Four.

Lucy is 4 today! What?? I've been waiting a year and a half to be able to do this for Lucy, after seeing it over at SortaCrunchy, so now I'm finally, shamelessly stealing the idea from her.

This is the song.

Here is Lucy's birth story.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sittin' here 

 I'm one day old

And I'm sittin' here

I'm two days old

I'm sittin' here

I'm three days old

And I'm sittin' here

I'm four days old.

One day I'll be a year

Then I'll be two

Then three

Then four

But as for now I'm sittin' here

I'm five days old, and no days more.


Happy Birthday, Lucy!

Christmas 2012

It's the Twelfth Day of Christmas, so I'm just fitting this in under the wire!  (We go to an Episcopal church now, so it's totally allowed.) 

We had Christmas!  Lucy is now 3.5, so she was way more into it this year than any time previous.  And she has chosen to believe in Santa Claus, even though we do absolutely nothing to encourage (or discourage) that.  She's also old enough to listen to and start to comprehend stories from the Jesus Storybook Bible, so we followed this plan for the duration of Advent.  Lucy also decided that the nativity set was just more toys for her to play with. (Should have seen that one coming!)

In the spirit of our spend-time-and-money-proportional-to-how-much-you-care philosophy, we spent all of 15 minutes taking our Christmas card photos (including getting Lucy dressed). 

Lucy was an angel in the Christmas Eve pageant.

We helped set up for the Norman Community Christmas Dinner.

Our own Christmas dinner consisted of roast chicken, green salad, soft pretzels, mashed potatoes, gravy, and champagne. 

Lucy got Scotch tape in her stocking. She was super excited!

I made Norman another shirt.

Norman bought me a book for those who are questioning.

Then on Saturday we had Christmas with Norman's parents and siblings. 

Lucy's uncle designed and created this bear blanket for her!  (It rolls up into a bear.)

Norman got some sonic screwdrivers.

And I got a dress form!  I still can't believe it!

And I made hot pizza dip, which I can now highly recommend!

Yeah, that pretty much covers it.  Oh, except for the part where the weatherpeople were predicting this big crazy snow storm for Christmas Day, and then it just iced and sleeted and then snowed a little.  But then a couple days later, they said we might get some flurries, and it snowed like 4 inches!  They were a little confused.  Merry Christmas!

Lucy's 3rd Birthday [Recap]

Lucy's birthday was last Thursday, and her party was last Saturday.  First, the actual birthday:

Nothing too fancy.  Put the Happy Birthday banner up after she went to sleep the night before.  Norman had to be gone during dinner, so he came home in the afternoon and took her to the park.  We had chicken stir fry for dinner.  (Not her request, exactly, but I've deduced that it's her favorite dinner. She likes to eat it with ketchup.)

And she got presents! 

 

[The Muppets]

 

[Tangled]

And... her own camera!

It's a little noisy for my taste, but I highly recommend it.  It takes photos and videos, and the lens swivels around so you can take a photo of yourself while still looking at the screen.  And it has a menu of silly hats and hair that you can superimpose over your photos.  It's really easy to use (Lucy already has it all figured out), and it takes pretty decent photos for being so cheap.  (It goes for $50-$60 on Amazon, but I got mine from eBay for less.)

Here's a collage of some of the photos she took in the first two days:

 [She seemed to delight in putting cat ears on her legs...]

OK, so that was Thursday.  Then came the party!  I had already thrown two of these things, and they both looked pretty much the same.  But this was new and weird.  We don't know very many people here, and we don't know them very well.  Our house is too small to host, and we couldn't plan on having it outside since it rains so much here.  But our church said we could use their gym!

So it was pretty much like last year's party, but in a gym, with different people.  We invited everyone at church and everyone at playgroup.  In the end about 30 people showed up, I think.

The food:

 

Cupcakes from scratch. Lucy did all the sprinkle work.  I accidentally bought jumbo cupcake liners, so I had to whip up another batch of batter after having already doubled the first recipe.  So there were chocolate and spice cupcakes, so we only put sprinkles on the chocolate ones. 

The frosting recipe: 2 sticks of butter, 2 blocks of cream cheese, enough honey to make it sweet. Beat with mixer. Then om nom your face off.  (Leftovers delicious on cinnamon raisin bagels, strawberries, and spoons.)

Fruit kebabs (grapes, watermelon, and pineapple on skewers).  Cripsy nuts.

Drinks: Herbal iced tea (a bunch of different fruit-flavored Celestial Seasonings teas with honey), and Magical Coffee. Ohhhhh my. Get yerself some magical coffee, STAT. (Thanks, Keely!)

At 10 p.m. the night before, it occurred to me to put together a slide show of photos of Lucy, since people here don't know what she looked like when she was younger.  Didn't actually take that long. Thanks, Picasa!

Activities:

Coloring table. Two dollar store coloring books and crayons I already had.

Painter's tape hopscotch!  I found this brilliant idea on some website or another.  Cheap and easy!

I made 3 bean bags to go with it.  (Real bean bags, filled with beans... because that's what I had.)  It had been bothering me for a week that I just wasn't sure if I had saved this fabric from the Great Purge before we moved last summer.  I've had it since high school.  Now that I have a toddler it finally comes in handy!

And other than that, we just filled the other half of the gym (that wasn't filled with tables and chairs) with balloons (plain ones and the punchy kind with the rubber bands) and pool noodles cut in half.  We figured the kids could make their own fun, and we were right!

 

[Norman kept back a bucket of balloons to dump on Lucy just to see the look on her face. :-)]

Punch balloon contests, sword and ninja fights, golf, baseball, etc, etc.

It was fun!  Nice and casual, and people could come and go.  We gave bubble wands as favors. (HT to Meghan for that one.)  In all, I think the party cost about $50 or $60 including food.  Not too shabby.  Looking forward to (but definitely not yet planning for) next year!

Egg Hunt (and What I Put in This Year's Easter Eggs)

This Facebook status pretty much sums up this year's Easter egg hunt at our house:

I guess I left out the part where she was thrilled and delighted to find treats that she gets to eat every day in the eggs, and set about finishing off each treat before she opened the next egg.  (Said treats: chocolate chips [admittedly a larger quantity than normal], apple chips, walnuts, and a dark chocolate/almond/cherry thing from Costco [y'all -- I can't find even a photo of these on the internet, but they are amazing. No creepy ingredients and tasty as heck. Get thee to a Costco.].)

 [Norman, stickerfied.]

This kid.  Seriously.  I know we're decent parents, but there's a giant amount of good luck/providence here.

So, a couple of treats...

 

a couple of stickers....

some balloons....

but the cool, awesome, epic thing I teased in my other Facebook status is....

I made finger puppets to put in some of the eggs!

Steve and Blue (from Blue's Clues), and Cookie Monster, Prairie Dawn, Grover, and Elmo (from Sesame Street, of course). 

A friend shared this link with me as a non-candy Easter egg filling idea.  And I was kinda sorta planning to make a couple.  But then I was hangin' out on the internet doing goodness knows what, and it just hit me that I should make finger puppets of some of her favorite characters instead.  I sketched out the ones I thought would be relatively straightforward to make and got to work:

I wish I could give you instructions, but I cannot.  It just involved a lot of felt, fabric paint, tiny scissors, and trial and error.  But, as it usually does, it worked out.  Close enough for government work, anyway.  (That's an idiom.  Do people say this, or just my mom?)

In any case, Happy belated Easter!

Valentine's Day 2012

Whoa, is it like way too late for a Valentine's Day post?  Well, too bad.  I still want to talk about it.  And by "talk about it", I mean post photos.

I talked last year about how I will and have mended my Valentine's Day-hating ways for the sake of my daughter.  The tradition continues!

I got the idea of using cookie cutters as paint stamps from this blog.  She has a lot of really great ideas for crafts and activities for babies and toddlers. 

 

It was Lucy's idea to get out the scissors and make fringe.

 

But then when we were done painting, she decided she wanted to use the table-protecting paper to wrap the cookie cutters up like packages for the post office.  (She sees me prepare and ship packages all the time.)

 

So we went with it!  It really is so much fun to let kids guide the activities.  Her ideas are always better than mine!

And then homemade heart-shaped pizza for dinner!

With bacon, red onion, red bell pepper, and... wait for it...artichoke hearts!  :-)

And Norman brought me some dark chocolate-covered shortbread cookies, even though I always tell him (honestly) that I don't want or need anything for Valentine's Day.  What a guy.

Thanksgiving 2011

Another Thanksgiving, come and gone. This one was perfect for us homebodies. (And by "us" I mean Norman and me -- I don't think Lucy could ever be misconstrued for a homebody.)  It was just the three of us, but enough food to feed... 8?  10?  A lot.

[The spread]

I made the soft pretzels (!!!) on Wednesday.  I hadn't made these in a while, and my bread kneading skills are much better than they used to be.  They turned out perfect.  Really.  There wasn't a single thing about them that could have been better.

Then Thursday started early with 5 bags of frozen green beans.  Now, calm down.  I had signed up to take a vegetable to the local Veteran's Hall.  We only kept about one bag's worth for ourselves.


These turned out really well.  I cooked up some bacon, then dumped it (and the grease!) into a pot with the frozen green beans.  Then I added salt, pepper, garlic powder, and dried minced onion.  Simple and tasty!

Then the turkey, which, sadly, I overcooked.  Especially sad because it was free range.  But the gravy I made from the pan drippings?  Ohhhh man.  So flavorful, but not fake flavorful.  Conventional turkeys are usually injected with a brothy liquid -- the ones at my local grocery store said they had up to 16% broth solution. That's a prime place for MSG to hide as "turkey broth", "natural flavorings", and "spice".  This is why we were so happy to be able to spend more on a free range turkey. 

Also, a standard post-Thanksgiving job for me, making turkey broth!  Turkeys are so big that I'll make two batches of crockpot broth from our 10 pound turkey.  And, once again, no MSG!

We also had sweet potatoes (actually yams -- I went to two stores and couldn't find any sweet potatoes!), but I cooked them two different ways.  Norman wanted them just mashed with butter and salt, so he could put gravy on them.  And I, of course, wanted them drenched in sugar!  I ended up mashing mine with butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  Then I topped them with this homemade marshmallow fluff and baked them!  Soooo good.  They taste just like some sort of Yankee candle smells.  (That's a good thing.)

We had wine, and sparkling pomegranate juice.  And for dessert I made pumpkin donuts.  Oh my.  This recipe makes about 50 donut holes.  And each one of them is fried in coconut oil (if you're at my house, anyway).  And coconut oil is seriously filling.  I have a feeling a bunch of these are going to mysteriously show up on the coffee table at church on Sunday, especially since we also still have a bunch of pretzels!

[Pumpkin donut holes]

 

[Om nom]