right, it's afternoon."  I went on to explain that afternoon means after lunchtime and that we just ate lunch a while ago.  She started laughing and said, "That is NOT how it goes, Mama!"  I've gotten this response several times lately!

Yesterday morning we heard her wake up on the monitor telling a story that went something like this:  "Eleanor was making cookies for Brock [a little boy she knows] with Mama, but Daddy STOLE the cookie!  Daddy came in and took the very last cookie and ate up the cookie!"  Of course, nothing about this story was true.  Hunter went up to take her to the bathroom and asked her about it and said, "Did that really happen, Eleanor?"  "No..." "It sounds like maybe it was a dream."  "Yes!  It was a dream."  So if you wonder what little kids dream about, there you go!

Like I said, we had VBS this week but we ended up leaving early on Wednesday when I realized Eleanor was sick.  Over the past few days Arthur, Eleanor, and I have been sick off and on, but I'm hoping we're almost done with it.  Yuck.

Now for pictures...

Playing together!  Finally!

Sweet sleepy boy

At a park by the river

(And this is the last picture I have of her because she does not like the camera!)

Arthur enjoyed the river, too

He likes Eleanor's train set!

Uh oh, now where will the train go?

Cousin love!

He's starting to get into things!

"I'm stuck!"

Riding on the tricycle for the first time!

He's not super fast, but he can get what he wants
(And those are 24 month pajamas!  The legs are too long, but otherwise they fit.  The poor kid doesn't have any in size 18 months so we just make bigger hand me downs work.  Why buy new ones when he'll be out of them in a month?)

This video makes me laugh.  It's a little old - thankfully Eleanor has gotten better about sharing with her brother.  She has also learned that if she plays with her toys up on the couch then Arthur can't get to her...for now.  ;)  Sometimes she's really sweet about sharing with him, but not always!