Beach Day

We took Mookie to the beach on Saturday (June 27th). It was a lovely day -- not too hot, not too cold. Perfect for introducing a sweet little girl to The Beach. :o)  Mike was in town, and so we went with Kelly and her family so the boys could play some beach volleyball and the girls could sit. Nice day all around. :o)

Mookie LOVED the sand. LOVED it. Was CRAZY about it. :o)  Hands in it, pouring it from one hand to the other, picking it up and pouring it back on the ground. Sand, sand, sand. We should call her Sandy. LOVED it. Wanted it for lunch, even. :o)

I haven't had the time (nor the patience!) to look at all 258 pictures I took of our afternoon at the beach, but here are 3.

Sand, sand, hands in sand, sand in hands.
Sand, sand, pants in sand, sand in pants.

Here she is standing under the umbrellas (when I could KEEP Her Fair Self in the shade...). I enhanced the color a bit because the umbrellas are so colorful, I hope I didn't make her look like a pumpkin! :o)

And here she is playing with a little shovel. Such a rich, blue sky.

We're so lucky to live here. So lucky.

(There are more beach-day photos, but I have no idea when I'll get to them. I will tell you, however, that she was NOT impressed with the water. Very scary. Poor little girl. She clung to Mama like I was a life-raft!)

Hope you have a great week!

WFMW - Baby Food Storage

I'm probably a bit late coming to the party with this idea, but I had it tonight, and it was a TOTAL a-ha moment for me.  For me, this is a new, and fabulous, way to store baby food I've made.

Mookie has been eating solid foods since, uh, November. And I've been making some and buying some of her meals since then. When I first started making her meals, I bought the KidCo plastic-tray-with-lid combo for freezing baby food. I also, periodically, use a regular ice-cube tray...which is GREAT for storing pureed blueberries to put into Mookie's rice each morning. :o) 

The KidCo tray works. Okay. But, I didn't like the portion size, quite frankly. And as Mookie has gotten older, and is eating more, I have liked the portion size even less. See, two little "cubes" isn't quite enough, and three is too many. And, by the way, the tray makes seven cubes. SEVEN. I don't like prime numbers when I'm making food. I like portions that are divisible by two. Or three. :o)  But, idiosyncrasies aside, I used them anyway.

Tonight, I made red beans and rice for Mookie, and even though I've done it before, somehow the volume was much, much greater this time. So I filled my two KidCo trays, and was stuck with about 2 cups of beans-n-rice left. What to do, what to do...it didn't taste that great, but that's a lot of food to waste...

I was wishing I had some other, freezable, correct-portion-sized container to store the rest in. But, alas, I couldn't think of anything. So, I opened the door to my 'plastics' cupboard to pull out a large container for the remainder, and I found the stash of approximately 932 plastic Gerber baby food containers that I use for crackers and snacks and such. You know the ones. (I think they multiply when the cupboard door is closed.) Mookie love, love, loves to take each, and every one of these out of the cupboard and scatter them all over the house. Oh, she's fun.

Anyway, I thought those might be the solution to my problem! And, as of right now, I'm thinking I was right!!

I know the portion will be just right for her, and I just labelled the lid with the date and contents. I figure when it's time to heat up the red beans and rice, I'll just pop out the big cube into a microwavable dish, and go to town!

Yay for good ideas! Next, it's zucchini. And minced pork and pear. And whatever else I can think of! :o)  Any good suggestions?

Check out the other great Works For Me Wednesdays at We Are THAT Family.

You've Been Waiting??

I'm busy chasing a baby around today, but here's a 3:34 minute video of Mookie walking, and talking, and just being a cutie patootie. :o) 

I apologize for the AWFUL videography at the beginning. I promise it's not like that all the way through!  You can see the new trashcan (which also doubles as a fabulous magnet holder!), you can see her telling me not to eat the cat food, :o), and then she has quite a few other stories to tell...I just wish I knew what she was saying!
So, grab a cup of coffee, and sit back and enjoy! :o)

Cool Clock

I was just going through my Favorites, you know, tidying up, and I came across an interesting bookmark. On my list, I called it "cool clock", but didn't remember what kind of clock I meant. (I love it when I confuse myself!)

Anyways, when I clicked it, I didn't remember it, but I still think it's a pretty cool clock, so I'm sharing it!

Click here. 

I don't know anything about it, or how I found it, but it's pretty fun.

Happy Friday!

Just Being

How did 2 weeks go by so quickly since I last blogged?

I've just been busy doing normal things, and being a normal housewife and mom. We've been rearranging furniture (and I'm SO darned excited! I feel like I'm living in a new house!) (without all the boxes!), and I've been crafting and creating, and doing some party planning, and hanging out with friends, and all that normal stuff.

Mookie is walking now, and it's SO much fun to share my days with her. I'm trying to be more present in her day, if that makes sense. She's okay if I stand here and type, but not for long. :o)  And she's signing quite a few words now (banana, more, eat, milk, baby (or maybe it's fish...I can't tell)). She's just going about the business of growing up! I wish I was doing a better job of recording her antics here for your enjoyment as well as for posterity, but I don't. I'm sure I'll regret it later. Oh well.

Anyways, she's doing this thing lately where she'll come up to us, and turn around and sit down in our laps. Well, the other day she went up to the cat, turned around, and sat. On the cat. Alley was not amused.

I tried to tell Alley that it's a sign of affection.

For her birthday, we got Mookie a "marshmallow chair" (foam, really, but that's what we call it), and she loves it! It cracks me up to see her get into it. She doesn't understand, yet, that she can back up into the chair, though. For now, she gets into it by putting one leg in, then turning around (sitting on that leg), then trying desperately to get her leg out from under her in order to sit properly! :o) It's really adorable.

Just like her papa, she likes to watch TV from her chair...

And read the newspaper...

And just to prove that, yes, she IS growing some hair on her head, here's a shot where the lighting was funny, making her hair seem much darker than it is, but at least you can see it! :o)  There's still not enough for a clip...nope, not even one of those "no slippy clippy" things.

And, finally, because she loves being with me, and loves helping while I'm in the kitchen, here's what she gets up to when I let her open the pantry door. Yes, that's 87 plastic baggies mixed with almonds, rice, potatoes, crackers, and pasta. :o)  I'm thinking of rearranging the pantry so the only thing she can get to are the cereal boxes...

:o)

That's all for now. It's snack time.

I Guess She Was Still Hungry??

For Mookie's afternoon snack today, I peeled and cubed a pear and she thoroughly enjoyed it. The girl would be a fruitarian if I would only let her! Canteloupe? Snarfs it down. Honeydew? She resembles a chipmunk filling her little cheeks. Watermelon? Shoves so much in her gob that she nearly chokes! Today's pear was so scrumptious that she had juice running down her little chin. Now, I'll be honest here, I love it when I'm eating a pear so good the juice runs down my chin, too, so I guess she gets that from me. :o)

(Side note: I LOVE that my child loves fruit as much as she does. I just wish it had more protein, and good fat, and good calories.)

But today? Apparently one large d'anjou pear was not enough for her. She was playing after she devoured her snack, and, as you all know, silence from a toddler is never a good thing. I knew she was in or near the kitchen (I was at my laptop on the other side of the breakfast bar reading Megan's blog), so I peeked around the corner (thinking "I should get my camera ready" but not actually doing it!), and I found my child with the lid of the trash can open, and a handful of pear peelings in one hand and the other hand holding the core of the pear in her mouth! Gobble gobble gobbling around the parts I didn't cut off! She looked up at me so innocently that I could only laugh.

Laugh and vow to finally make a purchase that I've been wanting to make for some time, but couldn't really justify.  Until today. I've been wanting a stainless steel trash can for the kitchen. Mostly because I think they look nice, but also because I think hope they are more secure than the little white plastic one we're using now. Plus, our kitchen is sooo stinkin tiny that I cannot justify sacrificing precious cabinet space for rubbish. So I wanted a bin that was (a) attractive, and (b) secure.

And the one we've been using met both of those criteria.
Until today.

Until my admittedly scrawny child went rummaging through the trash in search of the sweet-smelling, mushy-gushy pear-peelings I had cast off thinking the "meat" of the pear was enough for her. :o)

But I guess she was still hungry. :o)