Hanukkah

Being pretty pregnant and all, Christmas has been a big enough challenge this year. So when Madeleine came home from her nursery school asking when we were going to celebrate Hanukkah, I was shocked. She didn't let it go though. All last week and most of this week she has been talking about it. Honestly, I think she might have been more excited about Hanukkah than Christmas. So I emailed her teachers, and then started getting things ready for our day of Hanukkah.

I'm really lucky that a lot of my favorite customers at Starbucks are Jewish. When I told them that Madeleine had her heart set on Hanukkah, they helped me get a list of what to do and where to get them. They are wonderful, and they even told me about their childish dreams of Christmas and how their parents made their wishes happen. Even Madeleine's teachers sent her home with a little dreidel and book to borrow, so by today everything was almost set. 

First we read some books of course about Hanukkah.

The Story of Hanukkah was really good and religious. 

I have a Little Dreidel was the dreidel song. Turns out there is like 10 verses to it. Madeleine has been learning it at nursery school so she was pretty excited to hear the whole thing.

Then the last book was just a short story about Latkes. It was cute and about helping people.

Then we made dinner. Madeleine had made the applesauce with me earlier this week, so we just had to make the latkes. 

After dinner, we played the dreidel game, ate our jelly donuts, and lit our "menorah".

Madeleine surprised us by knowing what each side of the dreidel meant. She would sigh or try to cheat each time she landed on "shin".

She was super concerned that we didn't have a big helping candle in the middle.

 We briefly talked about temples and how we would be sad if someone trashed and hurt our temple, and how we would celebrate having it back. I think she got that part.

 I learned a lot about Hanukkah and it was a fun family evening. This whole week is just a week of celebrations. Tomorrow is the Winter solstice which we are planning on celebrating, and then of course, Christmas, and Madeleine's birthday.

Memorial Day Weekend

Memorial day weekend was pretty awesome. Matt is finishing up his project right now so he has a lot more flexibility than usual since he is writing. We took full advantage of this. :)

Saturday we went on the beach like usual. It was perfect weather and their was a boardwalk festival that morning. We came early enough to get parking (yes!) and we also bought our season passes.  

It turned out too that there was a small parade an hour after we showed up. Madeleine was excited. There were "blue cars" (police cars) and candy. 

There were no real floats. Just different people in cars throwing out candy and different bands playing music. I loved the bagpipes and this band.

You might not be able to tell from the photo, but these guys had sequins all over their jackets. They looked fabulous.

Sunday we watched movies all day, and Monday was full of parties. The highlight was Madeleine seeing a real frog for the first time. She really wasn't sure what to make of it. At first she called it a bug, and then she growled at it before deciding that maybe it was a frog.

Halloween

I seriously love Halloween. We had a really fun day, so here are a few photos from it.

I usually make cupcakes for Halloween, but with the small people being, well, normal small people, I thought that was a bit too ambitious. Instead, we got a dozen of donuts and picked out some costumes for them at Party City. Their eyes were just little white m&ms with black frosting. Madeleine loved picking out the different costumes. My favorite were the funny glasses. We then walked up to campus in costumes to drop them off to Matt's lab. 

Fast forward to after nap time, all the kids in the neighborhood got dressed up and played outside. It was so cute watching King Author take on Spider man and a tiny jedi fairy. My friend Rachel and I took photos of Madeleine and her little best friend. They are so silly.

They kept making each other giggle (and us) so we could not get too many photos with them looking the right way. Half way through they started playing peek-a-boo. It was just too much cuteness.

Beatrice was a cute little butterfly, and Madeleine just got a "new" princess dress from Gamma. Madeleine didn't really care about it, but Beatrice loved it. :) It was Mollie's fairy princess dress that my mom made when Mollie was a little younger than Madeleine. 

After that we went trick-or-treating around the neighborhood with some friends from church. It was wonderful and Madeleine quickly caught on to the whole thing. She would walk up all by herself and knock on the door. At the beginning she would give the candy right back to me, but eventually she started keeping it for herself. Our neighborhood is seriously the perfect place to trick-or-treat and we had so much fun with the other students. The best thing Madeleine got was a llama cookie cutter.

We switched back to the dragon cape when she got cold. Then we went home and got some spicy wings before curling up in bed and watching Merlin. (We aren't sure if we like it.)

Anyway, Happy Halloween!

Halloween costumes

We had our church Halloween party today! We were more than ready for it. Unlike last year, I actually finished more than a few hours ahead of time. (Probably helped that this costume was simple enough to do in 5 minutes.) Madeleine got two costumes this year, because Matt deemed the first one, the paper bag princess, too cold to wear outside. So I made her a dragon cape to wear with it.

If by any chance someone wants to duplicate this, I have a few tips for you. First of all it's really just a bag with three holes cut out of it. I reinforced all the cuts with packing tape on the inside of the costume, which prevented it from ripping. Another thing that helped was the arm holes were between the bottom of the bag and the first crease. I found in my trial costume that if I did it a bit farther down it ripped a lot faster. Also a few people asked me how I got it all poofy like a princess dress. I just tied the center with a ribbon.

It was ridiculously easy. The cape was a lot harder though.

link

This was my inspiration for the cape.

  If I had to make it again, I would have magically had a serger. The ends frayed and curled on the green fabric and the gold was a bit slippery. I had to use a really large seam allowance to make it work. Thankfully, I didn't use the stretch silk otherwise it would have been a lot harder. Also, I would have measured Madeleine better. The cape is a little long on her. The front covers her hands a tiny bit and it bugs her.

But all in all, I'm very happy about the costumes! She was so cute to watch running around collecting chocolate. When everyone had run out of candy she started asking people to open it for her so she could eat it.

Sweet Gifts

Last year for Mother's Day, Matt was so good at surprising me that I had a break down and cried because I thought he had forgot. Madeleine was five months old, and I told Matt that I did deserve some recognition because this motherhood thing was just so hard. And even if Mother's Day was just a halmark holiday, I still wanted extra love and attention so that I knew that someone appreciated me, because Madeleine sure didn't act like she did.  (Little did I know that Madeleine would become a much easier baby in a matter of days. haha)

Looking back at those thoughts just make me smile. I've grown so much in this last year. This year mother's day really was a celebration. Madeleine is a cute little sixteen month old who is happy and usually pretty sweet. Having a celebration for Mother's day wasn't nearly as important this year as last year, but Matt still surprised me and went out of his way to make it a great day. 

Matt was such a sweet husband. Despite the fact he didn't get to sleep til 6:00AM, he still woke up at 9:30 and made french toast for me. (Probably my very favorite breakfast foods). He then dressed Madeleine up in her Easter dress and had her carry my present to me. 

She did a great job of bringing to me, but she wouldn't give it to me. She sat next to me on the bed clutching it and not let me touch it, so I had to wait a while to open it. In the mean while I "read" my card.

I was thrilled. I think most women would be pretty excited to get a Tiffany's necklace for Mother's Day, but I was even more touched because it crossed off an item on my 20's bucket list. 

"Own something from Tiffany's"

Okay, so maybe a bit shallow for a bucket list item, but I really wanted something from there. I was planning on running the Nike's Women half marathon to get something from Tiffany's. (That's what you get instead of a medal.) Matt thought that was a bad idea and wanting to save me the pain just got me this instead. He also said that it was really from Madeleine for being her mom.

No matter what the reason, it's lovely.

We ended the day skyping with our siblings that are all over the world. Mollie is in Chile. Anna is in Brazil, and Riley in LA. :)

It was wonderful day.

I hope yours was too!

Mother's Day Cards

 We've been doing digital cards for different holidays.

These are the ones for Mother's Day.

Easter Egg Hunts

I have so not been up to date with our blog, and I feel slightly guilty about it, but...

Spring is here!!! And we are outside everyday for most of the day. It's been beautiful. I have never had a "real" spring. Just a few months ago everything was dead, but now everywhere we look there are flowers and blossoms. Staying inside and blogging has little appeal when we can be outside.

We had an awesome Easter, even though we didn't do much to celebrate. Easter is a bit tricky for us. I feel like we should celebrate it more than we do, but neither Matt or I have any ideas how to celebrate it. We need to work on that, but for this year we just made it as stressless as possible.

On Saturday, we went to a church Easter party. We did things relating to the last week of Christ's life and then there was an Easter egg hunt. Madeleine was too young for most of the activities but she did write a thank you card to some soldier in her own scribble language. Then it was time for the Easter egg hunt. We weren't sure if she would understand Easter egg hunting, since Christmas went way over her head, but we brought her out with her age group.

It took Matt a few times showing her the eggs and putting them in  her basket, but once she figured it out...she was hooked.

After she gathered a few eggs, one of them broke open. She saw the chocolate and knew what it was immediately. After that a new quest was downloaded into her brain, collect as much chocolate as possible.

After she had carefully gathered her dozen eggs, we started herding her towards the car. She sobbed when we took away her basket, so we could buckle her in. We figured it wouldn't hurt for her to hold the basket while we drove home. It was only ten minutes away.

When we pulled up to the Chemistry lab to drop Matt off, he looked in the back set to kiss her. "Uh...Michele, there is something in her mouth." That something turned out to be a big ball of tinfoil. She sucked all the chocolate out the wrappers and just held the wrappers in her cheeks. I guess we should have learned better after Halloween.

The rest of the day Madeleine and her basket were inseparable. She even had to sleep with it.  

On Easter day, we did yet another Easter egg hunt with our community. Madeleine was prepared this time. She went out there with a determined little walk. Not even the swings could sway her from her hunting down the eggs.

There were 5 little kids there hunting for eggs, and Madeleine found 14 out of 40 eggs. The other two kids about her age only found 3-4 each, and Madeleine had a really difficult time not taking their eggs out of their baskets.

When we got home, we made dinner for the sister missionaries in our church and had a beautiful evening outside. We felt close to God and very loved. It was a great ending for Easter weekend.

Resolutions

Matt and I sat down and made some New Year's resolutions on the New Year's Eve, but here are some of my own. The ones later in the year might change, but that's okay. :)

January
Big Goal: No Spend Month
Small goals: Finish my quilt, Clean out the closets

February
Big Goal: Set a morning routine
Small goals: Wake up before 6 each morning, read My Antonia

March
Big Goal: Join a photography club
Small goals: Overcome salad aversion from pregnancy, go through books and bookplate the ones we are keeping,

April
Big Goal: Start a garden?
Small goals: Go to the Cherry Blossom festival in DC, sell whatever we don't need, go on a walk every day

May
Big Goal: Take a drawing class
Small goals: Find ways to incorporate creativity into my life, start creative writing journal

June 
Big Goal: Pack house
Small goals: Be out of debt, visit Utah

July
Big Goal: Move (we are moving like a mile)
Small goals: Unpack.

August
Big Goal: Simplify my surroundings
Small goals:Visit the Amish, read books on simplicity

September
Big Goal: LEARN TO BAKE BREAD (pretzels too for bonus points)
Small goals: Yankee v. Red Sox game, learn more about classical music

October
Big Goal: Sign up for Spanish classes
Small goals: Fall cleaning

November
Big Goal: Make a new friend
Small goals: Read about architecture, explore campus and surrounding area more

December
Big Goal: Don't get stressed
Small goals: Go to Utah

Start of 2014

1:36 AM on New Year Morning 2014

Please note that Matt is in Madeleine's bed.

Happy New Year!

2013 was an amazing year.

Good luck to 2014.

Halloween

Pre-Halloween snack

Post Trick or Treating.

Madeleine loves chocolate,

and I gave her a wrapped hershey chocolate to hold 

while we trick or treated so she'd keep her wig on.

She would not let that thing go.

Just sucked on it as we went around.

She screamed when I tried to take it away from her to buckle her in,

so I let her keep it.

When we got home though, I discovered a baby covered in chocolate!

She somehow got that thing opened and slurped it up.

Silly baby.

Anyway.

Happy Halloween!

Trunk or Treat

Matt and I were so excited for the candy.

We had already eaten all the warheads and kit-kats from the candy bags that we bought,

and we were desperately craving more.

Madeleine's costume is mostly done.

The important thing was that

all those weeks of hat training paid off.

She kept the wig on most of the time.

Since I was so busy making Madeleine's costume, 

I didn't decorate our trunk.

Matt just told everyone that it was a murder scene. :)