Pumpkin Patch!

It appears we are past the barfs for now.  Steven stayed home with Sophie today to make sure she was okay, because I had a big court argument to do in the afternoon.  He enjoyed his stay-at-home-dad day and during her morning nap (around 10 AM), he mentioned to me how much he was enjoying the day with her.  By the time I walked in the door at 4:15 PM, she was napping for a second time and Dear Old Dad was starting to look a bit weary. :)  Happy, but weary.  That stay-at-home stuff is not for the faint of heart.



There's an adorable little pumpkin patch a few minutes from our house, called Heather Hill Gardens (which I've blogged about before during the summer), and our fledgling group of mom attorneys (the Mother Attorneys Mentoring Association, based on the idea out of MAMA Seattle) decided to do a Fall Pumpkin Patch Event there.


This way for fun!


Carrie is one of my attorney-mom friends.  The idea of the Mother Attorneys Mentoring Association (MAMA) is that we get all the attorney-moms together so they can talk about issues relating to their life and law practice.  Depositions and diapers.  Its an odd combo but it works.



As you might imagine, Sophie loved the pumpkin patch.  (See us waving?)



She even wore her special pumpkin sweater for the occasion.



Hard to tell, but she's riding on a teeter-totter below.  Grammy and Grandpa came with us to the pumpkin patch.



I'm not sure she fully understands how a slide works.  She got to the bottom and just sat there like it was a chair.




Um, do I get up now, or something?

She absolutely loved seeing the sheep and goats at the "petting zoo" and I use that term loosely because there were signs indicating that those who attempted to pet the animals could draw back a hand with significantly fewer fingers.  So perhaps it was just a "looking zoo."



She growled at the sheep.  She makes the same noise for lots of different animals in her books here at the house -- "Aaarrggghhh" is the noise for horses, bears, sheep, etc.  Dogs get either panting noises or a "hoo, hoo" that sounds more like an owl than a barking dog.  Cats also get the "hoo hoo" noise.  We haven't figured out "meow" yet.


The sheep says aaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrgggghhhhh.


The sign on the sheep pen says "Please keep fingers out of animals' mouths. They will bite."  Not a very comforting sign for a nervous mommy.



As the morning went on, it got warmer and sunnier outside, and turned into quite a nice day.



Here are all the attorney moms and their kids -- we had a great turnout for our third-ever event!  If you want more info, MAMA of Northern Virginia is on Facebook.



And here is Daddy with Grammy and Grandpa, giving Sophie the tour of all the pumpkins.  Grammy and Grandpa were in town for Sophie's first birthday and graciously agreed to squeeze in next to Sophie's car seat so that we could all ride in one car to the pumpkin patch.



Its hard to believe that in a few months, we will have two kids and two carseats!  We'll have to start taking two cars wherever we go, anytime we have family in town.  Either that or buy a minivan, and I'm fairly certain where Steven stands on the idea of owning a minivan.  (Hint: It's a no.)

Also hard to believe that its been almost a whole month since we went to the pumpkin patch, and Sophie is almost 13 months old already.  The fall trees are still holding their gorgeous colors, and I'm grateful for the delayed onset of winter, even though we did have to change the clocks this weekend.  At least we gained an hour!  Happy Fall, everybody!

Sausage and Kale Soup and a Toddler who was happy for half the day...

As I write this, Sophie is asleep for her first nap in her "big girl bed."  We put a twin mattress on the floor in her room, put a toddler railing on it, and we make sure to close her door so she can't get out of her room (the stairs are awfully close to her doorway).  Seems to be going well so far, knock on wood.  Maybe I won't have to buy two cribs, after all.



Given her generally happy and fun-loving mood today, I'd say we've finally broken through that molar that was causing us all the trouble last week.



We didn't really grasp just how badly she must have felt until we got to see her on "the other side" of this pain -- she has SO much more energy now.



It just proves to me that she really was feeling terrible for the last couple of weeks.



She is also talking up a storm.  So far, I have heard the following words from her:  "Dada" (which she actually says as "dadadadadadadada!" and it was probably her first word that she connected with a person), "Bubbles" (she says it "bah-bull" and points to them in the sink when I am washing dishes or in the bathtub when she's taking a bath), "Baby" ("ba-ba" and she will run to pick up her baby doll), "Bottle" (also "ba-ba" but doesn't sound quite the same as Baby or Bubbles), "Mama" (sometimes she says this when she is sad, like "mah-mah-mah-mah" with a sad little pout and it breaks my heart), and she even said "Cheese" pretty clearly one time.  I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting.  Sometimes she can repeat "Nananana" when we say "Banana," but that one isn't consistent yet.


"Dadadadadda!"
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And as I was in the process of writing this post during Sophie's 2-4 PM nap, she woke up crying, and when we went up to check on her, she had puked all over herself.  So much for being beyond the teething/sickly phase.  Poor baby.  She ended up throwing up 7 or 8 times tonight.  We called the pediatrician and they advised us to give her only 1 oz of water or Pedialyte every 30 minutes, and not to feed her any food for the rest of the evening, because her tummy needed to rest.  That seemed to work, and she's asleep now for bedtime.


Poor baby.

And now, having said that, I will awkwardly segway into telling you that I made soup this afternoon. (I don't think that was the cause of the later issue, at least, I'm hoping it wasn't....)

White Bean Soup With Sausage and Kale:



I've made this soup before and even blogged about it previously.  The recipe is pretty easy, so I'll see if I can just approximate it for you without violating any copyrights.



The ingredients are:  Mild Italian Sausage, chopped onion, minced garlic, a can of drained cannellini beans, a can of diced tomatoes with oregano, basil, and garlic, and two cans of chicken broth.



You cook the sausage in a separate skillet until browned, then set aside.  The chopped onion and minced garlic go into your cast iron pot with some veg or olive oil until soft, then you add the drained beans, tomatoes and chicken broth.  Bring it to a boil, then simmer for 5 min or so, then add the sausage and kale.



Stir and simmer for 3-5 minutes until the kale is wilted, and season to taste with ground black pepper.



Delicious and it freezes really well.  In my experience, you probably don't want to feed the cannellini beans to your toddler, though, apparently.

I guess this means its dress up day...

First she picked up a bib out of the clean laundry and held it under her chin until I put it on her.



When I try to take it off, she just holds it up again, so clearly she has decided this is her fashion accessory for the day.



She played for a while with just the bib on.



And then fished around in her toy tub until she found something else she wanted to wear.



Maybe it was too bright over by her reading chair?



The sunglasses didn't last long, but you could tell she was really thinking about how they worked.



I'll be interested to see what else she decides she needs to wear today.  For now, we are just here, chillin' in our bib.

Happy First Birthday!

I blame it all on Pinterest.  If not for that website, I probably wouldn't have had nearly the crazy, ramped up and grandiose ambitions about Sophie's first birthday party that I did.  But alas, the internets are very very good at showing you all the things that the other cool mommies are doing.  Pinterest is sort of like peer pressure for grown ups.

After clicking on a billion zillion kids birthday party links, I realized I was out of my league, so I had to scale back a bit.  There weren't going to be any hand-lettered signs for each child attendee, there weren't going to be any homemade 15-layer rainbow cakes.  But then I stumbled upon something that looked do-able.

Cupcake toppers.


Actually, cupcake toppers and pom poms.  I would send you now to my friend Melissa's blog if she had one, as I got the paper poms idea in part from her daughter's first birthday party.  However, it appears she is blogless at this time.



In my browsing on Pinterest, I discovered the TomKat Studio.  The designer sells you a PDF of her party designs, customized with your child's name and age, and you do the footwork of printing the designs out in color on cardstock and cutting them out.



In reality, I let Staples do the footwork of printing in color on cardstock for me, and I spent a lunch hour one day sitting at Chick-Fil-A cutting out the cupcake toppers and the happy birthday sign.  I got a few weird looks, but when I said "first kid, first birthday," the weird looks turned into knowing nods from veteran moms.  They'd been there, too.  To the brink of party planning insanity and back.  Just to say we'd done it, of course.



Homemade cupcakes (or homemade anything, really) were out of the question given my available free time and energy (read: zero and less than zero), so I let Harris Teeter handle that part of the equation.  We even got a free "smash cake" since it was Sophie's first birthday.  The hand lettering on the cake left a bit to be desired, but when its free, I guess I can't be too choosy.



The cupcake toppers turned out magnificently - better than I thought they would.  I ordered them from the Lollipop Sweet Shoppe collection on the TomKat Studio website, although I didn't really go through with the whole lollipop theme.  I bought a 2-inch scalloped paper punch from Michaels and just punched those bad boys out at my Chick-Fil-A party organizing lunch that day.  In the few days before the party, I taped wooden dowels to the backs of the toppers, and on the day of the party, I put the toppers into the cupcakes.  I think they look pretty professional and awesome, but that's just me.  I will probably order toppers from that site again -- plus, they have freebies for special occasions! So fun!



Another great tip that I saw from the hundreds of "first birthday party" posts I looked at online -- lots of people had a specific "cake smashing outfit" for the baby.  Hence, Sophie is here wearing nothing more than bloomers and a bib, for minimal pink icing cleanup.



That idea worked out quite well, as post-cupcake smashing, I just transported her over to the sink, washed off her hands, then took her into our home office (which doubles as the baby-changing-station right now) and stripped off the bib and bloomers, and put her back into her regular birthday outfit.



Nana and Pop (my parents) came in town for the party, and Grammy and Grandpa (Steven's parents) came in town for Sophie's actual birthday, which was later that week.  Sophie loved having all of her grandparents visit in the span of less than 10 days, although she may have been a bit exhausted after all of her partying!



One of the funnier things about waiting until her party to get her any new toys was how very thrilled she was with EVERY SINGLE TOY.  We'd apparently been depriving her.


Yes, Pizza Hut? Mommy wants a cheese in the crust pizza, please, and make it snappy!


Our "big present" to Sophie for her birthday was a personalized toddler chair from Pottery Barn.  It was a wee bit spendy, but after seeing how much she absolutely adores it, I'm so glad we got it for her.  She runs over and dives into it now, and then turns her little bum around and sits in it like a proper little lady. Anytime she has a book or toy in her hands that she wants to look at, she carries it over to her chair, climbs in, and sits down to "read" or to look at her toy.  She also has a toy xylophone that she drags into her lap in the chair to play.



I've got more pictures from the pumpkin patch to show you, so I'll be back later to give you those.

Mornings At the New House

Had to get up extra early this morning for a leadership conference that started at 7:30 AM across town.  After we got up and made it downstairs at about 7 AM, Sophie needed a diaper change before Steven took her to school.  I have Sophie's diaper changing pad set up on the window seat in our downstairs office (so that I don't have to carry her up and down the stairs for every diaper change -- she is 25 lbs heavy now).  Looked out the window to see that the sun was just barely starting to rise over the treetops in the woods behind our house.  The sun itself hadn't made it over the treeline, so it was just the warm glow of the pending sunrise, and all the beautiful colors that come with a Fall sunrise.

I wish I'd captured a picture -- I'll try to do it another time -- but it took my breath away. The bay windowseat in our home office faces southeast, so it was a perfect view of the sunrise.  Quite a nice way to start such an early morning.  I love our new house.
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Edited to add:

Here's a picture Steven took today of our house on the sunset side of the day.

Bet you thought we forgot about you.

It wasn't so much forgetting to blog.  It was more in not having a free hand with which to type anything.  That, of course, combined with the fact that most, if not all, of my cute pictures of Sophie are immediately put up on Facebook, and my random thoughts are usually captured by Twitter.  I've apparently spread my social networking self too thin.



So perhaps we should redefine this space.  I started the blog to keep track of all the crafty things I was working on -- the knitting, the cooking, the gardening, the home improvement tasks.  Sadly, I haven't picked up my knitting needles in over a year now, and although I did cook dinner tonight, I don't know that anyone wants to see pictures of homemade chicken nuggets and Velveeta Shells & Cheese.  (Or perhaps people do, who knows?)



At this point, I'd just like to keep the blog from fading away altogether, so I'm going to make an effort to post at least one thing a week.  At least one picture, at least a few words, at least a blip on the radar.  I do feel like this whole "parenting an infant" has gotten somewhat easier as Sophie has gotten older.  That being said, we have spent the last week in The Valley of the Shadow of One-Year Molars, so perhaps its not easier, just different.  Thankfully, I think we are nearing the end of Molar Madness (OH DEAR LORD QUICK SOMEONE KNOCK ON WOOD, as I'm certain I've just jinxed myself), so perhaps I'll be coming up for air more often now.



Our next little girl, Scarlett, is due on January 31, 2012. I've scheduled her c-section already for February 1, because two-one-one-two is a cool birthday. This pregnancy has gone by so unbelievably fast, I still sometimes forget that she's going to be here so soon. I'm not sure how I'll survive working full time with two tiny kids, but then again, I wasn't sure I'd survive when Sophie got here, and here I am.  I can't wait to see what the next year brings.  If its going to be anything like 2011, it will be wholly exhausting and simultaneously the most fun we've ever had.

Blogging is harder without the internet

One little girl is enjoying her new digs!  Sadly she will have to go without elmo videos on you tube for a month, since the kind folks at verizon decided to go on strike recently, creating quite the lag time for new installations.  No tv, no internet, and no home phone until october 3.

perhaps we will go get a library card... Blogging from the phone is too time consuming to be wordy. More to come!