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Last year, we enjoyed cheering Isaac on in field day in Knoxville, so naturally we thought we’d support him again this year.  Only Carriage Crest does a field day like I’ve never seen.  It was more like one of those elementary school carnivals than a field day.  They had 35 stations and at each station there was a game or an activity. The kids were paired up in their classrooms and given a list of stations/activities to choose from.  Isaac was paired up with A.  I don’t know how the partner selection process happened, but Isaac and A did not seem to agree much on which activities to do.  When I met up with them they had just finished an activity that she choose.  Isaac really wanted to do the bowling, but she didn’t so when he got in line, she just ran off and he had to follow her.  I was glad that I went if only to sort out how the partnership should run.  I caught up to them in a line I explained that they needed to take turns choosing the next activity.  She still ran off at times when it was Isaac’s turn and he had chosen something, but I reminded her that this turn was Isaac’s choice and she had to stay with him.  I didn’t stay for the entire field day because I soon found it very difficult to keep up since Isaac and A were running to each station and I had to drag a stroller and two girls with me.

Sunny and cool, and perfect for fun outside.Some days, life is not about having a perfectly clean house or having a nice dinner right on schedule.  These are the days to let go of the schedule and let the kids be kids.  I love the freedom that I have as a stay-at-home-mom.  I love that on the way home from the bus stop in the morning we can take a detour to the neighborhood park or stop on the benches to play.  It’s in those carefree moments that I find great joy in being a mom.  I love moments when I can forget about everything that’s hard in life and just enjoy the sunshine and watching my kids have fun—what could be better?!

I’ve been frustrated in the past that I can’t place any memories in Kindergarten.  Today, my kindergarten teacher posted a picture of our kindergarten class on Facebook.  Thanks to being friends with some girls I went to kindergarten with who were tagged in the picture, here it is:

(I’m the first one in the second row.  With short brown hair and a pink and white dress)

Now that I think about it, I remember a few things about kindergarten registration/testing.  I remember going into the little room by the stage (where we had instrument lessons in 4th grade).  I also remember that my parents had always called me Kathy and when they gave me a name tag that said Kathleen, I told my mom that they gave me the wrong name tag because that wasn’t my name.    It wasn’t that I disliked the name, I really didn’t know that my name was Kathleen.  I remember learning my middle name (Alicia) and trying to memorize how to spell it as I got on the school bus.  I also remember the night before my first day of school, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep.  I kept getting up and asking my mom if it was time for school yet. 

Grandpa Bird left some pipes and elbows for Isaac to play with.  Isaac really enjoyed putting them together in different ways. 

Last week, Isaac and his friend, Ryan experimented with a variety of different configurations.  Once they built something that they liked, they turned on the water and watched to see where the water would come out. 

They put little plastic balls (slightly smaller than marbles) into the pipes at different points and experimented to see where they came out.  It was fun to see them work together and make changes to the designs to get the desired results.  Ryan and Isaac get along really well because they both have the same level of interest in the same things and they work together well.

I always assumed that none of my kids were picky eaters because of something that I did.  Turns out I was wrong.  In fact, a lot of the things I took credit for with one child or another, I’ve learned had more to do with their individual personalities than anything I did.

So, for those of you who are really interested, here are the details of what she will and won’t eat: 

She still likes Snow Pea Crisps most of the time, although she’s started to only eat them directly from the bag.  Sometimes when I just put some on her tray, she won’t eat them, but if I put an open bag on the table next to her, she’ll eat them.

She really likes yogurt.  It’s a good thing since it’s the only dairy product she will eat.  She will not drink milk.  I have tricked her into taking a sip or two here and there, but most of the time I can’t even get her to drink that much and I have tried Chocolate and Strawberry milk.  She will not taste cheese (although she will sometimes eat a cracker that comes with some kind of cheese paste on it).  She will eat strawberry yogurt, but she will not try a strawberry.  If I put one on her tray she will look at it and cry until I remove it.

She will eat some varieties of crackers.  Naturally, I have offered her every cracker imaginable.  Crackers are hit and miss with her.  Some days she’ll eat them happily, other days she just rejects them.  She has learned that you can open up the Peanut Butter and Jelly crackers and just eat the middle out.  I wish she hadn’t learned that because she will often only eat the PB&J and reject the rest of the cracker.  Despite her love for peanut butter cracker filling, she will not taste regular peanut butter or taste a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I have even tried putting fresh peanut butter on a cracker once she ate all the filling and she rejected that as well.

She will sometimes eat bananas, but she will only take a bite if I give her the entire banana partly peeled.  She will not eat cut up pieces of banana or large pieces with no peel.

She will eat apple slices.  She likes to chew the apple and spits most of it back out after chewing it up into tiny pieces.  She will not try an apple slice if it has a green peel.  She will not taste applesauce.  In fact, her grandpa Cochran tried to offer her applesauce last time we were in Utah.  When she rejected tasting it, he put a little on her lip.  She cried and cried.  Even after all the applesauce was wiped off her lips, she continued to cry for several minutes.

She will sometimes eat bread or toast with cinnamon and sugar. She will not try a sandwich or bread sticks, or bread with anything on it other than butter, cinnamon and sugar.  She will eat muffins and banana bread.

I have gotten her to eat some oatmeal.  She will eat some types of cereal.  She has started eating raisins and Crasins.

She will not even taste any type of meat and if you put a small piece of meat on her tray, she will cry until you remove it.  She will not even try any other type of fruit (not even berries or oranges).  She will not eat anything at a fast food restaurant (including french fries and chicken nuggets).  She will not eat potatoes or rice or any vegetable.  She will not eat chips or Gerber Graduates puffs.  She refuses to even taste pasta.

She will mostly only drink water.  I have gotten her to try Pedialyte and Gatorade, but she wouldn’t drink much of either.  I have finally weaned her from nursing this week.

She does like sweets.  I don’t know how she knows which things fall into the cake and candy category, but she is always willing to eat sweets.  A few times i have made the mistake of breaking a cookie or brownie in half to make it easier for her to eat.  When I have done that she instantly starts to cry and tries to put it back together.  She will reject a broken cookie (or a broken cracker) just because it’s broken.

That is it.  I cannot think of a single thing that I have not listed that she will eat.  I have been giving her vitamin supplements to make up for some of the foods that she won’t eat, but I worry about how healthy she’ll be on a diet of yogurt, water, and crackers. 

It’s no secret that my little Charlotte is a cat lover.  She spends a good part of everyday chasing our cats around the house.  She brushes them and pets them and carries them around.  She likes books about cats and items adorned with cats.  She talks about cats, she draws pictures of cats, she probably even dreams about cats.  She is excited every time someone points out a cat or a picture of a cat anywhere.  The fastest way to get her out of bed in the morning is to tell her that a cat is doing something interesting.

(The other day Charlotte told me her cat was in the laundry room sink, next thing I knew, Charlotte was also in the laundry room sink.)She even enjoys talking to cats.  I’ll overhear her telling a cat about another cat she saw or something about one of her friends.  Sometimes she’ll come home from going somewhere and tell her cat everything she did while she was gone.

(Charlotte reading a bedtime story to her cat)She likes to tell people facts about her cat as well.  I’ve lost count of how many times she has told me that her cat (Jill Pole) doesn’t like tail petting. 

Circles are now one of her favorite shapes because cats sit in a circle sometimes.  The other day she was really amused because her cat was “in a circle” and she was laying next to the cat and she said that they looked like a “10” together.  Then she proceeded to make every kind of letter she could make with a line and a circle by moving to different spots next to her cat. Somehow, despite all the chasing and tormenting her cat endures at her hands, Charlotte’s cat seems to really love her back.  To Charlotte’s great joy, Jill jumps up into her bed every night and regularly seeks Charlotte out for love and attention.

So, what do we do when we actually get a sunny day here in Seattle*?  We pretend it’s raining:To be fair, we have actually had a lot of sunny days lately.  When the weather is nice here, it’s stunningly beautiful!

*Technically we’re in the unincorporated Fairwood area between Renton and Kent, but you know what I mean.

My Dad came to visit us from Ohio.  He arrived during breakfast on Friday and left just before 10:00 AM on Tuesday.  We had a good time and really enjoyed our visit.  This morning, the bus driver asked about Isaac’s grandpa and said that Isaac was very sad on the bus Tuesday morning after saying goodbye.On Friday Afternoon I drove in downtown Seattle for the first time so that I could pick Zach up from work.  It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but I was more than happy to let Zach take over the driving.  We ate dinner at Ivars, then drove to a park across the sound from the city.  The park had a great view and big hill that the kids enjoyed rolling down.  We drove along Alki point then got out and walked down to where we could see the lighthouse.  Ever the agronomist, my Dad looked at and talked about all the plants he saw.We stopped in with Great Grandma for a short visit before driving home and putting the kids to bed.Saturday, the boys (my Dad, Zach, and Isaac) drove down to the train station and took the train into the city.  They visited Pike Place Market and brought back pepper jelly and chocolate pasta.  They also stopped at Uwajimaya and picked up an assortment of Asian desserts and snack food and had Dim Sum.

Saturday Afternoon, my Dad built marshmallow guns for the kids out of plastic pipes.  Then they went outside to play with them. 

Sunday I stayed home from Church with a sick Nicole while everyone else went to church.  Charlotte gave her talk in Primary.

After church, Grandpa held Nicole while I made cookies and dinner.  We had Great Grandma, Uncle Gale, Uncle DeFord, and Aunt Charlene over for dinner.  The little girls both fell to sleep really early and we were able to sit and talk and put together puzzles. 

Monday morning we drove out to a beach with tidal flats and went clamming.  Unfortunately, the little girls were not feeling well so I spent the entire adventure sitting on a towel with two crying girls on my lap.  Zach and my Dad collected about 30 clams before we decided to take the girls home to rest.  Monday evening we ate clams and pizza and watched a movie together.Tuesday came too fast.  After a waffle breakfast and walking Isaac to school, we washed a batch of whites and sent my Dad off on his way.

I’ll be honest, this is a bit of a dull thing to blog about, but it’s been such a source of stress and anxiety this week, that I’m writing about it anyway.  One thing I’ve learned about being a parent is that it’s easy to fret yourself into turning a normal virus into a potentially life threatening illness.  There were multiple times this week that I imagined the worst, from fearing she had something as severe as meningitis, to fretting that some unknown illness was going to permanently diminish her brain function.

 

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Charlotte is giving the talk in Primary next Sunday and her topic is the Restoration.  They have been talking about the Restoration all month in primary (and her brother gave 2 talks early in the month about it), anyway, I thought I ‘d ask her what she knew and have her write her own talk.  I just asked questions like tell me what Joseph Smith did when he wanted to know what church to join and what did the angel Moroni do?

This is what she came up with:

Joseph Smith restored the true church by getting the missing pieces back on the earth and helping Jesus fix it.

He went to all the churches in the world and asked which one is true and they all said “I am.” So he read the scriptures and he went into the closest forest to his house and he prayed and Heavenly Father and Jesus came to him and he asked which church to join and they said None.

The angel Moroni was the one who hid the golden plates and that’s how he knows they were on a hill.  He told Joseph Smith that they were on a hill and maybe he told him it was a heavy box.  Joseph Smith translated them into the Book of Mormon into words that everyone could understand, even kids who can read, like Isaac.  So you can understand because you’re a mom that knows English.

So, do I have her give this talk the way she told it to me or do I take out the speculations and inaccuracies (I don’t think Moroni told him it was heavy and he didn’t go to every church in the world) and maybe polish it off a little?

Another option would be to compose a list of questions and practice having her answer them a few times then present her talk in a question in answer format (so I’m not whispering her talk in her ear, but she’s sharing what she knows).  Does that make sense?

The weather has been great this week with lots of sunshine.   On Friday we decided that we wanted to go somewhere as a family to enjoy the weather.  Zach came home a little early for our adventure.  We thought we’d got to Coulon Beach Park, but a lot of other people had the same idea and it was really crowded with no good parking.  We decided to try Lincoln park instead.  It was much less crowded.

We walked along beautiful wooded trails and stopped at some playground equipment to play.  After the park we followed a path down to the waterfront.  The tide was in so there wasn’t much beach, but we ate our picnic lunch on a bench and some rocks near the water.  We took a walk along the Sound and stopped to throw rocks into the water, until an urgent need to use the potty sent us back up the hill to the bathroomWe took a scenic route to go home and stopped at Alki point.  There were geese and goslings all around and they didn’t seem very intimidated by people. Ila loved them and kept chasing after them.  She might have even gotten close enough to pet one if it wasn’t for her mother grabbing her (I was afraid she’d get bitten).I love being so close to such neat places!

Nicole has figured out how to get her own drink of water from the fridge.  It’s a little unnerving.  She can just barely reach the very bottom edge of the water dispenser if she pushes with her fingers.  It means that when she’s done filling it, she has to let it slide down before she can pick up her full cup of water. She is not always successful, but sometimes when she does it flawlessly, she takes a sip, pours the rest in the sink and then gets some more water.  When I catch her in a cycle of doing that I often turn on the child lock on the water dispenser.

I just couldn’t take the mullet anymore.  I always get impatient for my girls to grow enough hair to have a normal hairstyle. 

Here’s the before:

It doesn’t look like you can tell in these pictures, but in the back she had a shorter layer on top and then a longer layer which was very thin and wispy.  I left the front alone and just cut the longer layer so that it was even with the shorter layer.

I got it mostly cut before she realized what I was doing.  Once she figured it out, she messed up her wet hair with her hands and anytime I came near her with my scissors, she shook her head from side to side so that I couldn’t get a clean cut.  I had to give up and just do touch up work a snip or two at a time for the next few days.Here are the after shots:

I am finally getting around to blogging about Nicole’s Birthday, but better late than never, right?

We started things off with a special breakfast of sausage, heart shaped eggs, and birthday juice.  (I almost never buy juice for the kids because of the sugar content, so the juice was extra special—it was Nicole’s favorite part of breakfast)

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I was going to make Nicole monkey cupcakes since she love Curious George so much, but when I showed her pictures of them on the computer she wasn’t particularly excited.  When I showed her these color burst cupcakes she jumped up, yelled cupcakes, and started pretending to eat them.

Lest you get too impressed, you should know that I cheated on the frosting and just bought a can of heavy whipping cream—I just don’t have the skill or equipment to frost a cupcake like that with frosting.

They’re actually not too hard to make.  I added food coloring to white cake mix.

Then layered the colors one spoonful at a time so they ended up looking like this:

They look really neat when you cut into them:

Side note:  I got the idea from my favorite recipe blog, if you haven’t checked it out yet, you’re really missing out because it’s awesome!  (I also bought their cookbook and I LOVE IT).

Name:  Nicole Kate Cochran

Age:  3 years, 3 days

Weight: 27.9lbs          5th percentile

Length:   34 1/4 inches       5th percentile

Since Last year’s well check :  +3.9 lbs, + 1 1/2 inches

I am lucky to have (and have had) amazing mothers and grandmothers in my life.

What says mother’s day more than children’s artwork? 

Isaac brought these home from school: (I love that it’s raining on our house—I guess we’ve been in Seattle for a little while now).  Here’s the inside:

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Nicole turned 3 yesterday.  I started writing this post before her birthday, but I was too tired to finish it the last two days so instead of posting it first thing on her birthday, I’m posting it the next day. 

It is always amazing to me to look back and see how much my children change and grow in a year.  It’s a reminder of how fleeting these tender years are.  Here is what I wrote about Nicole last year on her birthday.  And here is how she spent her birthday last year.

Nicole is a funny, unique little girl.  When she’s happy she smiles real big and gallops.  She also gallops when she dances.  When she’s sleepy or excited, she yells everything she says.  Most of the time, she is not angry when she yells.  She will yell things like “I HAVE A HAT” or “THIS IS A TOY.”  We have tried to teach her about using a quiet voice, but there are times that her volume is just stuck at loud and she doesn’t seem to understand our request to turn it down to conversation level.

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