Cute cute cute.

Ellie's little personality is really shining these days...and it's not so little. She is quite the ham, and speaks a hilarious language all her own. It goes something like this: "Bucka bucka! Ticka, ticka ticka, ga ga gack!"

She doesn't say "real" words yet. She actually just started signing for "more" at the dinner table last week so that was big news here.

And like most babies, less clothes the better...as seen below...

We all know baby Toms shoes are to die for. However, my mother in law found a pair of...wait for it...

baby Sperry Topsiders!!!  

They are too much! 

(She found them on sale at Chapters of all places)

Ellie pads around in them pretty well. 

Ellie eats sand, by the way. And dirt. She will sit there and just put small scoops in her mouth until I pull her hand away. And what goes in must come out right? It does. Oh, it does.

Quite often Wren pretends she is a "pink cat" (just loves pink these days) and out of no where will lick people. Okay not just anyone, mostly just us in the house. But her and Ellie were sitting on the chair and she licked her and said, "Hey Mom! Ellie thinks it's funny when I lick her!"

Evidence below...

Giggles ensue.

I don't know about you, but we're having the slowest summer ever. We were way more ambitious last year when Ellie was tiny, for some reason. This summer I just take the girls to our neighbourhood playground and then walk home at lunch time and call it a day. Wren plays non-stop next door in the backyard of our neighbours house with their little girl and I try to weed my monstrous garden. And I mean it's just monstrous in size, not with plants. I will have to take the camera out there soon and show you how it turned out. Let's just say the beets didn't really make it, the spinach seeded itself too early and the dirt is dry and clay-like which hasn't helped.

And yet, our peas have flourished and the girls have enjoyed eating them. My tomatoes are growing well and we have carrots. It's not a total loss! We did not expect much to happen out there so this is a bonus.

Here is Wren with her neighbourhood pal, Drake. Are they not the sweetest?

Lazy weekend

A few funnies

Ellie's hair is always comical. But the other morning, it was even better with a big tuft sticking up on the back of her head like a parrot...

Andrea snapped this shot of Ellie sitting on Wren and smacking and squishing her... 

..it gave me a flashback to this time we found Wren sitting on Ellie the "squeeze toy"!

Ellie was super quiet for a while this morning and when I looked for her, I found her hanging out in Wren's car seat by the front door. 

And, well, this just speaks for itself.

A morning at the zoo

Today was Wren's first trip to the zoo. She was pretty excited about animals...but mostly talked about the ice cream stand she spotted on the way in, and getting pink ice cream!

We went into the petting zoo which was hilarious. Wren was nervous around the baby goats, lambs and chickens. I could barely get her to walk out because she was frozen in a corner watching the animals nip at each other and made noise.

The baby chicks were more her speed...

She thought it was pretty funny when a grandfather with his grandson made a joke about the chicks becoming "Chicken McNuggets"!

Wearing some clip on earrings...so glamorous.

Ellie barely noticed any animals (to be expected), but wanted to walk and climb on everything.

They loved the Merry-Go-Round...but I did not. The second it started moving I was dizzy and wanted off. Such a parent!

Just look at these two...so happy! Ellie's mullet blowing in the wind...

I took Ellie home for a nap and Wren stayed with Nana to check out more animals (and get that pink ice cream she was dying for). 

Fun :)

Have a sunny weekend..

My neighbour took a few more pictures of Wren the other day. Wren likes to pick dandelions and hand me the bouquet to be put in a cup of water. So cute!

I also came across this article about a new style of parenting which made me laugh- good to keep in mind when you feel like you can't keep up  :)

Have a good one!

Cool kid.

Pardon the baby snot in the pictures, this little one has been sick. Being sick doesn't stop her from being a silly kid though. As I type she calls "Ma ma ma!!" to get her off the coffee table. She likes being a cool kid :)

Ellie, Little Trooper

I had plans to do something "fun" today. It's Friday, I don't work on Fridays, and I wanted to take the girls to a good playground.

However, Ellie woke up around 10pm last night with a barky cough. That's the moment you know your plans for the next day are shot. 

This is the third time I've had to take her in for Croup. As I pulled into the parking lot, I took out her Alberta health care card to put in my pocket like I do with my Costco card so I'm ready at the door. I even recognize some of the nurses when I go in from the other times we've visited.

The weird thing about Croup is that if you research it a bit on the internet, you will mostly find many sources saying that you can ride it out, just get the baby in cool air so their lungs relax and they can breathe easier. It will go away on it's own.

But when you go to the emergency (at least at the Stollery), they are happy to see you, especially if you come as soon as the cough begins. With only a few questions, they give your baby a steroid to help with the cough and you go home. Nothing too complicated. You go home, your baby sleeps, and you don't have to endure a sleepless night with a poor baby that is up because her throat is killing her. Each time Ellie gets Croup, we go in faster than the last time, knowing that waiting doesn't do any good.

Can I just say that Ellie is pretty amazing through things like this? She has only 3 hours sleep after waking up from her cough. Our wait time at the Stollery was over 2.5 hours...Imagine, a baby waiting that long in a waiting room. Time crawls by, and yet 2.5 hours also moved quickly because you are focused on your baby the entire time, not realizing you just sat in a waiting room for the same length of time as a movie in a theatre. 

I wish I could have watched a good movie. The Backyardigans were on instead.

This kid has a disposition like none other. She was relatively pleasant under the circumstances the entire time. 

This morning she was playing with Wren's Barbie car, and as I am snapping a few pictures of her, I realize she is trying to climb the car. 

See her little feet on the hood? They're clinging for dear life.

She must be feeling better already!

Sibling interactions

I have three books on the go at this moment. I can go for months without anything on my night table for reading, and then all of a sudden I have three at once. 

One of them is a cookbook- Dinner: A Love Story by Jenny Rosenstrach, which is just a nice read with recipes made for our family..or so it seems. I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but I feel like I use similar ingredients, have a similar cooking style and overall philosophy about dinner as Jenny. Like if I wrote a cookbook about our family dinners, it would probably look like hers. You find a lot of good recipes when they all look like something you can and want to cook.

Anyway, pick up a copy from the library and if you love it too, buy one. It's pretty great.

The reason I told you that is because I'm too busy to write because I'm so busy reading.

I'm getting to this point with blogging where I don't have a lot to say because you really need to be a fly on the wall in our house to really get what goes on between these two stinkers. 

Their interactions are so hilarious, irritating and sweet and it's hard to convey across the screen. 

First interaction below...it seems "loving" on Wren's part, but she's actually purposely being a pain in the butt by squeezing Ellie's head off. 

Ellie will always loudly protest such actions taken against her. Or produce a hilarious face. Either/or.

Second interaction seems like a "sweet" gesture of love from Ellie to Wren. Wren is actually ready to hiss in Ellie's face for attempting to remove her kitty cat ears from her head. Taking off Wren's headband (of any kind) before she has given the okay (such as bath time when her hair needs washing), is like cutting off her arm or some other awful equivalent. The headband is a part of her. You can't eject your ipod from the computer prematurely, the computer has to give you the "ok". Likewise with Wren's headband. Do not remove prematurely.

The "I give up trying to play with Wren" face. 

These photos are now taken on a totally different day. 

What baby doesn't like to be naked? Ellie would like to know.

Have I mentioned before that Ellie will just throw herself backwards onto a seemingly soft surface at any given moment? 

Case and point below. Luckily it was a soft landing this time.

We have deduced that Ellie has two sets of butt cheeks. 

Please note exhibit A:

Lastly, Wren's cute eyes. They have nothing to do with anything in this post. 

She said to me "Mummy, you have brown eyebrows, but I don't." 

I said "You have blonde eyebrows, they are very light. Usually people with red hair like you have really light eyebrows." This launched a discussion about what colour everyones eyebrows are that she knows. Most conversations with a three year old usually go that way. 

The Garden

We planted our garden fairly late. Our veggies are taking their sweet time to grow, but with the sun and less rain, it's happening. 

I let the garden turn into a weed haven with all the rain (because who can weed in the rain..?) and had a massive job of cleaning it all up. 

I had never weeded like that in my life. I actually don't think I ever weeded anything much before. A total shock to all, I know. My first round of weeding looked like me hacking through a forest, chucking massive weeds left, right and center and then going through again for the finer work. My thighs burned.

But look...Spinach!

And carrots! Teeny tiny little greens. I almost weeded them by accident. 

My favourite- beets! C'mon guys, grow!

It's hard to weed and such with the girls outside with me, well, mostly Ellie. Sometimes a bottle and cracker in her playpen with a few toys keeps her happy for a while. But then she wants out and crawls around. She crawls around the garage where I can't see her and find the dirt clumps left from my shoes...I pick her up only to see a smile of dirt in her mouth! 

Wren mostly jumps from stone to stone around me and sings little songs and plays games in her head. 

Nana gave us peas to sprout (we did that ahead of time in a dish) and then planted them out here with chicken wire for them to cling to. They make me feel like I'm really doing something right.

The dirt is basically clay-like and atrocious. Kenton and I literally knew nothing about planting a garden. We (okay mostly me because I have been the only one tending it, haha), have learned a lot so far. And it's only July. Every time we see something that needs improvement, we smile and shrug and say, "Oh well, first year garden. Next summer we'll be smarter". 

We are also encouraged that if these poor vegetables can push through this nasty old dirt and grow, then we didn't do so bad after all for our first time around.

Hey! Tomatoes!

My parents planted the tomatoes, and we slapped in the rest. 

It's hard to tell from the photo, but the garden sits at about 24 feet by 16 feet. It's a decent size for us first-timers!

And raised garden beds? They're definitely high on the priority list for next year, holy crap. No question about it.

This is Wren's little bean sprout she started from preschool. I thought it had died and forgot about it and one day we gasped in amazement, it lived! Her first plant. So cute.

I'm happy to say that I enjoy gardening and trying to find my "green thumb" within. Although if my sister saw how I transferred plants into pots and in the garden she'd probably be mortified. But hey, I'm coming along! (And thank goodness I have a million family members to go to with questions.)

As the plants started to come up, I felt the excitement probably every gardener does when the garden is budding with life. I can only compare it to something like working on a knitting or sewing project. At first it doesn't look like much, and then as time goes on the project starts to unfold and take shape. I feel that same excitement as if I'm making a baby quilt or knitting a toque and it finally starts to actually look like a quilt or a toque instead of just fabric and yarn.

 It's starting to look like a real garden out there!