The making of a Christmas card

Next time you open a Christmas card from a friend/relative/co-worker etc, remember it looks a LOT easier that it is.  We took pictures of the girls a couple days ago for our Christmas card.  I was breaking a sweat by the time we were done!

I did two sessions which included a lot of bribing with candy.  One session was in the afternoon after Maddie woke up from her nap.  The next was after dinner when they are usually at their best.

Emily was such a good girl (I think the candy bribing had a lot to do with it) and Maddie thought it was a joke.  She kept getting up, squirming out of the chair or just screaming.

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall watching Hubby and me making the funniest faces, noises and trying just about anything to get these two kiddos to SIT and SMILE.

Here are a few funny bloopers:

Wordless Wednesday

A view from Letchworth State Park from our weekend getaway.  This is more amazing in person for sure.

Happy Halloween!

This year Emily wanted to be a fairy.  It was only fair for Maddie to follow suit and be a pumpkin fairy!

I bought Emily's costume at a yard sale over the summer.  She loves twirling in it.  Loves the big pouffy skirt.

I bought Maddies at Gymboree via eBay after I lost her original pumpkin fairy costume over the summer. I will probably find it someday when I clean out the storage attic. I never spend $$$ on costumes, but I just HAD to get this for her.  It was so darn cute!

I took some pictures that halloween afternoon to get some great sunny pictures.  It was a perfect afternoon! Emily had fun twirling outside on the lawn and Maddie crawled across the lawn in her costume trying to get out of it!  Emily wanted to go trick- or- treating right then!  She was super excited to get candy and show off her costume to everyone.  She was pretty disappointed when I told her we had to wait until after dinner.  As soon as it was dark, she was rearing to go!

It was a no nap day.  Emily slept in that morning and she was too excited to actually sleep so we played all afternoon.  By the time it was tick or treat time, she lost it.  She started having a melt down.  Poor kid started crying that she was tired and didn't want to wear her costume.  Being the excited mother I am, I put her costume on, threw her in the double stroller and we were on our way.  After a couple of houses, she got the idea and was excited to be trick or treating.  

We were out for about an hour and she didn't want to stop!  I was exhausted and Maddie was getting cold.  Adam could have gone on for a little bit longer.  He loved watching Emily squeal with delight when she rang the doorbell and got to pick out a candy.

Her favorite part though, was dumping her loot and picking out her favorites!

All in all, we had a great halloween!  Time to stock up on next years costumes at Target this week :)

Maddie: Eight Months!

 Madeline is now a crawling, babbling happy eight month old!  She is getting cuter and more animated by the day.  Her strawberry blond hair is finally starting to fill in.  She still has a ways to go though.  I can't wait to be able to put little bows in her hair!  In the picture below, I did manage to add a clip to her hair.

She just started crawling!  She mastered sitting up and soon after that, started lunging forward onto her belly. Her big sister Emily is not too thrilled about this new development though.  Maddie wants to be involved in what ever Emily is playing with which in turns makes Emily very upset.  Ah, the joys of being a toddler!

I am not too sure about the weight gain or the other stats.  We haven't been to the pediatrician since she was six months old, but my prediction is that she is about 14-15 lbs.  She has really started to fill out since being on solids.  This girl loves to eat!
She has 4-5 cubes of fruit mixed with baby oatmeal for breakfast. A 5 oz. bottle for snack, then 3-4 cubes of a veggie for lunch. A 5 oz. bottle for snack, then jar of food mixed with a meat and a bottle for dinner.  Then she has about two more 5 oz. bottles before bed.  Sometimes I throw a baby yogurt in there if she still seems hungry after her meal.
She loves yogurt.  She gets so excited when she sees the container and instantly opens her mouth and flaps her arms.

She also loves to snack on:

Her sleep patterns have gotten a bit hard to deal with.  She used to go down for the night around 8 pm and sleep until 8 am.  Now she has been staying up until 9 pm and waking up at 7 am with a night feeding in between.  Yes.  She has been getting up around 2-4 am to have an early morning snack.  The doctors and books I have read say to NOT feed her, but let her cry so she understands it is sleep time and not time to eat/play/get out etc.  I'm sorry.  I just can't do that.  If I know my child is hungry, I am going to feed her. I am the one who has to deal with her, not the doctors.  Feeding her for 5 minutes and putting her back to sleep is much easier than listening to her scream for 45 minutes.
She does really well with naps though.  She usually takes a short nap in the morning and then a 2-3 hour nap in the afternoons.

I am anxious to see her growth from the past three months come October!

Summer's end

I swear summer goes by faster each year.  Maybe because we have been super busy this summer with a highly active toddler who is such a busy body.  She always wants to go somewhere or visit someone.  Wonder where she gets that from?!?

Sooooo here are a few pics of things we did over the summer.

Happy 4th of July!  Enjoying a sucker after church.

Riding a horse with Daddy

Swinging at the park

Roller skating for the first time with cousin Abby

Struttin' her stuff at the beach

Blowing out the candles at her third birthday party!  The cake was melting.  Whoops!

Hangin' out at the zoo

Building her own stuffed monkey on her Birthday!

Visiting with Grandma and Grandpa Incardona

Feeding the fish at the hatchery

Climbing the Gorge!  

Going to baseball games and meeting Mitsy!

Adventures in Baby Food

Madeline is starting solids.  This time around I decided to make my own organic baby food for a couple reasons.  

1. $$$  Baby food is pretty pricey!  Especially if you go the organic route.  One teensy 2 oz. jar carrots, peas, bananas, etc. can set you back $.60 a jar.  I bought all baby food for Emily and spent about $10-15 a week once she started eating three meals a day. 

2.  Another reason is I have the time. At first I was pretty overwhelmed at the thought of making this baby food.  I figured it would take me all day to cut, peel, cook and freeze the baby food. Boy was I wrong! The reality is, it takes me about an hour or two depending on how much I plan on making and freezing.  I found a great baby food Blog that gave me many useful hints.  I got the confidence I needed and I was on my way to making baby food!

It is really simple.  I Peel, chop and steam/boil/bake whatever food I prefer.  Then I puree it in the food processor, thinning it out with water and scoop the food into ice trays for freezing.  Once frozen, I popped out the food cubes and put them in a marked ziploc freezer bag.  Now I just have to go into the freezer and pull out what I need.

This is what peas should look like!  I bought a bag of frozen organic peas for $1.99 and steamed them right in the bag.  Threw them into the food processor and voila!  On that one bag, I filled 1.5 trays of food.

Yams ready for the freezer!  I bought a 5 lb. bag of organic yams for $5 ($1 a yam basically).  I ended up filling four trays of Yams.

I started her on plain whole grain rice cereal two weeks ago. I really like Earth's Best products.  The cereal is not that much more than Gerber. I also really liked the variety of the 2nd foods when I was feeding Emily a couple years ago.  I prefer to not use Gerber at all.  Not even organic. According to blogs and news articles I have read, Gerber uses a lot of fillers in their baby food such as large amounts of water, chemically modified starch and added sugar.  No thanks. Earth's Best and Beech Nut do not use these fillers.

 Last week she started Yams, peas and apple sauce.  She liked the yams and apple sauce.  No to the peas.  As soon as I scooped them into her little mouth, she started crying and spit them out.  I did mix them with yams and she tolerated them.  

This week I made carrots and peaches.  We will see how she likes those!

Cookies!

We decided to do something fun with Emily last week so we made Toll House cookies from scratch!  There is nothing better than a homemade cookie.  Well maybe the Wegmans Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies OHMYGAWD they are so good!  They almost melt in your mouth as you chew.  Anyways!

I remember as a kid making them with my mother and had so much fun stirring everything up and then watching the balls of cookie dough "melt" and turn into cookies in the oven.

Emily loves to help me do pretty much everything and I must say she is a great little helper! She really had a blast helping me to pour the ingredients into the bowl and especially loved dumping the chocolate chips at the end.


And of course, she got to have a little taste!  The problem was, she kept wanting to eat it!!  We had to put the bowl up so she couldn't reach it.  She kept sneaking a spoon and digging in!

 

Adam had the job of putting the cookies on the cookie pan to bake!

Here is the finished product!  Doesn't she look proud?  She kills me with those legs of hers!

She approves!

Anniversary Vacation!

Adam and I celebrated our four year anniversary on June 23rd.  We decided to take a much needed vacation to Boston.  We also decided that we were going to leave the kiddos home.  It would have been way too stressful (for me, haha) with an almost three year old and a 5 month old.  The kids would have been thrown off their schedules and they really wouldn't have enjoyed it very much.

We took Emily to Washington, DC last year and it was pretty disastrous with the teething and screaming nights and no naps. So yeah.  This year we went sans kids!  Thankfully we had family who were willing to watch them while we were gone.  Gotta love family!

We had a BLAST!  We flew there and it was pretty seamless.  Very easy and quick.  I love flying but I love short flights even more.  After about 30  minutes in the air, I tend to get pretty bored.

We spent the first night just walking around the city.  We ate dinner at The Barking Crab.  A cute little crab shack on the water. We both enjoy crab, but I really love it!  I couldn't get enough of it.  We got a total of 4lbs of crab, fries and grilled veggies.  We ate it all!  I could have had more though.  It was sooo delicious!

Then we took the T (subway system) to Revere Beach.  It was beautiful!  The beach was nice and the water was refreshing.  Adam and I found some shells and cool rocks to bring back home.  We also got these humungous hot fudge sundaes from a little ice cream shop on the beach. Picture this: A swirl of vanilla soft serve, hot fudge drizzled all around the ice cream, TONS of whipped cream, jimmies and a strawberry on top! I would have taken a picture, but the homemade whipped cream it was topped with started falling over!  I had to eat quick!

The next day we took the famous touristy Boston Duck Tour all around town.  Our guide was hilarious!  He made us QUACK at random people on the streets.  Most people just looked annoyed.  It was still lots of fun though. A great way to have fun and see the historic sights without tiring yourself out walking everywhere.

After the tour we headed over to The New England Aquarium. It was pretty cool!  We both share a love for fish and other aquatic species. They had a cool sting ray touch tank.  I didn't realize how slimy those rays are!

In the very middle of the aquarium, there is a HUGE tank filled with turtles, fish and more sting rays!  There was a walk way spirling up to the top of the tank where it was wide open and you could look down into it.  This turtle was trying to find a way out!

The next day (our anniversary) we decided to do a Whale Watch  Let me just start out by saying that was one hell of a boat ride!  The watch was on a high speed catamaran boat that could hold about 150 people.  We were lucky (sarcasm) to be on the boat with two middle school groups who pretty much took over the entire boat. The water was getting choppy as we got farther out and at some points we were getting air on the waves.  Pretty crazy!  I actually started to get really sea sick.  I mean really.  I was ready to vomit the choppier it got.  About 30 minutes out, the captain announces that we  must turn around.  The weather was not cooperating and was not ideal to see whales.  Bummer!!  Event hough I was sooo sick, I still wanted to see whales!  Adam was pretty disappointed too.  His plans for the day were not going as planned.  He wanted the day to be special.  This is pretty much how we both felt and looked as we docked in.

After we gained our stomaches back, we went to walk around the little shops and find a place to eat lunch.  Then we went back to the hotel to get ready for our evening!  Adam made reservations for Top of the Hub at the Prudential Building.  It was so pretty inside.  We snagged a table by a window.  All great and all expect for the fact that it was so foggy that we couldn't see out!  Bummer!  We still had a blast though.

Adam ordered the Salmon.  It was served with sweet potatoes and the salmon was on a cool piece of cedar. 

I ordered the 2 lb. lobster dinner.  It was stuffed chock full of lobster and topped with a crab and ritz cracker stuffing.  It was delicious!!  

We ordered this amazing blueberry and peach cobbler for dessert.  It was the best cobbler I have ever tasted in my life!

The next day we walked The Freedom Trail.  We saw The Paul Revere House and The USS Constitution Boat just to name a few.  It was quite a walk!  I think we must have walked about 5 miles that day.  We were totally exhausted that night!

We ate dinner at Quincy market and headed back to the hotel for the night.  We had to get ready to leave the next morning.  

We drove home instead of taking a plane back for a couple of reasons.  I was producing milk during this entire trip and I was really nervous that they wouldn't let me travel with 80+ ounces of milk.  Plus I had NO BABY.  So yeah.  Talk about suspicious!  Also, we thought a drive would be nice.  Sort of a way to prolong the last day of vacation.  It was a pretty nice and easy drive back.  we made it home in about seven hours or so.

All in all we had a GREAT trip!