12/9/11

For baby’s first Christmas ornament I have taken both of my kids to have their hands imprinted in clay.  I love these little ornaments and next year I promise to take a photo of them! For successive years I have let the kids paint an ornament. This is a fun little tradition, which I think eventually will make for a very cute tree.  This year our friends Ryver and Tooper went with us. As you can see Talia had a great time trying to eat the paint. Simon was just very serious about getting the job done.

Simon decided months and months ago that he was going to have a “dragon birthday” and that the cake would be a “pink chocolate raspberry cake” and he came up with all of that on his own! I went looking for a dragon cake pan because I am not a very good baker and I need to keep it simple and I came across  directions for assembling a dragon out of 2 rounds, and I thought “hey I could do that” And so I just used a box cake mix and I did! To make the raspberry I just juiced a bag of frozen strawberries (after microwaving it for one min.) Juicing just removes the seeds and you are left with a raspberry syrup.  I added that syrup to royal icing (but you could easily do butter cream). The resulting icing tasted great!

Talia was very excited about the gifts! She is really into cars. It’s super cute – she will scoot them along and make car noises. Simon didn’t do that until he was way older but I guess she has him to imitate.

We got Simon some additional pieces for the plan city we already own. He also got a cape and mask from his friend Ryver, which we had to fight him to get him to take off at bed. I have a feeling I’m going to have a hard time convincing him not to wear it to preschool tomorrow. He also got a real electric guitar but so far the only person who has played it has been Myles… (I think he’s a bit young).

I haven’t been organized enough to plan him an actual party so tonight we just celebrated with ourselves. He has his heart set on another swimming party but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen until March.

When he woke me up this morning at 6:30  he said “Mommy it’s morning and I’m already 4!”

They set up an ice rink here over the Holidays and since I grew up in Alaska and ice skating was a big part of my childhood my brother Mark and I thought it would be fun to take Simon. He received the knee pads with his skateboard for Christmas and it was all his idea to wear them ice skating – Hilarious!

He was really unsure about this.

All of this was a lot of fun until he fell flat on his face, he didn’t even break his fall with his knees so the knee pads were of no help. After the giant knot on his head he decided he hated ice skating.  When I was growing up ice skating was something pretty much everyone did becuase it was cheap or free so long as you had skates. Every single elementary, junior high, and high school has an ice rink. It’s as simple as building a concrete slab and flooding it in the winter. The quality of the ice is not that great but pretty much ever elementary school kid ice skates during gym class and if you want at recess too (and the school always had plenty of skates you could borrow if you didn’t own any however dull they might be.) Often in the evenings my parents would take us back to the school so we could skate some more and slap around a hockey puck.  I started taking lesson when I was 3 – almost a year younger than Simon is now and I don’t remember ever being afraid of falling (maybe my mom remembers otherwise) I do remember my sole goal – a double axel. Of course I was disappointed to find out that they don’t teach those for the first decade or so of ice skating lessons. Instead the beginning lessons focus on control and strength. And at ages 3, 4, and 5 I found the lessons to be awfully dull. I just wanted to get to the part to when you jumped and twirled in the air! being my strong willed self I didn’t let those teachers or the rest of the class hold me back, while they were all learning a simple controlled semi turn I was practicing jumping and spinning (out of control) as fast as I could. I don’t remember how old I was but I do remember that when it came time to advanced to the next level I didn’t pass. Basically I flunked ice skating. I remember the teachers handing out level completion certificates to all the other kids. I was stunned and probably embarrassed that I didn’t get one and I remember fleeing the ice as fast as possible. The instructor came over and talked to my mom after class and said if I promised to work really hard and to LISTEN to what the teacher said follow along with the class I could pass to the next level. “Forget it” I said, “I don’t want to do ice skating any more!” Just thinking back on all of this makes me wonder how on earth my mother parented a child like me!

His projects are getting bigger and messier

this is the chalk tray on his easel after his most recent painting adventure. I thought the chalk in the pool of blue paint looked cool. Probaly should have had him put the chalk away first but I didn’t think about that until he was already really involved in painting.

I actually really love this painting. All the blues and purples are so pretty.  He carefully selected the colors and layered them over and over.

and here he is making a pink and purple painting. He is using liquid watercolors in spray bottles.

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I think we have a new October tradition!

inspired by all of the Halloween decorations and Play at Home Mom, we decided to have dinner by blacklight. I picked up these blacklights for $10 each at Walmart. Yes, I’m admitting to driving to a different county to go to Walmart to pick up cheap blacklights (there is no walmart in King county and blacklights at the 3 other stores I checked were 3Xs the cost). Simon has been playing with glow in the dark and blacklight reactive objects under them all week. They are a ton of fun. So tonight we extended the play to dinner. I researched as much as I could about food that fluoresces under blacklights. I read that vitamines A (beta carotene) B1, B2, and B12 are all blacklight reactive and I hoped to crush up some and sprinkle it on our food but I was not successful in getting it to work. I must reshearch this topic further becuase I read that B12 is the secret behind Monster Energy drink’s orange glow. For tonight’s dinner party we stuck with tonic water which is made with quinine (from tree bark) it’s extremely bitter and usually used in the drink gen and tonic. I simply froze tonic water in ice cube trays and made jello with it for some eerie drinks and dessert. If you want to make your own blacklight reactive jello just buy the knox gelatin and follow the instructions on the package. You will need 4 packets of gelatin, 2 cups of some sort of juice (I used white grape) and 2 cups of tonic water (you can buy HFCS free tonic water and Whole Foods Market). Both kids found this to be too bitter so you might actaully need to make it more juice less tonic water (or add sugar).

these are our florescent ice cubes which melted into florescent water – the next logical extension of this is of course blacklight bath and tonic water is pretty inexpensive so don’t but it past me to fill the bath with it.

and this is our glow in the dark jello.

we also bought florescent green hair spray (as you can see so clearly on Simon) that was a huge hit once he realized it’s purpose. Our table center piece is just florescent plastic shot glasses that I found at the party store, Simon has had a lot of fun playing with them. The company that makes them also makes plates and cups. We might have to experiment with them next year. I also found on http://www.blacklight.com that you can buy all sorts of fun stuff that our local party store didn’t carry; nail polish, makeup, bubbles, balloons etc, etc.

showing off the hairspray (comes in like 4 different colors)

showing off his glowing teeth!

All in all it was a ton fun. I don’t think Talia was quite sure what to think of it. We gave her some jello to play with and she loved squishing it but I’m not sure she even noticed that it was glowing.
If this post inspires you or if you have any other ideas of blacklight reactive “stuff” we could add please comment!

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recently I have been into the blog Play At Home Mom, so many many awesome ideas. This idea was shared on their blog awhile back. I picked up these submersible LED lights at Jo-Ann’s in the floral section. I think they sell them at most craft stores, they are for adding to the water in floral arrangements. I thought I was purchasing just white lights and I was presently surprised to find that they are color changing rainbow LEDs. This was a HUGE hit with the kids. We also added in a package of glow stick bracelets, I loaded up on them the last time I was at Michael’s ¢.99 for a package of 15! There are so many things you can do with them.

The only downside to the submersible LEDs (or at least the ones I purchased) is that once turned on and submerged is that you can’t turn them off. I guess the moisture causes a continuous connection with their batteries. The package says that they are good for 100 hours so I guess we will be having bathtub rave parties every night this week until they die I don’t know if the batteries can be replaced or not (it looks like you would have to break into the plastic to do so.) It’s not lost on me that white LEDs would be AWESOME during a night time water birth. I’m going to go purchase some and keep them with my birth bag just for that purpose (just think of those photos!) Tomorrow night I would like to try our bathtub rave party with lots of bubbles. We don’t normally do bubble bath for many reasons (mainly I’m super paranoid about the ingredients in soap ) so I have no idea how to make lots and lots of bubbles. Any suggestions?

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I took this video with my mom’s D90 about 4 months ago and then never even took it off the memory card. It was fun to look back on how much he has improved (this was 2 sessions ago) and how much hair Talia has grown with out me even noticing!

They  Love each other!

We tell Simon that Talia will always be his first friend, that it is his job to look out for her. Even though he does already enjoy bossing her around he takes that job pretty seriously. He always makes sure that she doesn’t have any choking hazards in her mouth and he comes running to me to let me know if she is even approaching any kind of danger. I think they are going to be life long friends.

I went to the fabric store yesterday in an attempt to get a head start on Halloween costumes. Instead I bought the material and patter to make the dress that Talia is wearing in the photos. It turned out pretty cute so I was trying to take some photos of her in it and Simon asked to get in some too. He rarely ask to be in photos so when he does I let him! The pictures I got of the two of them are way more precious to me than the dress modeling. But here it is in color

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Well he did it! my little 3 year old got on a regular old bike and just took off.

The full story is that he started his love affair with wheels when he was 18 months and my mom bought him a radio flyer scootabout.  He got a kaZam balance bike back in December (it was a Christmas gift) He didn’t get to ride it all that often until spring but then he really took off on it. He love that balance bike. Then he started begging me for a “pedal bike”. Simon always wants what he sees other kids doing. So I bought a super cheap bike off craigslist and let him have it. What I didn’t realize at the time is that most kids bikes are made of steel and are super heavy, heavier than Simon in fact. He couldn’t even lift it off the ground. Actually I think the first bike I got him was heavier than my bike. I realized that he wasn’t going to be able to ride it for years so I sold it (for exactly what I bought it!). And I began searching for an aluminum frame kids bike, they are hard to find. There is exactly one manufacture of aluminum 12″ kids bikes  -  specialized hotrock. I don’t know much about bikes but I guess that specialized is a very high end performance brand. The 12″ bike cost almost $200, that’s WAY out of our budget for a first bike that he will likely quickly outgrow. I thought that he would just have to wait until he is older/bigger and ride a steel bike but I kept looking on craigslist for a used specialized hotrock. Periodically I would see them listed for about half price but by the time I would email they would be gone. My friend Jennifer finally found this one craigslist for me just about 30min after it was listed and I was the first to respond and I got it for $30 (score!).  We brought it home Myles took off the training wheels at the end of our drive way, I was busy fiddling with my camera and Myles was putting his wrenches away when we looked up and saw Simon had gotten on the bike and was riding away… I started shouting “he’s doing it! he’s doing it!” and trying to turn my camera on – and then he wrecked. It wasn’t a bad crash it’s just that it never occurred to me that even though he may know how to ride a bike he had no idea how to use the breaks. He has never had breaks before (neither his trike no balance bike has them). After that wreck he wouldn’t get back on the specialized at all. He was afraid of it.  This was about a month ago, and since that time his legs seem to have grown a full inch which has also helped a lot.  I put the training wheels back on it and spent 2 days teaching him how to break. Riding down our driveway (which is a slight slope) and having him try and stop right at the edge. When I was finally convinced that he had mastered it  I took the training wheels back off but he still didn’t want to ride it. Yesterday I suggested it again and he was game. I just held the back for him and gave him a push and he was off and riding like he had been doing it his whole life. It was pretty amazing! So the lesson here is when you are ready to transition from the balance bike to a regular bike just make sure they know how to use the breaks first.

Here is the video of him riding around. He did NOT want to quit last night and had a melt down over it when we finally made him.

We did have one other incident, about 30 min after he started ridding he got really comfortable with it and road right over Talia. It was pretty horrific. She was sitting in the middle of the neighbors lawn and he just made a huge circle and road right up on the grass, knocked her down, and road over her back and arm. (He fell off the bike in the process but I went straight to Talia) At the time I was sure he had broken her back or arm and she screamed her head off but then calmed down pretty fast. I gave her her first dose of Tylenol ever (because I figured she was in a lot of pain) and nursed her and then she seemed just fine. No bruises or anything. Simon says it was an accident but I won’t be letting Talia down while he is riding anytime soon…

That’s the story of my little bike rider and now what he REALLY wants is a skateboard – anyone know where I can get toddler sized elbow, knee, and wrist pads?
and guess what Talia is almost big enough for the scootabout…

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Thank you Sarah Bayless for trying – I actually love them!