Adventures in La La Land

Proof that there's a someecard for everything. (I was in a very strange mood when I wrote this entry . . .) 1. My blog has reached 50,000 page views! I should do a giveaway or something. I'll give away more wit and wisdom. How do you like that? ;-) 2. We had some success with vegetables this week! I roasted carrot "fries" for Lena. (Just carrots cut in slices and tossed in olive oil.) She loves them! Unfortunately, I made the fries too thin and she had a very near-choking incident. She finally puked up a huge piece after gagging on it for a scarily long time. So now I cut them into tiny pieces for her to pick up with her fingers. But she's been eating them all week. Woohoo! And I've gotten back on board with sneaking veggies into Lucy's meals. I put a whole baby food container of carrot/apple in our waffles on Monday. And a container of squash in her macaroni. She was none the wiser and gobbled them down! 3. I made a new recipe this week: Slow...

Lena Lou is 8 months old today. I feel like she's grown so much and developed so much personality in the past month! Routine Still very similar to last month. She wakes up right around 7. Takes a morning nap and afternoon nap. The evening nap has become hit or miss. If she doesn't take one, I struggle to keep her awake 'til 7:00. If she does get that evening nap, she usually goes to bed a little later. Eating We haven't made much progress with solid food. Actually, she's already becoming picky. I've made the mistake of giving her bread, which has become her new favorite food. She wants nothing to do with fruits or vegetables. I've given her slices of pear and apple this month straight from my dad's trees. She sucks on them for a little while, then throws the slice on the floor. And she's totally over eating food in the mesh feeder. That goes straight on the floor as well. I tried avocado slices again recently. Not a fan. I bought some sweet ...

1. A couple weeks ago, I wrote an article for my friend Bethany about her Art Prize piece . She got it published through Life News and it popped up on their facebook feed this week! So e xciting!  2. Lena took off crawling this week. I took her to Bible Study with me on Tuesday night. We met at my friend Missy's house and Lena was obsessed with her dog. She inched forward for the first time to get her hands on that dog! Haha. (So different than Lucy, who is terrified  of dogs!) She's become quite a pro since then. She just army crawls, but I've seen her up on her hands and knees a lot. She'll have that figured out in no time. 3. Justin and I took the girls down to Art Prize on Friday. We looked like a couple tourists with our 2 strollers, consulting our map frequently. I feel like we were there for hours, and walked miles  but didn't actually see that much!  Of course we started by checking out Bethany's piece: It was so cool to finally see it in pers...

This week's lesson really daunted me. Teaching the gravity and importance of sin is a big deal. It was also my first real chance to include the story of redemption. Honestly, I don't think Lucy grasped much of it, but hopefully the seeds are being planted. Week 3: The Fall (Genesis 3) Letter:  x Verse: "Everyone has sinned. No one measures up to God's glory." ( Romans 3:23, NIRV ) On Monday we read the story of the fall in her children's Bible. Then we built a blanket fort (finally crossing the last thing off our summer bucket list!), and pretended we were Adam and Eve hiding from God. We talked about how you can never hide from God and He always sees us. On Tuesday we attempted to make this  x-ray craft. Photo credit Lucy went crazy with the glue and white crayons and never actually glued any q-tips to the paper. I thought about incorporating sin into the  x-ray by telling her that even if we hide sin in our heart, God can see it - just like an  ...

When Lucy was a baby, she threw a book at my [open] laptop and dislodged the letter  x. So every time I type the letter  x, I have to copy and paste it from a word document saved on my computer. Haha. Just a fun fact for this week's letter!  I was very un-original and just used an idea from notimeforflashcards.com.   Lucy loved all the gluing, and I thought it turned out pretty cute!

1. I've been noticing lately that Lena is a homebody. We babysat at Niki's a couple times this week. Lena was restless, whiny, and wouldn't sleep the whole time we were there. But as soon as we got home, she sat on the floor happily playing with her toys. She's done that multiple times lately. 2. We had crazy weather this week. On Tuesday it was 94 degrees. And this morning we're under a frost and freeze advisory! 3. Maybe the weather contributed to the sickness that has taken over this house. Justin's been fighting some kind of congestion/sore throat thing for a while that I had thought was just allergies. But Monday morning, Lena and Lucy both woke up snotty, coughing messes. As usual it has seemed to hit Lena the hardest. She is so congested she can hardly breathe. I hate that I can't give her any kind of medicine to help clear her out. I've been using the nasal aspirator like crazy. She actually kind of likes it. Haha. She smiles every time I use...

We had a busy week and weren't home very much, so we did a small lesson based on Genesis 2. On Thursday, we read Genesis 2 in Lucy's children's Bible and discussed how Adam named all the animals. I lined up all Lucy's animals . . . Then I gave her a stack of "Hello My Name Is . . ." stickers and told her to name her animals. She actually wrote real letters on most of them. So cute. Then, she wanted to make name tags for Lena and me. I wrote out Lena's name for her to copy, but she did "Mom" all on her own. I was amazed at how well she did! She also copied Dora's name off a book.  Then today we talked about how Adam was lonely and couldn't find a friend among all the animals, so God made him a helper named Eve. I had a hard time thinking of a way to represent Eve's creation, so we raided Grandma's cookie cutter stash and made man and woman cookies. :-) I realize it kind of looks like Adam has a child bride. ...

1. Every labor day Justin's e xtended family spends the weekend camping. I've made it very clear that I do not enjoy camping. I identify strongly with this: And this: And this: Get the point? Lol. Anyway , we usually go up for one day to hang out with everyone. We went up after church on Sunday for the big family meal. I ate half my plate of food with Lena sitting in the stroller ne xt to me before she started to freak out . I just could not console her. I finally decided she was just hot and tired, so we went and sat in the car with the AC on until she fell asleep. She slept for 20 minutes, but woke up happier, so we went down to the lake for a while. She and Lucy both loved  it.  It wasn't long before Lena started to melt down again, though. Apparently she inherited my distaste for camping. Haha. I wanted to leave with her, but Justin and Lucy wanted to stay, and we only drove one car. So I ended up leaving them there to spend the night! I was really nerv...

This was our first week of my attempt at homeschooling Lucy. We're not doing anything rigid or serious. I just want to incorporate a little "school" into our day to prepare her for kindergarten (which she won't be attending for 2 years - overachiever, much?). Really, it's just an excuse to add more routine to our day. I love routine. We're still not done with our quest through the alphabet, so I incorporated letter W into our first week. It took a little creativity. Haha.  Anyway, here's what week one looked like. Week One: Creation (Genesis 1) Verse: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." (Genesis 1:1) God is: Creative!  This lesson was easy because I had something specific to focus on every day. I don't think we'll always do a craft every day, but we did for the 7 days of creation. My inspiration came from here , but I re-worked a lot of them. Every day, we sat down with the Bible, read about what...