Blog Name: Small Fry
Age: 13 months
Favorite Food: Blueberries
Favorite Activity: Practicing my newfound walking skills
Something I don’t like: Being left alone in my high chair or crib
Favorite Person: Mom, closely followed by Dad and my big brothers
Blog Name: Seahawk
Age: 9, almost 10 (birthday is in October)
Grade: 4 (he’s easier to place a number on since his age and grade line up properly)
Favorite School Subject: History
Favorite Food: Baked Ziti and Ice Cream
Favorite Activities: Playing with Legos and completing triathlons
Favorite Color: Blue
Favorite Book: Biographies (he especially likes learning about anyone who lived between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War)
Something You Don’t Like: Cooked mushrooms. They’re fine raw.
Taking an idea from Sanz at From the Mrs, I’m doing a short “back to school” interview with each kid. Up first, Munchkin.
Blog Name: Munchkin
Age: almost 7
Grade: 2/3 (I’m not super strict with the grade the kids are in – he’s 2nd grade age but 3rd grade academically)
Favorite School Subject: Reading
Favorite Food: Chicken Drumsticks and Peanut Butter Sandwiches, but not at the same meal!
Favorite Activity: Swimming and coloring
Favorite Color: Red
Favorite Book: Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims; Charlotte’s Web
Something You Don’t Like: Zucchini
We had one of those nights this week when the baby just wouldn’t go to sleep. As much as it pains me, we had to let (make?) him cry it out in his crib. When he quieted down about 10 minutes after we left the room, I came to check on him and found this. I think it definitely wins the prize for Craziest Position in Which to Fall Asleep!
Have a great weekend!
–Wendy
Yesterday was Small Fry’s birthday party. It was a fairly low key affair, but I thought I’d share some pictures.
He started the party asleep on Grandma (my mom). There were a few guests who thought it was weird/inappropriate that the guest of honor was asleep during the party, but at 1 you don’t argue with baby’s desire to nap.
When he woke up (and after eating half a bagel), he was much happier.
I made 2 cakes. This one is Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate cake. I got one of those super huge candy bars for the top – cookies and cream. It had 16 rectangles, so I used 12 of them around the outside like a clock and grated the other 4 up and put the shavings in the middle.
This one is a homemade carrot cake. I altered the original recipe a touch, though – I cut the oil back by 2/3 and subbed in some applesauce to make up the difference. For the teddy bear shape, I used my Wilton Puzzle cakes set.
Of course there’s the obligatory eating cake picture :).
And his messy face afterward!
And some playtime with Mom.
I hope you had a great weekend!
–Wendy
Over the next 9 days, three of the five members of my family will celebrate birthdays. Mine is today, Hubby’s is Friday, and Small Fry’s is next Friday. For mine, I thought I’d share one thing for each year of my life (32!) that you may not be able to easily deduce from the blog.
1. I’m short. Extremely short. Like my driver’s license says 5’0″ but if I’m not wearing shoes, that’s not completely accurate.
2. I got married at 19. We dated in high school, but went to different schools. I think that still qualifies as high school sweethearts, right?
3. For the first 3 years of marriage, I worked as a cashier in a grocery store.
4. I quit that job 3 weeks before Seahawk was born in October 2003 and have playing the role of Mommy ever since.
5. Even though I know how to crochet (moderately well), I don’t have a clue how to knit.
6. I’m a member of a Nazarene church where my father-in-law is the senior pastor.
7. My mother-in-law passed away 5 1/2 years ago.
8. I’m not a very good housekeeper, but I’m much better than I was even 3 years ago.
9. I like creating things (stories, novels, quilts, things made from yarn, etc), but I don’t consider myself creative. I almost always have to get ideas from somewhere else and just execute them myself.
10. I never thought I wanted more than 2 kids, but now that I have 3, I think 4 or even 5 would be awesome!
11. I was born exactly 5 weeks before my mom’s 21st birthday.
12. I have one brother and one half brother, both younger (though much taller!) than me.
13. Both of them have 2 kids. My full brother has 2 sons and my half brother has a daughter and a son.
14. My parents divorced when I was 5. My mom married my stepdad, to whom she’s still married, shortly after.
15. My mom and stepdad have no kids together.
16. On hubby’s side, we have the only boys. His sister has 2 girls and his stepbrother has 2 girls.
17. I only wear skirts and dresses, no pants. (I mentioned this once before, but cut me some slack – I’m barely halfway through this list and it’s getting hard!)
18. With each of our kids, we tried to pick an original name. We failed epically with Seahawk. But it’s not our fault. Between when we picked the name (even before I was pregnant) and when he was born, it surged in popularity.
19. With the older two, they got family names for their middle names (Seahawk was named for his father & grandfather and Munchkin for my grandfather). With Small Fry, we just picked a middle name we liked that went with his first name.
20. Hubby picked Seahawk’s and Small Fry’s names; I picked Munchkin’s. It wasn’t planned, and I love all their names. That’s just the way it ended up going down.
21. Seahawk was my only natural (though medicated) birth. Munchkin was an emergency c-section (maybe I’ll share that story when his birthday comes around in September) and Small Fry was a scheduled c-section because I’d already had one. I DO NOT recommend repeat caesarean sections. The second one was MUCH harder to recover from than the first.
22. My favorite beverage is iced tea. Unsweetened with no lemon. The plainest one available is all I’ll drink.
23. My favorite store to shop in is JoAnn.
24. I don’t hate grocery shopping. For a lot of my adult life it was the only shopping we could afford, so I learned to like it.
25. I’ve recently learned to love biking again. It’s been really fun getting back into that habit. I can’t wait until we get Munchkin’s add on bike and a trailer for Small Fry so we can go for family rides.
26. I made Small Fry’s cloth diapers. But I didn’t design them (see #9).
27. We don’t have a dryer. This is a lot less bad in the summer than in the winter.
28. One of our favorite family activities is swimming.
29. Another one is bowling.
30. I play Words with Friends. If you do, too, hit me up. My user name is wmr1601.
31. I’ve used that user name for everything online for ages (until this blog, that is). It’s my initials followed by the day I got married (Jan. 6, 2001: 1/6/01).
32. I like reading. Currently I’m reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series on my Kindle. Hubby tried for a couple of years to convince me to read it, and I finally am.
I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know me a little better :).
–Wendy
We have a small planter near our front porch, and I’ve always been a bigger fan of veggie gardens over flower gardens. Yes, flowers are beautiful, but they’re the same amount of work without the “payoff” of fresh produce. I might come around next year and do flowers in the planter instead, but I don’t know. We’ll have to see.
Anyway.
So, because I favor veggies, I put carrots in the planter. my thinking was that it’s deep enough to get decent sized carrots, and carrots don’t flower like other veggies (since they’re a root vegetable), so they wouldn’t attract bees to the door – yet another reason to put something besides flowers there. I started the carrots from seeds a couple months ago, and it’s been exciting to watch the tops get bigger and bigger.
Because of their root nature, we’ve all been horribly curious how the carrots have been doing. Hubs even pulled a couple up a month or so ago – they were very spindly and not at all carrot-like, so he carefully replanted them. I decided to take a chance a couple days ago, and guess what?!
A real carrot!! A small one, but a true carrot nonetheless. Our tomato plants have really started thriving recently as well. And we’ve already used our own lettuce on sandwiches and burgers. It’s very exciting :).
So maybe, just maybe, we’ll end up with a good harvest of fresh veggies this summer after all.
–Wendy
P.S. Did you notice my new header? 🙂
You might remember that I bought a quilting book a few weeks ago – A Year in the Life of Sunbonnet Sue. It has patterns for 12 quilt blocks, one representing each month. There are options for making each one into a small wall quilt or you can combine them any way you like into larger bed quilts, i.e. one representing each season for a crib quilt, all 12 into one quilt for a queen size, or any other combination you can imagine. I don’t have any baby girls coming into my life soon to do a seasonal one for, and 12 small quilts for the walls isn’t something that really fits into our decor, so I’m tackling the “through the year” queen size for mine & hubby’s bed. I’ve finished 4 of the blocks so far…
February:
April:
May:
October:
When I have a few more done, I’ll do another update, and of course when the whole thing is completed as well :).
–Wendy
We’re trying our hand at growing some of our own vegetables this year since we’re out of the apartment and into a house with a yard. We bought tomato, pea, and lettuce starts and carrot, zucchini, and bell pepper seeds. I planted the seeds early last week and was rewarded with sprouts in the zucchini and carrot pots yesterday! It was very exciting :). The bell peppers haven’t come up yet; I’m not sure if they’ve failed or if they just have a longer germination period. Once the zucchinis get a little bigger, I’ll move them to where the other flowering veggies are – we don’t want bees right next to the door. Since carrots are root veggies, I put them right in the planter by the porch.
Do you garden? Let me know in the comments :).
–Wendy
Earlier this week, we joined my in-laws for their annual trip to the Tulip Festival in the town they live in (it’s about a half hour drive from us). We did it last year and had a lot of fun – even though I was more waddling than walking since I was pregnant with Small Fry at the time – so we accepted their invitation to go again.
We started the day with a picture in one of the many cutouts…
And then they traded spots since neither wanted to be in the lower one. This was our way of compromising.
This windmill was in the center of the kids’ play area.
The kids took a ride on the wooden shoe train. It’s basically shoe-shaped wagons atop tractor wheels towed by a small tractor. Both last year and this year, the boys’ favorite part of the ride was the “biggest puddle in the world.” Boys!
Then we walked through the huge tulip field. I don’t know how many acres it is, but these pictures represent only a small portion of the field.
It was too big for Small Fry to make it all the way through ;). Because of the way he fell asleep, he was sporting his very first sunburn later that night. However, because of babies’ Wolverine-fast healing ability, he was all better by morning.
In the middle of the field was an old John Deere tractor for kids to climb on.
This is kind of interesting. There in the front of the picture you can see that white line… it’s a strip of mesh fabric. They put those on each row of tulips and then plant the bulbs on top. Then at the end of the season, they just pull the mesh out of the ground and the new crop of tulip bulbs comes out of the ground easily without risking damage to them. I thought that was pretty ingenious.
Another cutout, this time with Grandpa 🙂
I thought these ones were pretty. I like the traditional smooth edges to tulips, but I also liked how these ones looked like ripped paper on the edges. Kind of like the difference between a rag quilt and a traditional quilt. Both are pretty but in unique ways.
And to end the day on a high note, the kids did the pony ride. Pardon my finger in Munchkin’s picture; I’m still getting used to the new camera phone.
–Wendy