Why Spring Is Special To Us

We like spring a lot here at our place (and a whole lot more now that it actually feels like spring).  We love the Easter celebrations and signs of new birth but many big things in our family alone in each month of spring.

We celebrate another year of having our spunky, clever and beautiful Megan in our lives! 

(March)

 

We celebrate a full year of having our curious and handsome Owen in our lives! 

(May)

 

 And John and I celebrate another year (this year made five) of being husband and wife! 

(April)

John also celebrates a birthday in May and will likely share parties with Owen going forward.  My birthday is a half year away but I look forward to Mother's Day to celebrate being a mom to my two wonderful kids and with the man who made me a mom!

Friday Funnies: Finally Spring!!

We are soooo happy it's finally spring!  Time to let the fresh air in and you can bet we will be outside or as much as we can.  Yippee.  Here are some funnies from this past week.  Enjoy the chuckles and enjoy Spring!!

In case you hadn't heard, John's sister Dawn recently became engaged to Chris.  Dawn asked Megan to be a flower girl for their June 2014 wedding.  Megan is so happy but she keeps telling everyone that she is going to be a Sunflower and Owen will be a Penguin!

Megan is also kind of on a wedding kick lately especially since we will be attending one tomorrow.  She is asking who she is going to marry since people around her are pairing up.  She knows that Dawn and Chris will soon get married and that Kevin and Cat just did a few months ago.  She finally just said that she will marry herself.  Easier that way I guess!

Switching gears to birthdays... Megan had such a fun time at her party and now is super excited for Daddy and Owen's party!  Especially since it will be Mickey themed.  I like to make our own invitations to match the theme of the party and include Megan in the process.  Megan didn't help too much with the invites themselves although did inspire the colored wire tail.  What she did help with was addressing the envelopes.  I chuckled as she pretended to write her own versions of the invitation wording on the envelope flaps.  Example, "Dear Alexa and Ethan. Come to Daddy's birthday and Owen's after that!"

Megan seems to be turning mischievous.  She is starting to find things to use as step stools to reach craft supplies or other things up on shelves.  She also is starting to decorate fabric storage cubes with crayon and stickers.... And the best was a couple nights ago when Owen and I came up stairs after making up a bottle and Megan announced she had been "cleaning" our bedroom with baby powder.  "See Mommy, I clean your dresser! Want me to clean you?"  Um, no please... as she squirts and rubs into the wood...

And John and my favorite funny of the week.  At the dinner table last night after Megan had finished her food she pulled her bare foot up and started to examine it.  She wiggled her toes around and started calling them piggies.  She played with her big toe and said, "Hmmm, where does this little piggy go?  Target?!"

Have a great weekend, everyone!!

Thru Mid-April Wrap-Up

Well, now that April is almost completely over I think it's time to do a little wrap up of the first half of the month :)  I gathered as many pictures as I could so let's see what we've been up to!

Megan has come to love her pizzas as much as her Mommy and Daddy do.  When we make pizzas at our house John and I do tortillas with toppings and Megan does bread with toppings.  But her favorite is the Papa Murphy's Mini Murphs since it comes with a small piece of dough with little containers of toppings for kids to add their own.  And let me tell you, she sure knows where in town Papa Murphy's (a.k.a. the pizza store) is.  Since they're a little pricey for what actually gets eaten we developed our own little mini pizza station for her.  It seems all she really cares about is having the toppings in little cups!

At the beginning of the month John and I celebrated five years of marriage.  We were lucky enough to get away from the kids for a few hours that evening (thank you Rachel and Nate!) and had an excellent dinner at Red Lobster - I even got to have some wine! Yummo!  (And a BIG thanks to those who gave us gift cards!)  After the tasty dinner we went to the Mall of America where we went through the Mirror Maze (I had a Groupon - such a cheap date I am).  It was all right.  Not fabulous since I was thinking it would be a little longer but still neat seeing all of the mirrors aligned so that you don't know which way is actually a path you can walk through.    

Then another Home Depot Kids' Workshop the first Saturday of April where the kids were able to make bird feeders.  I am glad it's finally nice out because we have one bird feeder and two bird houses to put outside now!  Good thing Home Depot also gives the kids balloons so Owen has something to do while Megan's away hammering!

 

 

Back on the pizza topic... I had a great coupon for Dominoes pizza so John and Megan ordered it a couple Thursdays ago.  I can't remember but for some reason she got the idea in her head that we were going to have a picnic that night so ordering pizza turned into a Pizza Picnic!  Boy was she excited to lay out the blanket, get some paper plates and napkins and give everyone a drink!  She smiled for the camera once and then made me shift my focus on Daddy since she was already in a picture.

 

Nursery Rearranged

John and I did some improvements in the kids' room a couple weeks ago.  After being annoyed with very minimal drawer space for clothing we found a good deal on a fabric drawer unit for their room which we figured was a little less commitment than an actual dresser.  We also splurged on a Closetmaid cubicals unit for their fabric storage cubes and books.  All in all these units don't take up much more floor space than we were already using with the fabric storage cubes laying around.  Now it's very neat and tidied and easy to maintain, plus we have actual surfaces to put things on now too so things stay off the floor!

We also moved Megan's bed so now it's just her headboard that is against a wall.  This really opens up their room and, if you can get over walking around the bed to get to the back corner, it actually seems a lot larger!      Bonus- Owen likes climbing up on one side of her bed and going down on the other side :)

We do her bedtime story time in the back corner where the night light is also plugged in.  Hopefully we can get most of the books from downstairs up into the cubicals too!

This side of the room didn't really change but I still love Owen's little corner!

This bookshelf has worked great for housing lots of toys and lots of them - even more underneath the crib and downstairs!

Enough with the pictures... now time to play!!

Friday Funnies: On A Mission

Kind of a boring week here at the Lewis household.  Funniest thing was probably the 8-12 inches of snow we received between yesterday afternoon and early this morning.  Everything had melted last weekend with the 40-50 degree weather we had but I guess all mother nature was trying to do was to make room for more!  Hopefully that was the last of the snow because we want to have spring soon!  The trees were beautiful this morning as we drove and Megan said the trees (not the evergreen ones) looked like daddy snowflakes!

In case you were thinking I was joking about Owen being all over the kitchen, I saved these pictures just for you... 

Step 1: Open the dishwasher door.

Step 2: Climb onto the opened door.

 

Step 3: Stand up on the open dishwasher door.

 

 

Step 4:  Ta-Da!! You are now at eye-level with the counter!!!

The joke with a couple in our Community Group who has an almost 2-year old boy is that Noah has been teaching Owen his tricks.  Noah apparently does this exact same thing.  It all started with Owen opening up the oven door the day after the two boys played together.  The boys met each other in passing in the church nursery that next Sunday just long enough for Noah to tell Owen that it was the dishwasher door he was supposed to climb on... Owen has been obsessed with getting eye-level with the counter ever since!!!

I put Megan on a mission this week too.  See, she has been having issues with staying her bed during the night.  Her glow bug lost its magic a few weeks ago and it's every night that she ends up with us.  We moved her bed around, got her new lights and music and most recently gave her a spray bottle for spraying the bad guy monsters... On Wednesday night Megan used nearly half of a spray bottle in attempts at getting every corner of her room monster-free.  Did it work?  Nope, she was still back in our bed again that night... And last night, John and I grabbed every monster by the hair and put them in our room.  That didn't work either... In fact, this morning she wanted to keep sleeping with the monsters... in Mommy & Daddy's bed of course!

Owen at Eleven Months!!!

Boy has this been one busy month for Owen!  I have a ton to write about for his 11 month update and I'm kicking myself now for not writing it before the 8th especially because most of the big things I have to write about happened just in the last week or so!

Owen's teeth count is now up to six!  I guess he'd gotten one about every other week.  He seems to be a slow teether since his gum will be pretty puffy and white for close to two weeks before the tooth comes through.  So far it's the four middle teeth plus one extra tooth on his bottom right and one to the left on top.  And, just for the record, they are sharp!  I accidentally got my finger stuck in his mouth today and I thought he was going to bite it off!

Owen has been sleeping really good lately.  The last couple nights he's been doing 10 ounce bottles at bedtime which is fine with me if it means he sleeps the entire night!  I need to start doing a better job of reading books at bedtime 'cause I think he'd like it and it would give us good Mommy-Owen bonding.  He also still loves his fuzzy blankets and especially loves playing peek-a-boo with me as part of our bedtime routine.  One other cool thing is Owen doesn't scream much at all when he wakes in the morning.  He will actually lay and play for awhile before I need to rescue him!

 

Owen's appetite has grown and taste buds are fast at work.  He had a really big growth spurt the end of last week (you'll read the results of it soon enough) and seemed to be a bottomless pit but has backed off slightly this week even though keeping an open mind with textures.  Owen is really enjoying trying new things like hot dogs, shredded chicken, apples and other things that land on his tray.  Although we still can't get him to eat scrambled eggs... Bottles are still very important but he's giving us a break and doing most of the holding :)

Also along the lines of feeding, I am beginning to work on baby sign language with Owen as I did with Megan.  Right now we are just doing "more" during meals.  Most of the time he will just clap but I can see his mind at work knowing that he needs to do something in particular with his fingertips... It will happen soon!

Sometime towards the end of March Owen started letting go of things and had an interest in "sharing".  Just like his sister he started in the bathroom transferring bath toys from one bucket to another and then into the tub.  He's been handing things off ever since.  It seems everything he touches he wants to share with someone else - everything from balls, balloon, food, toys, suckey, spoon...you name it!  I hope you always love sharing, Owen!

So one of my most humbling Mommy-moments came in the past couple weeks when I realized my little Owen was a typical boy.  I for some reason thought he would be different and maybe it's because Megan was such an active girl.  Owen's mobility, strength and curiosity have joined forces and given Wiggle Butt a whole new meaning.  This kid will go into the kitchen and pull down the oven door, then open up the cupboard and put all the mixing bowls into the oven, then try to open up the dishwasher.  If the oven door would be closed he could get the dishwasher open all the way and stand on the door to get higher to see what's on the counter....  Yes, he discovered that he could also use the step stool to get his head counter height as well but really likes it when Mommy holds him so he can pull open the microwave door.  Oh, and the garbage can is still a big hit.  The kitchen is basically one big play zone for Owen...

 

But unfortunately that doesn't mean the rest of the house is a sanctuary... Owen's been caught swinging from the bathroom sink at my parents' place, splashing his hand in the toilet, doing the stairs on his own, climbing up on Megan's bed and rocking chair, eyeing up the washing machine.  Since he knows how to start going down the big stairs by himself he also thinks he knows exactly how to get down from our bed... Oh, and his new obsession when I'm holding him is the light switches.  He could turn them off and on all day long it seems.

Maybe the biggest result of Owen's last growth spurt is that he is now officially a walker.  Since right after Megan's birthday he had been taking one or two stumbling steps, letting go from some furniture to kind of walk with some forward falling momentum into our arms.  But something just clicked (again with the curiosity-mobility combo) and he can't get enough of trying out his new found ability.  Owen has no problem standing on his own for long periods of time now and then taking steps towards whatever catches his eye.  He's even walking past stationary objects that could be used as walking aides to reach something else.  Prior to all this he was perfectly content just walking holding onto furniture and crawling when he needed to.  Or else he would just turn kitchen chairs into his walkers...  I have a feeling Owen will be running soon too and it's going to get even more interesting from here on out!

I get a kick out of one of Owen's ways of communicating with me.  He can't talk yet but he seems to treat me like his puppet.  If he wants me to pick him up he will crawl over to me, stand up and pull down really hard on the front of my shirt so I bend over to pick him up.  If I am sitting down he will do the same except pull up on the top of my shirt.  When I am standing holding him Owen will push away from me if he wants down but if he wants to move somewhere his entire body and arms point in that direction.  I guess this kid knows what he wants!  Owen likes to have fun with me too and when I'm sitting on the floor he pushes against my chest with all his might to push me over.  Boy does that bring some smiles.  He also likes to pull my hair... that does not make Mommy happy....

Other random updates on Owen...  Since his growth spurt we have moved him into size 4 diapers and almost his entire wardrobe has been purged from 12 month clothes and replaced with 18 month.  John has switched Owen's car seat to be forward facing and I will be switching the seat in my car shortly as well.  Owen has become pretty good at the kazoo and loves playing his egg shakers too.  Owen babbles a lot.  I can't wait until we can differentiate some of the babbles and hear first words!  Along with babbling he will also take my cell phone and put it to his ear and "talk".

It's such a joy seeing all of these changes in Owen.  We're glad his mobility has increased even if it means we need to watch him more.  We love watching his personality unfold to be this creative, fun-loving, energetic little boy that God wired him to be.  We look forward to so many adventures outside this summer (if it ever does come, that is)!!!

 

 

 This is John helping Owen practice his walking technique.  We worked and worked with him on Monday night.  It was so much fun now that Owen actually has a passion to walk and let us practice wit him.

  

Hump Day Funnies: Into April

Hey everyone!  You're probably like us at our house wondering where spring is.  Hopefully this snowy weather is just one last winter hurrah so we can get on with spring.  We want t-shirt and biking weather over here!  While we wait for spring, enjoy Megan's funnies from the past couple weeks.

Mommy: Megan, can I call you Sweetie-Pie?
Megan:  No. Call me Megan. That's my name!

When going to the bathroom one time Megan exclaimed that she used all the toilet paper since she has a Big Butt!  She's said it several times after that as well but I'm pretty sure hers is one of the tiniest butts around!

Downstairs one morning Megan freaked out because Owen was watching her show.  She said, "Owen, no watcha my TV."  I tried to tell her that the TV was really Mommy and Daddy's.  To that she said, "Mommy and Daddy's TV is in Mommy and Daddy's room.  This is Megan's TV."  I asked her where Owen's TV was.  "Oh, he can share mine."  Problem solved!

I admit I do not save every piece of artwork that Megan has done.  I maybe should be saving more but I have no regrets with what I've let go.  This weekend I threw a whole pile away and soon after Megan came to the kitchen to throw something else in the garbage.  She asked why I was throwing my pictures away.  I told her I was sorry and they probably accidentally fell in and asked if I should take them out.  She said, "No, leave them in.  Then Owen can't get them."  Makes sense to me, huh?

Owen's new thing is handing objects to people.  Sunday he was trying to give the blu-ray remote control to Megan while she was watching a TV program.  Not playing along at all she said, "No, Owen.  I don't want it either!"

Easter 2013 and March Wrap-Up

So, obviously March and Easter have come and gone but I am just going to do a quick catch-up before we move into April.

This was probably our busiest Easter as a family.  We were thrown right into Easter after Megan's birthday party and it didn't stop till it was over.  John even had to bell sub at his home church and I played at Chaska Moravian on Palm Sunday!

John was approached by someone in the handbell choir to play again this Easter.  He was hesitant but I knew the only way he would play would be if I played too so we both said yes.  Overall it was fun but the bell choir is not nearly as experienced as the one at John's home church and him and I also ended up playing in a really easy position.  We had rehearsals every Thursday night for the 4 or 5 weeks prior to Easter and ended up playing for the Sonrise service that morning.

John and I were both asked to play in the church orchestra for the 8:15 and 10:45 services Easter morning as well.  We hadn't played together in the orchestra for a while so we were very excited to get playing again. John got to play 2nd trombone so he wasn't playing all the really low notes that he's had in the past when doing 3rd.  Plus, his schedule was more flexible this year and he could make the two rehearsals!  Much needed since the music was pretty tough.  I loved the music we played as ensembles: orchestra, praise team, choir.... Awesome and very powerful!  It included I Will Rise, Overcome, and In Christ Alone (The Solid Rock).

A HUGE thank you to our parents for watching the kids during all our rehearsals church services.  There is absolutely no way we could have done it without them.  Oh, and if the stress of coordinating all these activities weren't enough, my car decided to break down going home from work on Maunday Thursday!  It was just the battery and alternator that had to be replaced, so very fixable.  Also, God was on my side and let the car stop working while I was parked at a stop light coming into Waconia.  My Dad knows people in the area so we got it fixed for a good price and got the car back on Saturday!

Now we'll get to the pictures... It's clear my mind was in Easter survival mode by time church was over because my pictures are not that great but I'm sharing what I can!

Our family picture in the church lobby after the 8:15 service!

Owen and Grandpa Lewis!

My attempt at getting Megan's picture with the butterflies from in front of church and then she's ready to leave and begin the party!

Grandma Lewis had an Easter egg hunt for all the kids but we said they could go ahead before we got there.  I guess there were two heats - an under 1 and 3 year olds.  Too bad we missed it!  Here are some pics from their place after we arrived.

 

 

 

 

Carrot cake... of course!

And finally, the most coveted picture of the day.... The three guys too engrossed in the games on their phones to eat dessert!

And finally, Owen with Great-Grandparents and Great-Aunt that night.

 

Bunny Jars

So after all the planning and execution of Megan's big birthday and all the rehearsals prior to Easter I had kind of put Easter aside in our home.  Gals at work were teasing me that I probably had tons of Easter crafts going on at home so I made sure I dreamt up something.  I wanted to do something with baby food jars and candy for birthday party favors but never got around to it.  So, I turned it into an Easter craft instead and came up with the idea all by myself!

Getting both kids involved I traced around their hands while they were holding up two fingers for bunny ears.  Megan got the pink paper and Owen the blue.  I cut out the shapes and Megan glued on the jiggly eyes, she made a finger print out of paint for the nose and then used the length of her pinky finger dipped in paint to highlight the ears.  When Owen woke from his nap his fingertips became eyes and noses on the blue bunnies.

Believe it or not, we actually painted the lids at 7 am that morning!  I washed dishes and Megan picked out the colors and squirted the paint onto the palette.  I wish she would have chosen more pastel colors than black and brown but I wanted it to be her project so didn't say anything.  Painting was fun and she did a great job!  Oh, and Megan helped me fill up the jars with the bunny food (peanuts, jelly beans and peanut butter M&Ms).  Then for the finishing touch - cotton ball tails!

I think they turned out so cute and it was great Megan could participate in virtually every step of the process.  

 

  

 

A tower of bunnies!