Hangin' Out

When I uploaded my photos onto the computer the other day, I realized (to a true blogger's delight) that if I stretched it a little bit (okay, maybe a lot), they all had something in common: HANGIN' OUT. Let me illustrate:

We had a grand total of TWO nice days last week (I feel like I'm in Vancouver again!) but we enjoyed every moment of them. Ellie was ecstatic to be allowed to HANG OUT on our newly snow-free deck...
And Joshua was too! There is nothing that quite compares to watching the wonder on a baby's face as they discover a world they can't remember from the year before. Joshua was busy for a loong time crawling in and out of our patio doors, amazed that there was actually a way out of our apartment that he could navigate himself! He, too, was more than thrilled to HANG OUT in the great outdoors:

Lately Ellie has discovered a new favourite place to HANG OUT:On top of Daddy. In fact HANGING OFF of Daddy is just as, if not more fun:

(Ellie likes to called Daddy "Rinky Dinky Donkey" when she rides his back. I can't decide if it's downright hilarious or borderline disrespectful. :)

Last week when our friend Tyler was over, he taught Joshua a skill he'd been trying to master for months: getting on the couch (strangely enough, Tyler was here two years ago when Ellie learned the same thing.) So this is most definitely Joshua's favourite place to HANG OUT:Ellie, of course, also appreciates the couch, but has recently learned it's more fun to HANG upside-down, often pretending to be a bat......but sometimes for a good read, as well.

Lately it's become apparent that I have TWO big fans of dressing up in the house. I guess Joshua is just following the only example he knows - Ellie. Here she is with her 25 cents worth of necklaces from our local thrift store. The necklaces are, of course HANGING around her neck.

It's not uncommon for us to find things HANGING around Joshua's neck quite regularly, like this necklace and headband combo, for instance:

Or his ultimate favourite, a stethoscope:

And speaking of all things HANGING, here's one more to leave you with - the concentration drool. Always hanging! It's the most disgusting when he starts to play with the sticky drool strings.

So there you have it. You're more than welcome to come HANG OUT with us anytime. :)

Easter Weekend

Hi Everyone! Hope you all had a great Easter weekend! Ours was busy but peaceful...and really fun. My camera battery was dead during a lot of the festivities, but here are a few memories that did actually get captured:

Ellie bought some finger paints with her birthday money from Grandpa and Grandma Balfour and we used them to paint Easter pictures for friends. The one in this photo isn't an Easter picture, but it's the only one where Ellie was smiling for me...sort of. She was too busy concentrating! I hardly heard a peep from her for an hour - finger paints are a new best friend in our home! (Grandpa and Grandma, check your mailbox this week!)

Friday we celebrated Easter dinner with my family. My sister Dana made this cheesecake that I not only ate but ENJOYED immensely...changing my opinion about cheesecake entirely! I can now see why it can be a weakness for some people. Like my brother-in-law, Jon, for instance. :)

(I appreciate this guy. He never lets me down when I make him pose for the camera.)

We had a friend from church, Charon, join us, and the girls quickly warmed up to her (anyone willing to read a story is a dear dear friend!)

Ellie and Auntie Dana enjoying a moment:

Dad barbequed his best chicken breasts and thighs EVER (mouth is watering all over again):

Speaking of mouths watering, Joshua drooled and teethed the whole weekend, as always (2 more teeth and we should get a break until the 2 year molars start...we hope!)After supper the kids got to search for the sweet treasures Nana had hid for them in the basement (Ellie's first ever Easter hunt) and it was awesome to see the girls' eyes bulging at the mass quantities of chocolate eggs that were laid out for us adults.

Saturday I worked all day. And watched a movie with Rob in the evening.

Then on Sunday morning we had an incredibly amazing time at church. The morning started off with Calvary Kids Praise doing their Easter dances. The older kids were amazing but for the sake of time I have left them out of the video. Here's Ellie and her class doing their dance (note how 'out of it' Ellie is until she sees me and her teacher motioning her to put her ribbons down. :) She gets a bit mesmerized by the crowds.)



The best part about the service was all the baptisms that took place. Just three people were slated to get baptized, and ELEVEN ended up getting baptized instead! There weren't many dry eyes in the house. There's no better way, in my opinion, to celebrate that fact that Jesus was raised to life than witnessing others doing the same thing symbolically!

When we got home from church I ran inside and made a trail of paper Easter eggs (that Rob and I had colored while watching our movie the night before) that led the kids to their Easter presents:
New placemats! Boy that sounds lame whenever I say it, but they are truly great placemats. :) The kids love them. (And they're not loaded with sugar!)

Do you see what I mean? I no longer have to rush to get food on the table. They're too busy being entertained by their placemats to notice if there's food or not. :)

Sunday evening we had our friends Tyler and Doris over for supper which was wonderful...and that brought us to the end of a very busy, very fun weekend.

So like I asked at Valentines day...what was YOUR favourite part of Easter this year? Did anyone come up with any brilliant ideas for teaching your children the true meaning of Easter while the chocolate and bunnies were dribbling down their chins? Do tell!

Growth Spurt

Although this has been a relatively uneventful month for the rest of us, Joshua has been busier than ever. He turned 15 months on Thursday, so I thought I'd post an update on his growth in the last 31 days:

He sprouted 6 teeth. That, my friends, involves a LOT of drool (as well as several tantrums and early morning wakeups).

He added more than a dozen words to his vocabulary. You can imagine my surprise when I walked into his room one morning and said, "Hi Joshua!" He said, "HI!" So I said, "How are you?" And he shouted, "GOOOOOD!" He's "GOOOOD!" every single morning now. It's impossible not to start off the day smiling.

This month Joshua grew out of most of his pants. He's taller than any other baby his age that we know.

He also learned to get on Ellie's step stool. He managed to do this before church this Sunday. I couldn't get over how mature he looked...

...combing his own hair! (And lovin' it!)What happened to my baby?

Anyhow, the most exciting thing of all that occured this month is best captured on video:

Oh No, Oh No - We Got More Snow!

If Manitoba were a child and I were her mother, I would declare that she needs discipline. She is out of control. Absolutely no respect. Every spring she taunts us with a week or two of warm weather.
The sun comes out.
We spot a robin or two.
The snow melts...and melts BIG time.
We should know better, but we start to dream of barbeques and flip flops and walks in the park. We think, "This year is different. This year we will truly begin spring in MARCH, like our good friends in the United States. Ahhh. What a life!"

And just when we're all adequately delusional, we get up one morning to find out that Manitoba has done it once again:She's dumped on us.
As most of you know we got a brutal storm this week that iced the roads and coated them in over a foot of snow. Schools were cancelled and we were housebound!
So we spent three whole days in the house (and for those of you who know me well, this is a fairly big deal. Daily (or almost daily) outings are part of what makes us a happy, somewhat peaceful family!) We did our best to make the most of it. Because, after all, this is the LAST snow we're going to get this year. (Didja hear that, you dysfunctional climate??)

So we brought some snow inside and 'made soup' and 'shovelled hay'...and ate it, of course.
Then we'd do the dishes to warm up little fingers. (Yup, both activities made a big mess...but I ended up with a cleaner house as a result!)
We read books...
...and ate leftover birthday ice cream.
Delicious!!
Watched a few too many movies and wore cool hats.
Learned to use a spoon...and were quite satisfied with this new skill! (although talk about being messier than his big sister ever was! When he had sufficient amounts of rice stuck to his hands he'd wave them around, sending rice flying all over the kitchen.)

As the week progressed, sanity levels seemed to decline quickly. Here's Ellie pretending that her pink pig is retching into a bowl. The sound effects were surprisingly realistic:

Sibling rivalry went up (these were the smiles right before the tears):

And energy levels soared!

But we are survivors. The house is still in tact and we all still love each other madly. And we even got one great snowman out of the deal, thanks to my dad!

So Manitoba, it's time for a talk. You need to get into line. The Vernal Equinox has passed. We've done our time indoors. Our fingers are calloused from zipping up parkas and tugging on boots. Our cheeks are chapped, our fingers are dry, and our lungs are begging for fresh air.
Spring IS coming...or it better be, anyways. That's all I have to say about that.

A few thoughts as Ellie turns three...

Whenever the kids celebrate a birthday I find myself (as you probably do too) musing about WHO they are, how far they've come, and how glad I am that God decided (out of kazillions of possibilities) for exactly ELLIE and JOSH to be our kids. He sure knows how to pick 'em!

To try and keep this short and sweet, here are three things that bless me the most about three year old Ellie:

1. Her EBULLIENCE. She is super cheerful (90% of the time :) and full of energy! From day one she had lungs and at three weeks a killer smile. At 4 months she had strangers at the grocery store stopping in their tracks because her happy shriek was so incredibly loud that she sounded like a sort of prehistoric bird. By six 1/2 months she was talking. At 10 months she'd yell "HI!" to anyone who'd listen, and by a year she had over 2 dozen words...and hasn't slowed down since. There are a few negatives to her talkative nature (teaching her to not to interrupt adults, my daily SANITY, etc.) but mostly it's been hilarious and way too fun - especially since I'm chatty too. Ellie sees the positive side of almost anything, and reminds me a lot of my favourite classic Disney personality - Pollyanna.

2. Another one of my favourite qualities in Ellie is her heart to encourage others. She will often lean over towards a friend and say, "Wow, that's a really beautiful picture you colored!". Today at biblestudy group when her favourite toddler, Benjamin, smiled at her she quipped, "That's a great smile, Benjamin! Great smiling!" Or sitting at the table in the morning she will spontaneously say things like, "You are my best mommy in the whole world!" The day before Ellie's birthday we decided to take her out for pizza as a special treat. After we had finished our pizza and paid our bill we were about to head out the door. Ellie had about 3 old ladies in the waiting area asking her questions and giggling at her answers when suddenly Ellie looked up and gasped, "OH! I forgot to tell the lady she made great pizza!!" So we had to go back to find our teenage waitress and Ellie shouted over the noise, "You make great pizza!!" That sure earned her a fast lollipop!
3. A third beautiful quality in Ellie is her quickness to forgive - and apologize. She's suddenly come to the point where if we're having a tough morning, and I say, "Boy, it's a tough morning Ellie, hey?" She'll go, "Mommy, I'm really sorry I...(fill in blank)" and she's always dead on with something she did that wasn't obedient, etc.. And it's very rare that I ask her for forgiveness for something that I've done that she doesn't come up with something to apologize about too. It's a wonderful place to be at - both of us knowing we can fail each other, but that there's always grace and forgiveness to be found. Of course as we forge ahead into year three there are many new challenges that are arising (I am not oblivious to the kids' flaws by any means!), but the point of this post is to bless. These are some of the things that make Rob and I get teary-eyed at night as we think of Ellie growing up and getting hurt and leaving home etc.. Three year old Ellie is a treasure to behold, a gift from God, and she fills our hearts to overflowing every day. Happy Birthday, Sweetie!

Ellie's Rainbow Party

On Monday we celebrated Ellie's third birthday with a "rainbow" party. I am in no way gifted at throwing parties - in fact, I usually find them really stressful to plan and get ready for. But I had a little extra help this year. The day of Ellie's birthday I decided to start of the morning by reading Proverbs 16. This verse jumped out at me: "Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed." (vs 3) I've recently learned how different my days can look when I start them off by asking God to order them...but on this particular day I knew I'd need extra grace! I committed my to-do list of 500 things to the Lord and asked him to bring peace and order to the whole day. It was quite extraordinary. We had an incredibly peaceful, productive day.
Anyhow, for some bizarre reason I am hard-wired to believe that I can't plan a child's party without a theme of some sort or another. I try to tell myself that it would be fine to just do nothing, but a theme always ends up happening anyways. After humming and hawing with Ellie over a few different options (she suggested 'oceans' and 'cherries'), I realized that choosing a 'rainbow' theme would be appealing to her and super easy for me. So with a little persuasion, a rainbow party it was!

Shortly before Ellie's friends arrived we painted a rainbow on her cheek. She was over the top excited about her guests coming!! We chose to do a supper party so that just Ellie's closest four friends and their moms could come (siblings stayed at home with their dads - we're pretty cramped for space). All four girls have been Ellie's friends since birth...and it was pretty amazing to see them all relating to each other as 'mature' three year olds. :)

Not all of them wanted rainbows on their cheeks, but they did all pitch in and help to 'decorate' our 'table cloth'.

Noodles and meatsauce and veggies and dip were the main course! Most girls were too excited and distracted to really eat.

After supper everyone went and played, and of course, dressed up.

For dessert we decorated ice cream sundays (with rainbow m&ms and sprinkles) instead of having cake. I nearly forgot the candle...so Ellie's ice cream was almost melted and finished by the time we stuck it in there.

The sugar did it's job!

Next came the gifts. Here's Ellie's dear friend, Chloe, telling her all about the gift she gave her.

I couldn't believe how peaceful it was with no babies! After the girls went home with their (what else) rainbow-themed goody bags, Ellie slept loooong and hard. I was so thankful that God had reminded me to trust him with the details. Normally this details-oriented, perfectionist of a mom would have been exhausted and tense by the end of a party day. But there was only peace and joy to be found instead. I was reminded yet again everything is better when He is involved, and that God is a truly a transformer of hearts!

p.s. I hope to post a little bit about "3 year old Ellie" yet, but am having trouble finding free time these days!! So there's more to come...check back.