BFF's

Katherine's two best friends are Robert and Ben. It's a good thing because their mom's are two of my best friends too. I love that we often call one another at about 9am to see what is going on that day. Janna and I do a lot of spontaneous things because we both hate to be home all day. A week or so ago I was planning to meet Sara, Eden and Simon at the park. Janna called to see what we had planned so they joined us too. I thought this photo of Katherine and Robert was so cute. He is trying to hold her hand and she is trying not to (good job, keep those boys at a distance). He is only 2 months older but look at how much taller he is. I was amazed at the fact that Katherine could navigate this apparatus on the playground but she did it over and over.
This week Robert spend an entire day with us (8:15-4:15) while his mom and dad had a commitment. We had so much fun. Robert is such a well behaved and respectful boy. I realized that though Katherine is much smaller, she is kind of the bully at times. We need to work on that. I bought Katherine some watercolors at the dollar store the other day and so we brought them out for craft time. Katherine loves doing crafts so we try to do one every day. You can see that she things all paints should be finger paints. I discovered that I really enjoy having the video monitor in Katherine's room for play dates. They were able to play independently while I cleaned the kitchen and prepared lunch. I was able to see and hear what they were doing. It was so cute. They were pretending to take a nap. Why is it that kids who do not like to nap love to pretend to nap? Anyway, Katherine would lay down and Robert would tuck her in. Then they would trade. Here is the conversation I heard.
K: Night night, I love you.
R: I love you too.
K: I am going to shut your door all the way. Don't get out of bed. I mean it.
Hmm, I guess that is what I say?

The adventure of the day was having two kids who are mostly potty trained. My goal was to have a day with no accidents. It was quite a different experience to take a little boy who stands to do his business to the toilet. I wasn't quite sure how much to help or if he would aim well or make a huge mess. It was fine. At lunchtime my mom, one of her best friends Linda, her daughter Karen (whom I grew up with) and Karen's daughter Kaitlyn who is Katherine's age joined us. It was all sorts of fun and chaos. At one point the kids were in Katherine's room while the adults were still eating. Karen and I decided to go check on them and found out that in the 5 minutes they were alone all 3 went poop. I am proud that Katherine took care of her business in her potty all. by. herself!

Madi and I have to be a little more scheduled in order to get together because that girl is BUSY between grad school, work and ministry. She is a sports trainer and PE teacher at a local school and every day her schedule is different. On Mondays she only has to be at school for a short time and it is right when Ben naps so often he will nap at our house.
This week Katherine did not like that Ben was going to nap in her princess sleeping bag so she proceeded to crawl into it so that he could not. They decided they both wanted to be in the sleeping bag to take a nap together. There was much silliness and giggling but no sleeping. Luckily Katherine has two princess sleeping bags so they each had one in their own room and they took great naps. Katherine has wanted to nap on her floor in her sleeping bag ever since. I have let her and this will be a great skill when we go to Grammy's house.
After nap we painted (notice the common theme). This time we actually did use finger paints so they could use brushes or fingers. Ben does not like messes so he used his brush and was a little concerned at the mess Katherine was making.

We finished our afternoon by watching Veggie Tales. You know Ben is a great friend because Katherine was actually willing to share her chair with him. Aren't they cute?

Hello Mr. Turkey

Today was Katherine's first school program. They had a Thanksgiving program and feast.

Her class sang a Thanksgiving song to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it." The sound quality of the video is pretty poor and the kids were pretty shy so here are the words.
Hello Mr. Turkey how are you?
Hello Mr. Turkey how are you?
With a wobble wobble wobble
And a gobble gobble gobble
Hello Mr. Turkey how are you?
They have been practicing for a few weeks and Katherine knew the entire song this morning. The director said they all practice but get on stage, see the parents and get silent. It was still cute. Her class has 9 kids but a few are out of range of the camera. Apparently the kid on the left, Cole is her boyfriend. She is also good friends with Kyle who is two to the left from her.

After the kids sang, we had a nice Thanksgiving feast. Nana and Pops came and enjoyed the meal. Afterwards we went to the park with one of her classmates Kate because they really needed to get some energy out. It was fun to play with one of her school friends and also a little weird. It is really the first time we did something with a friend that Katherine made rather than a child of one of my friends. I really enjoyed her mother though and they live close by so
hopefully we will do more things with them. Caroline got to sit in the swing for the first time but she did not actually swing. I put her here for a moment to go get the girls out of the bushes they were exploring and Kate's mom was right there. Of course I could not resist the photo op.

4 months

Caroline, I cannot believe you are 4 months old today. How time flies. You are such a cutie and such a joy for the entire family.
You are a very happy baby. You are usually content to sit and watch the world whether it is outside in your bouncy seat, in the den on your playmat, in the kitchen in your high chair or from your car seat where ever I have taken you. You love to be held too but you don't really care if it is mommy, daddy, Katherine, another relative, a friend or even Santa!You give us many smiles. Katherine loves to make you smile and will announce "mommy, baby sister smiling at me. It's so cute." We agree. You love to smile at her and though it will be a long time before you actually play together, we can tell that you already enjoy interacting. She loves to play with you and she makes you smile faster than anyone else. You are also making all sorts of fun noises. You have a cute little cooing noise, a sound that is a "gggaa" from the back of your throat and my favorite, what I call the teradactyl, which is a shrieking happy noise. You are not laughing yet but I know it will come soon. Physically you continue to grow, develop and acquire new skills. You are able to reach out and grab things whether it is a toy dangling above your head or one on the table. You also love to grab mommy's hair when I am nursing and you got a fist full of Santa's beard the other night. You like to hold things, especially when falling asleep. I hand you a small rattle or if that is not around you grab your pacifier. You have even been able to put it back into your mouth a time or two.
You have found your feet as well. You like to grab your toes, especially when you are having your diaper changed. You have not figured out yet that they taste so yummy but I am sure you will start putting your feet in your mouth before long. You have pretty good head and trunk control. You hold yourself up pretty well in someone's lap, when propped up on the couch or in your bumbo seat. You can even support your own weight standing when I hold on to your hands. You are no longer a floppy newborn.
You are not a fan of tummy time though you are getting better at it. I find it hard to remember to put you on your tummy because we are on the go so much. When we are at home usually either you or your sister are asleep. I don't really want to do something that makes you cry while she is napping so you don't wake her up. I can tell though that most of your time in on your back because you have a bald spot on the back of your head and a ring around your head where the hair is thin.

You are on the verge of rolling around. Tonight at Bible study I put you on your tummy with Annelise (who loves tummy time). I was just commenting that Katherine started to roll at exactly 4 months but you had not. As if to prove me wrong you rolled from your tummy to your back at almost that exact time . I knew you could do it, it is just a matter of figuring out how to move one arm out of the way. I am sure by next week you will have mastered the skill. I am not sure that I am looking forward to that as I really enjoy putting you somewhere and knowing you will not move.
You are a great sleeper and for this I am thankful. You sleep 10-12 hours at night without waking up most nights. You take 2-3 naps a day varying in length between 30 minutes and 2 hours. I am not really sure exactly how long because I don't keep track and I am not one to have a strict schedule. You are pretty good about falling asleep anywhere (crib, pack and play, car seat, floor, swing, bed, etc.). You like to have your pacifier to fall asleep but you are not dependent on it.

You are a baby on the go. I have a calendar on the wall of your nursery. Each day I write down what we did that day. Rare is the day that it is blank.

Outtakes from our monthly chair photo shoot.
First we have the "playing with dress" photo.
Then is the "deer in the headlights" shot. Last is the "uh-oh, Caroline is falling over" photo.

Cheap Puzzle

Yesterday I saw a blog post that suggested buying a place mat at the dollar store and using it to make a puzzle. Today I had just 5 minutes to waste and was near a dollar store so I thought I would check out the selection. They had a princess place mat! Katherine has recently become quite interested in the Disney Princesses. When I showed her the puzzle, her first comment was, "Look, it is princess. Like my panties and my sleeping bag."Luckily I thought to take a picture of the place mat before I cut it to pieces. I will print off a picture so that she knows what it is supposed to look like. While she was napping I cut the pieces. Next time I will draw the pieces on the back before I cut them out. My pieces are odd shapes and some have pointy edges.
Katherine still needed help putting the puzzle together but when we were done she said, "That was fun" so it was a $1 well spent. I put the pieces in the baggy and it is an easy toy to take along with us to places like the doctor's office. I also bought a Dora one that I have not cut apart yet so that will be next week's surprise.

Christmas comes early

So, guess what we did tonight? We went to go see Santa. It is not even Thanksgiving yet and we already made our Christmas trip to the mall. The main reason was that I had a great coupon that expires next week. It is for $10 off a $32 package. The package includes a flash drive with your photo as well as a $25 credit to be used at Shutterfly. So, basically they paid me $3 to come see Santa. If you are local and interested, I can forward you the email.
Anyway, our goal was to get a good picture of the four of us, possibly for use on our Christmas card. We have not had great success with Santa pictures in the past so I did not have high expectations.
I decided to prep Katherine in the car for what would happen, Here is how our conversation went.
Me: Katherine we are going to see Santa tonight.
K: Yea! And snow too?
Me: Well, pretend snow.
K: Yea!
Me: You will get to go sit on his lap. He will ask you your name. What will you say?
K: (very softly) Kafrine
Me: He will ask you if you have been good or bad this year. Well, what have you been?
K: (again, very softly) good
Me: Then he will say, "Katherine you look so pretty today. Can you tell me what you want Santa to bring you for Christmas this year." Katherine, what will you tell Santa you want?
K: A bunny for my garden.
Me: (surprised) Oh my, that sounds fun.
K: Mommy, what do you want Santa to bring you?
Me: (I think, what do I want and what would she understand?) A new sweater.
K: Mommy, that's silly. You already have one.
Me: What do you think Daddy wants Santa to bring?
K: Boots
Me: What about Caroline?
K: Books

So, there you have our Christmas list.
We got there and we were the only people there. I changed the girls into their matching red velvet dresses. Santa could tell that Katherine was going to be shy and difficult so he went with us into the snow globes to try to warm her up. She had a lot of fun with that. I think that usually the snow globes are just where the line winds around but since we were the only ones there we were able to play and take more photos.
Katherine did warm up to Santa and had fun playing with the snow with him inside the snow globe. He held Caroline who could not have been happier. But, when it was time for the family portrait, Katherine would not sit on his lap. So, she is on Sam's lap. She also would not smile. But, we did get a picture of the four of us, all looking at the camera, with Santa. I am not posting it yet in case we do use it on our Christmas card. On the way home she said she had fun. She also said, "mommy, we forgot something. I did not tell Santa about the bunny."

Blog published

I know that many of us who blog wonder what the best way to back up or preserve our blog would be. Since I use blogger and do not host my own domain there is a little bit of me that fears that I will lose all of my blog someday if Google crashes or something. We spend hours uploading pictures and journaling our lives. For many, this is our children's baby book. I still do old fashioned scrapbooking but it is different from my blog.Quite some time ago I learned about blurb. They can actually turn your blog into a bound book. I loved the idea of still having my memories preserved in a physical format, a book I could actually sit on the couch and flip through. When we returned from Norway, I downloaded the blurb program and "slurped" my blog into it. ("Slurp" is their terminology, not mine.) I spent a lot of time tweaking and editing the book. It was not difficult to do but time consuming. It was a lot of fun to be creative and so fun to relive our experience in Norway. Well, I finally finished my book, ordered it and received it in the mail last week. I could not be happier with it.
Here are some of the great and not so great things about a blurb book.

Great

• It is free to download the software and work on your book. You do not pay for it until you have it printed.
  
• It is very easy to use.
• There are many templates to choose from ranging from all text, text with pictures or all pictures.You can see several examples from my book.
• It is very affordable. Our hardbound book with premium paper, 150 pages, 525 photos and 14 weeks of memories was only $66. Printing that many pictures alone, at the cheapest place I have found would have been $47. Add to that the cost of all the other scrapbook supplies that I usually use and this was quite a bargain. Plus, since I had already done the hard part of selecting favorite photos and journaling, I figure I still saved time.
• There are many options as far as backgrounds, fonts, etc. I chose to keep my book uniform for this project but could have a lot of fun with those creative aspects for other projects.
  
• I have a very high quality record of our trip.
• Your project is saved on your computer so I have another backup of my blog on my hard drive. It is also now stored on their server and I could order another book at any time if I needed to. In fact, you can sell your books for any price on their site. I did not list my book for sale because I cannot think of a single person who would buy it, especially since it is all still available for free on my blog.

Not So Great

• Currently it does not work with blogs on the blogger platform due to updates by blogger. They are working to resolve this. I hope they do because I would like to someday print the rest of our blog. On some message boards I found a way to work around this by migrating your blog to another format (Live Journal, Typepad, Wordpress) that does work with blurb. This might be a pain but should work.
• When your blog is "slurped" into the software, every post, regardless of the length of text or the number of pictures, has the same layout. So, it does take some work to redesign the pages to better showcase your photos and fit the number of photos you have in each post. It was fun but it took a lot of time. Don't expect to turn your blog into a book over the weekend.

The standard format after the "slurp". It works for some post but not for most.

In hindsight, I wish that I had "slurped" my blog weekly and kept up with reformatting the layout of the posts as I was writing them so that it was not such a huge task to do at once. If they get blurb to work with blogger, I will try to do this.

Blurb does not only do blog books though they are the only company I have found that does. They also do photo books, recipe books and text books so it is a great way to self publish. There are many other companies who do photo books. I have used Shutterfly and Snapfish in the past.
This weekend Snapfish offered a free 8x10 book as a part of a promotion after Oprah did a show on reducing clutter. Their idea was to scan your kids artwork and make a book out of it and then trash the artwork. So many people have been trying to get this free book that download times have been slow.
I saw posted on Simplemom another program that looks good called Inkubook. Simplemom is currently doing a giveaway of one free book. They are also offering a free book as a promotion through November 30th. Use code PBK266 when you check out. What a great thing to create a free book right before the holidays. I have been wanting to make Katherine an ABC book of people and things in her life. Let's see if I can get it done between now and the deadline.

329

That is the number of kids books that I counted in our house. Then I remembered that I bought some at a garage sale the other day and those are still in my car. Oh, then I remembered that I bought some at a consignment sale and hid them in the garage for Christmas. Wait, there are also the "nice" books and books that are for bigger kids in the top of the closet. It also does not include the 120 items that I have checked out from the library. So we probably own close to 500 children's books and have over 600 in our house. Update since I originally wrote this. I just bought 25 more books at a thrift store but don't worry, some are gifts!

I guess you can say that we enjoy books at our house. It is my weakness. If I see cheap kids books at a thrift store or garage sale I buy them all. I have found some great deals where I have bought 5 books for $1 (worth $25). Luckily Katherine loves to read. We would read all day and all night if she could. I think it has really contributed to her large vocabulary. The great thing about having so many books is that there are so many favorites and I don't get sick of the same books over and over. When we lived in Norway we only took 10 books with us. I really got sick of those 10 books and don't enjoy reading them now. This is Caroline's bookshelf. It includes the soft baby books, small books and books that typically have only a few words per page. Of course Katherine still enjoys those books because she can "read" the words. Actually it is that the books are memorized or there is only one word per page that describes the pictures. She also enjoys "reading" those books to Caroline. It is so cute.

This is Katherine's bookshelf. The 2 outer sections are mainly board books and in the middle section are her paper books that have longer stories in them. Her current favorites are the Franklin books. They are really sweet. She also love the Berenstain Bears and Curious George books.

I get a lot of books at the library. I try to pick a theme each week. It started as a part of the letter of the week curriculum that I did a horrible job with following through. We read books about cows, the jungle, eyes and cats. Then I checked out books about sea animals to get ready for our trip to Sea World and then books about Halloween. Now we have Thanksgiving and Christmas books. It is hard to find good Thanksgiving books. Most are pretty cheesy or stupid and not really related to Thanksgiving.

One thing I love about our library is that I can go online and search the children's catalog for books. Then I can request the books and the library emails me when they are in. Then all I have to do is stop by the front desk to check them out. It is so helpful with 2 kids. It is hard for me to go through the stacks actually looking for books when Katherine is with me because she wants to take the books to the "funny chairs" to read. Another great took that has proven invaluable is called Library Elf (thanks Jen). You enter your information onto their website and they send an email to alert you when your books are due. As you imagine with 120 books, I could rack up some horrible fines if I was not careful. After receiving the email, I just go online to renew them. It saves so much time.

I guess if I were to have a weakness in buying something this is a good weakness to have. One friend on facebook even called it a strength!

Another cute costume giveaway

Well, I did not win the awesome Marie Therese costume but Grosgrain is having another costume giveaway. This time it is for a set that includes a Little Bo Peep and a sheep. Not only would it fit my girls next year for Halloween but she describes it as Norwegian inspired and well, we lived in Norway for 14 weeks so we NEED to win this. So, if anyone wants to enter to win go here to do so. And, if you don't really want it for yourself, you could always enter and give it to me if you win:)

Grosgrain is also hosting a giveaway for a commissioned watercolor painting. Go here to enter this giveaway.

We are so full of culture!

Once a month the sculpture museum is free on Saturday and they have kids activities. We decided to check it out. We rode the train downtown and walked to the museum. It was a gorgeous day. They had a scavenger hunt, crafts, puppet show and story time. It was a very enjoyable family day.

Katherine with the headless army of men.

A cool outdoor sculpture

A cat puppet made from a scarf

Dancing marionettes

Do not touch the sculpture!

It is hard to tell in this picture but there are three pieces by Picasso in the above picture. They are of the same thing. One is the painting, one is the small sculpture inside and the third is a large, cement sculpture outside.

Sam was explaining what the clothespin and typewriter eraser were.