Montreal in February

I haven't been including all of my work trips here as posts, both because I'm trying to get through my backlog faster and because they just aren't all that interesting, but when I went to Montreal in February I had the chance to see something very cool that I wanted to share here!

I ended up with a free couple of hours one afternoon while in Montreal, and rather than sit at my hotel I did a quick google search to see if there was anything interesting nearby, and when I saw something that said "Barbie Expo", I immediately thought "I need to see this." It's a traveling exhibit that was installed in a high-end mall in Montreal, close enough to walk to from my hotel, so I bundled up and hiked over. I'm so glad that I did! The exhibit was really cool to see. Just look at the space!

I took photos of TONS of the Barbies, but I'll save you from posting the many that I have and just share a few of my favorites. There were a lot of themes: historical figures, movies, tv, decades, fashion, gems, pop culture, flowers, artists, music, and more!

I absolutely loved this one.

And who doesn't love Barbies dressed to represent precious gems?

This was definitely one of my favorites. Wizard of Oz!

Of course, when I did leave, there was a crazy delay due to snow/ice - the picture on the left was them bringing the de-icer out to try to clear off our plane. I had to fly through Charlotte, and missed my connection due to our delay. The right is me in the Charlotte airport bummed because I had to stay there for a while to make my connecting flight. But I had Starbucks and work to do, and eventually I made it home.

 

...where I found this sign waiting for me. I love those kids <3 p="">

Christmas break videos

I'm going to skip my Christmas post for a bit, only because it's going to take a bunch of time for me to write it, and this week I just don't have the energy for it (especially after pouring through all of those Nutcracker photos). There's been a ton going on, and my brain is just tired. But, there's no question that looking at cute videos of the kids help, so...here are a few post-Christmas videos!

One of the presents that the kids received was new Magic Trax! My parents got the kids a set of these a couple of years ago, and they love setting up the tracks all over the house. They had seen advertisements on TV for the new version, where the tracks and trucks glow, and so my mom got them for the kids for Christmas. Of course that led to a video of them driving around in the dark!

From that modest track (of just the new pieces), the kids then brought up the rest of the track pieces from the basement and set up a much more extended track. I believe this sat in the living room for about 3 days...I don't normally allow that (this is more of a basement activity!), but it was holiday break, so why not :)

Total non-sequitur now, but because it happened at the same time, I'm including the video here. Henry loves showing me his "hip hop" moves, and I particularly enjoyed this dance. He really knows how to move that body!

Disney 2016: Disney Springs

Our first night at Disney, we headed over to Disney Springs (formerly Downtown Disney). We decided to do one nice dinner while on our vacation, and with good memories from a trip there years and years ago, we booked dinner at Wolfgang Puck's. The kids loved it and were so well behaved - it's nice to be able to take the kids to a nice restaurant now! It was also the perfect place for Natalie to wear her new dress, based on Elsa's dress from the "Frozen Fever" short (right). I included the pic on the left so that you could see that despite her growing up, the Frozen obsession is nowhere near over yet! That's a Frozen backpack, suitcase, dress, Crocs, and stuffed doll.

 

Henry decided to represent the superhero side of Disney with his outfit :)

 After our delicious dinner, we walked around for a bit. Listened to some live music:

 And checked out a few stores, with the most time spent in the Lego store! This picture reminds me that we actually went to Downtown Disney twice: once earlier that day (left pic), then back again that night (right pic). The kids got to pick out a toy (stuffed animals were chosen), and then later on they each got a Lego set courtesy of my sister.

 

A pretty fun night out! As I mentioned in my previous Disney post, the next morning we moved over to the Swan & Dolphin, and then set out for the Magic Kingdom!

Playing with Goldieblox

This past week our daycare needed to close, due to a death in the family. Luckily I was home all week (not traveling!), so I was able to assist with the kids. Well, really, it was Henry - Natalie was at school all day, but Henry is normally at daycare in the afternoons on MWF, and there all day on Tuesday and Thursday. Unfortunately, Tuesday is the one day that Evan is completely unavailable (he's very busy with work most Tuesdays), so I took the day off and spent it with Henry. We had a really nice day together! We ran some errands, played games...it was a very fun day.

Thursday I also stayed home, but worked this time; Evan and I traded off time with the kids, while working. I spent a lot of the day with Henry, at the kitchen table, working while he played next to me. We were running out of ideas as to what to do, so I got out the Golideblox engineering kit. While the kit is Natalie's, and it was originally designed to get girls more into engineering, who says that boys can't play with it too? Henry and I had a blast making creations, and he picked up on the idea pretty quickly!

When Natalie came home from school, she wanted in on the fun, and they both quickly realized that the platform could be used as a type of steering wheel, which led to this:

It's not difficult to work next to that, now is it? Really, it was adorable, and I was so proud of them for playing so nicely with each other for at least an hour (which they did again this morning...it's so great that they can do that now!). I love watching them make up their own games and be creative together!

New Lego creation

On Mother's Day weekend, Natalie and I took a "quick" trip to Tyson's Mall on our way up to Maryland to visit some friends. I had planned to only go to a couple of stores, but of course we wandered past one, then another, then another, that we can't go to anywhere else, so our trip was a bit more extended than I thought it would be! One of the stores that we found was the Lego Store, which we haven't gone to before. I had been wanting to get the kids a few more Lego pieces to go with the large bin that we have - we've got tons of individual pieces, but were lacking in wheels, axles, and people. So, we hit up the "Wall of loose Lego pieces", as well as the "make your own people" 3 pack, and picked out everything we wanted. When we got back home, it was time to start building!

Natalie did an awesome job with the new pieces. I started off by making a very basic car.

Which Natalie fairly quickly turned into this spaceship/Mars Rover-looking vehicle.

And the next thing I knew, we had this final piece, with all 3 Lego people now on board.

She really did put all of these components on the base herself, quietly working away with almost no help. I love the creativity, and that we were all sitting on the floor building together. Yay Legos!

Happy Hanukkah!

Merry Christmas to all! I have so much to talk about from our first at-home Christmas, but I first wanted to say....Happy Hanukkah! That's right, we celebrate both in this house. And by "celebrate", I mean I absolutely love the tradition of lighting the menorrah every night, but it doesn't have any religious meaning to me (I guess the same can really be said for me about the traditions of Christmas). I like that the kids are learning about Hanukkah as well, even from just a tradition point of view.

Here we are celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. We decided a couple of years ago that there was no way the kids were getting 8 nights of presents AND a full Christmas (as well as Natalie's birthday being in December too!). Instead, the kids each get one on the first night, and then we just light the candles for each of the next 7 nights. Here are the kids helping me light the candles on the first night.

Then, it was present time! To entertain ourselves, we are teaching the kids that Hanukkah presents are brought by the Holiday Armadillo (if you don't get that reference/didn't watch Friends, click HERE to watch). Hee hee! This year, the Armadillo brought the kids cat-shaped flashlights, whose eyes light up different colors (white, blue, green, pink), and flash in each color as well. Very cool! They were a big hit.

I managed to get this action shot right as Henry dropped his. I love the light streams from the eyes!

I also finally learned how to play the Dreidel game. I purchased a set of two wooden dreidels from Wegmans for $3.00, including instructions. We then taught Natalie how to play with pennies. So much fun! She did great - she's wonderful at taking turns and doesn't mind at all when someone else does really well or if she's not winning. She had really good luck though - without us planning it that way, she won both games! At the end, we had her count up her winnings, and without us even telling her to she counted out her pennies in nice straight lines of 5. Something else she's learned to do at school! Such a smart bug.

Henry and the cars

Henry is a big fan of one of Natalie's new toys: the battery powered cars. Think about: what's not to like from his point of view? They move around, they have lights...they're a dream toy to grab at. It normally takes him a couple of tries, but he is eventually able to get ahold of them (much to Natalie's displeasure, most of the time!)

However, we found one way to position Henry with the cars where it's MUCH harder for him to grab them. And, as much as I feel kind of bad laughing at my child, watching this is really funny.

More Henry...and a little Natalie

Yesterday I received an email from ToysRUs telling me that for Friday and Saturday only Fisher Price infant toys and Crayola products were buy one get one free! I stopped on the way home to see what I could find. I got two cute toys for Henry, and two color-wonder Crayola products for Natalie. She hasn't used the color wonder paper yet, but I think it'll be good for her as she can color with it on the couch, and not just on our spare blanket on the floor.

This is one of the toys I bought for Henry. The snail lights up and plays music when you rock it, and combined with the mirror on the front it's good at attracting his attention. I put it on the floor in front of Henry, and he definitely started staring at himself and the lights!
The other toy I bought him is part of the "Stack n Surprise" series of toys. My friend gave us the Sillytown toy in this series, so I got Henry some stacking cars that go with it. I think he'll like them when he gets bigger!



Henry had a lot of fun staring at the snail.

Natalie liked the snail too!

The snail did exactly what it's supposed to: encouraged him to roll over to reach it!

"Really Mom, must we take SO many pictures??"

How did Henry get himself over onto his belly, you ask? Well, he had a little help.

Natalie wanted to take pictures of Henry as well. She doesn't have a play camera (although I'm thinking we should get her one, as she LOVES taking pictures!), but she made do with her phone:

And about 2 minutes later, Henry was done:

Time for new books

Last night Evan read Natalie a "new" book: the board-book version of "Are You My Mother?". I say "new" because she'd read it before, but we had left it on Henry's bookshelf when we moved Natalie into her big girl room, so she's not had us read it to her in months.

Turns out, it was a HUGE hit. I was nursing Henry in his room while Evan was reading it to Natalie, and I cracked up twice while listening. First, Natalie kept repeating "where's da muddah?" every time Evan would read "are you my mother". Seriously, she sounded like an old Jewish man. Then, about halfway through, she said to Evan "Quiet Daddy, I can't hear the book while you're talking!" I guess he was reading it too loudly. Or something. I literally laughed out loud when I heard that.

She then wanted to keep the book in bed with her (which we let her do with one book now at bedtime; we'll hear her "reading" to herself while we're watching TV), and Evan told me that this morning it was all she wanted to talk about. She even chose the book over her babydoll to take to Essie's (trust me, that's huge).

So either this book is just a fantastic hit, or it's simply that it's new. I'm going with the latter. It occurred to me while talking to Evan about it this morning that she's not had any new books in months. Since she always goes and picks her favorites, and I know kids this age really like routine, I never thought about it. But now I'm thinking a trip to the bookstore is in order.

While we trust Natalie with non-board books, as she doesn't rip pages anymore, the board books still seem to be her favorite, and are what she wants to "read" in bed at night. We have almost all of the Sandra Boyntons, a couple of Dr. Seuss and Eric Carlisle. Can anyone recommend other board books your kids have really liked? I'll take any suggestions.

Natalie's favorite books

Natalie currently has three favorite books, and I can't recommend them enough:


This book is great! Natalie loves "counting" along with me as the caterpillars go from 10 to 1 (they're raised off the page so she can easily touch each one). On each page, we count how many are left, and read about why one stays behind.

Then, on the last page, they all become beautiful butterflies that pop up from the page! This is of course her favorite part. She loves opening & closing that page to make them pop up. I constantly have to stop her from pulling too hard on the butterflies, but she's slowly learning.





I just bought this one for Natalie this week, and she's picked it out before bedtime every night! She likes that the butterflies are raised off the page (like the caterpillars), and they're a little sparkly.

Each page has a color scheme (like "purple pansies tickling a purple dragonfly") that matches one butterfly. I think it's really good for learning colors; she can already point to the yellow one when I ask her! I think she's going to learn purple next; she says it a lot.


This one is also great. It has a button on the bottom right corner that you push to make the lights go. Each page talks about something different "stars to watch over you; rockets dashing out into space; streetlights lighting the way", etc.

Natalie knows where the button is, and tries to push it but doesn't have the strength to quite yet. The funniest part is that almost any book we read she now pushes at that part of it, expecting something to light up. So cute!





Let me know about any faves your child, niece, nephew, cousin, etc might have and I'll think about getting them! You can never have too many books.

Great toy website

I heard of this great toy website through a friend of a friend. It's called babyplays.com. I had been meaning to sign up for a while, and just got around to doing it today!

Essentially, the site is like Netflix, but for toys. You sign up for whatever plan you'd like, and you get to choose from 4-6 toys at a time, that you can either keep for 30-60 days (or keep some longer if you'd like). I went with the extended play plan, as it was the cheapest/month (even though you have to sign up for 6 months). We get 5 toys shipped to us (at no extra cost), with a return box including free shipping. Natalie can play with the toys for at least 60 days (less if she's not enjoying them, more if she is), then we send them off and get the next ones on our list.

I've picked out some really great toys for her. Everything is plastic or wood, so I can easily wash it down before she plays with them. Another thing I like about the site is the large number of Melissa and Doug toys they have; they make all wood (natural) toys for kids to play with, so I don't have to worry as much about lead paint from China. Because they're better quality, they tend to be more expensive, so we don't really have any. Now Natalie can have a bunch!

The other thing I like is that we won't have 800 kids toys hanging around our house as Natalie outgrows them. I have quite a few things from when she was a newborn-6 month age, that she just is too old for now. And yes, the next kid can play with them, but storage is starting to become a problem. Now it won't be! I will likely buy her some of her own toys still, especially if there's one from the site that she REALLY likes, but we can cut back on that now and save money that way.

I'll let everyone know how it works out! And thanks to Kathy & Eric again for paying for the first month as a birthday present to Natalie - I didn't just take your money! :)