Jack kisses

Jack has never been an especially cuddly boy. Sure when he was a little baby he'd fall asleep while I was holding him, and he likes to cuddle (or huggle as we say, thanks to Avery mixing words when he was about 2) when he gets hurt or is sad. But getting a good hug, or kiss, from him is like pulling teeth! He runs away and thinks it's hilarious. So we've had to get creative in ways to get him to hug and kiss us. Sometimes the faces he makes make it seem like he's actually disgusted with us...how dare we want to love him! :) Can 2 year olds be disgusted?

 Sometimes we'll play a sleeping game, where Andy or I will pretend to sleep and the only way to get us to wake up is if Jack gives us kisses. It works about 25% of the time. He's catching on to our ways. :)

 Recently we've discovered the he thinks "lip punches" or "lip bumps" are a boy-ish enough way to give kisses. They're not as violent as they sounds, just big kisses. But watch out, he might accidentally not here the lip part of lip-punch and deck you in the face. It happens.

 We try not to promote violence, but his face is so kissable...so we have to be creative in finding ways that he things are good enough for him. More often than not, trying to get a goodnight kiss ends up in some sort of wrestling match with all of us trying to get a Jack kiss. He's probably going to be the one that's embarrassed of us at an early age. : )

*special thanks to Avery for taking all these pictures :)

Avery's secret

Best Valentine moment - for about a week and a half Avery has been telling me daily that he has a secret for me but he can't tell me until Valentine's Day. He's been so proud that he's such a good secret keeper. He's been very excited for Valentine's Day to get here so he could tell me his secret. So, this morning when I went in their room to get them out of bed he very excitedly told me that since it is Valentine's Day he can tell me his secret now. I asked what his secret was and he said "I love you, Mom!" and gave me a big hug.
 

Best secret ever. It was a very happy "mom moment" for me!

Helpful Jack

Jack and I usually do whatever grocery shopping and errands while Avery is at pre-school. Running around with one of the boys is so much easier than both. Not that they're overly crazy, I'm just always surprised at how quiet my shopping trips are with only one!

Yesterday when we got home from the store Jack wanted to help me carry things in, and since I'm not one to turn down "teaching opportunities" for my kids I accepted his offer. : )
While he was carrying the package of plates up the stairs I was praising him, he must have thought it was a really special moment (of course it was!) so he stopped and said "Mom, get the camera. Take my picture"

 So he waited on the stairs for me to take the rest of the bags to the kitchen and get the camera. He was very proud to be helping me and even put them in the right cupboard. It's so fun to be able to have conversations with him now. I still think of him as a baby, but he's growing up too fast and isn't really a baby anymore. Although I tell him, whenever he insists he's not a baby, that he's still MY baby! Little punk, growing up.

 

He walked around the kitchen like this asking where his legs went. It was very cute!

Avery originals

Avery brought this little gem home from primary on Sunday, it's his rendition of the First Vision.

He's also been hard at work making valentine's for his preschool classmates today. His class party is next week and he's very excited to hand out all his creations. He's doing surprisingly well cutting along the lines I've drawn. He's just getting so big!

 

 He also enjoyed spelling things out with yarn the other day, he's getting so smart and creative. I love it.

I just overheard...

This morning I caught Jack climbing over the back of the couch for the 1,187,364th time. This week.

He was promptly sent to his room for time out. A couple minutes later Avery came to me and said "I went and told Jack he has a couple more minutes, when you're ready tell me and I'll go let him out" so I said he could go open the bedroom door and ask Jack to come talk to me.

When he didn't come right away I walked down the hall to see what was going on, and this is what I heard through the partially open door

A: do you know why you're in time out?
J: yes. I climbed over the couch
A: Is it ever okay to do that?
J: No. it's not
A: don't do it again then. Now go talk to Mom

I loved that. Avery then came out and said "don't worry Mom, I talked to him"

So. Cute.

Jack has already attempted to climb over the couch again...oh well.

Projects

Since we moved into the house I haven't really been able to focus much on my sewing/craft room as much as I had hoped. It's just in the last week or so that I've started getting things organized in there.

Today is the first time I've been able to work on some projects, and it has been so nice.
Yes, the house work I wanted to get done today is only half done, and my kids have been begging for a snack for an hour, but it was so nice to work on something that it was a little too easy to ignore the house work and tune the boys out for a bit.

So, first was a quilt I started 3 years ago. I had no idea it was that long ago, it should have been finished a long time ago! I'm not a quilter, so I tied it, and used store bought binding for the edge. It's queen sized, so it'll work well for guests or for keeping warm this winter. I'm just glad it's done!

 

 Second, I bought fabric to make the boys coordinating pillow cases a couple months ago and just haven't gotten to it. So I found a fun little tutorial (here) and made them. They're cute and go better with their room than my old girls camp pillow cases!

And this last picture is just because I love my sewing room. It's messy and unorganized right now, but I love it.

Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, Snowzilla....

...those names make me laugh.

We spent Tuesday watching the snow fall and be blown around by huge gusts of wind, cozy in our warm house.
My dad showed up at about 6 pm, and when Andy asked him where he parked he said he walked! Across town! In a blizzard! So we were glad to take him in and feed him, the boys loved having Grandpa Rob over for a sleep over. : )

Wednesday we were completely snowed in. Andy tried to dig his way out of the driveway to get to work only to find neither of our cars could handle the snowy road (ours was one of the last streets in town to be plowed, I'm sure of it!). So we hunkered down to be lazy and wait. Andy was finally able to get out and go to work at about 2:30. Best day of work this week! :)

Later in the afternoon my brother-in-law came over and with his "snow tractor" as Avery called it dug the rest of our driveway out. We have some big snow drifts in our yard and I don't expect it to go away any time soon. Avery has been begging to go out and play, but with the negative temps I'm not about to send him out!

Now we have a few days off before we're supposed to get more snow!

Rice Cooker from CSN

So about a week and a half ago I received a $25 gift certificate from CSNstores.com. The only requirement was that I had to do a review for them after I bought something for myself! Fun!

I thought it would be pretty easy to pick something I had a couple things in mind, mostly kitchen items. So I started browsing for something new. What I thought would be an easy decision turned into a day and a half trying to decide between hundreds of items! I thought about a cooking set for Avery, a ravioli maker, a deep fryer, an oven liner (I hate cleaning the oven!), and tons of other things. There were way more things to pick from than I thought! It was awesome, and I can't wait to buy something else from their shops, they have just about everything you could ever need for you home.

So I finally showed Andy about a thousands things (maybe a slight exaggeration) and told him to pick which one we should get. We decided on a Rice Cooker, and I actually really like it! I know rice isn't a hard thing to make, but when you're also cooking meat and veggies on the stove it's awesome to be able to pour the water and rice and whatever seasonings you want in the cooker and let it sit til it's done.

The day we got it I decided to make some teriyaki chicken stir fry. so between the sauce, the chicken and veggies cooking on the stove the Rice cooker made it just a little easier to manage. The rice turned out perfect, very moist, very low maintenance, very yummy. 

So, this will definitely get put to good use around here. I'm excited to try some different rice recipes like fried rice in it.

And as an added bonus the purchasing process at CSN was so easy, and we got the Rice Cooker 2 days after we ordered it. I hate when I buy something I'm excited about and then it takes 2 weeks to get here, so fast shipping is a huge draw for me! They even have tons of items that have free shipping, so overall I will definitely be recommending CSN to people!