2 year old's feelings

I will readily admit I am one proud momma and totally think that most (or everything) my kids do is either the cutest, smartest or funniest thing I have ever seen.  I think that all moms have this feeling and its not to say other people's kids are cute, smart or funny too, they just aren't my kids :).

Nolee has begun to become very vocal about her feelings lately.  It is so fun to have a peek into this part of her little mind and see how she ticks.  For example when we told her Nana was coming down last week she started to jump up and down and we were pretty darn sure she was excited, but on top of the jumping she will loudly tell us "Nolee is SO excited!".

Not only does she tell us when she is excited or happy, she also lets us know when she is sad and why.  This morning when were on our way to daycare I was talking to Nolee in the car.

Me:  "Nolee are you excited to see Brenda & everyone at daycare?"

Nolee:  "No" (insert sad face here)

Me:  "Why?"

Nolee:  "Don't wanna go to Brenda's.  Nolee wanna stay home.  Nolee sad."

Me:  "Why are you sad?"

Nolee:  "I wanna stay home with Lilly...miss Lilly" (insert bigger sad face here)

Awwww.  You see Lilly goes to school all day and after school hangs out with Scott so the girls don't see each other ALL day long (as in from the 7 in the morning until 5:30 at night they are apart).  When they were both home all week last week they got to play together all day long and it was apparent that Nolee would rather be with her big sis over anything else. 

I have had some proud moments in the past 4 years of being a mom, but I have to say that seeing how much my girls love each other has got to be at the top.  Even though they fight (and kick and scream and whine when the other one is looking at them) they truly do love each other at the end of the day :) 

And speaking of cute sisterly moments I just love this picture.  Nolee was so whooped and totally conked out right on Lilly's shoulder while watching Air Bud.

Big Sister Love

Nolee adores her big sister (well most of the time - you know how that goes).  Lately everything Lilly does, she has to do.  If Lilly has to go potty, Nolee has to go potty.  If Lilly wants to play with dolls, Nolee wants to play with dolls.  This past weekend while trying to make sore throats feel soothed, we had some popsicles out on the deck. 

Me:  "What do your popsicles taste like?"

Lilly:  "Mine tastes like lime!"

Nolee:  "Mine tastes like lion too Mommy!"

It was so funny and cute and gave Lilly and I a good laugh :).

Lil Miss Smarty Pants

This little one came down with pneumonia last week :(.  We have been busy with breathing treatments, lots of kisses & hugs and trying to make staying inside as much fun as possible.  Good news is - the girls like to share - bad news is they even share pneumonia.  Lilly was diagnosed yesterday and is on the same medications as Nolee now.  Thankfully Nana (my MIL) came down for the whole week to help us out.  The girls were super duper excited and having your Nana at your house for a whole week, sure does make being sick not such a bad thing :).

Sandbox Fun...For a Day

After seeing the huge mounds of sand in our backyard, the girls could not resist diving in and enjoying the biggest sandbox they have ever seen.  Luckily I had the day off last Friday so Nolee and I spent a good chuck of time out there, digging, building, demolishing and running up and down the sand hills.

Of course we had to take breaks from the "sandbox" to test our swinging & sliding skills.

Nolee was having so much fun I started thinking that maybe a sandbox in the backyard might not be a bad idea.  She wasn't even getting as dirty as I thought she would! 

Then Lilly got home after school...

This girl rolled in the sand, slid down the sand hills like it was a snow pile, did somersaults down the hill and at one point in time I even caught her doing sand angels.  It was like she had never seen a sandbox before and went completely nuts.  The sand was so ingrained into the seat of her pants it still hasn't come out after scrubbing & washing multiple times. 

So I was quickly second guessing the idea of a sandbox.  The idea totally went out the door once I stripped the girls down and found bites all around their hairline.  Turns out there were sand fleas in our humongous sand box :(.  Needless to say the girls have not been allowed to play in it since.



At least they had one crazy fun day in it :).

Spaghetti Night

I don't know about you, but when my kids eat spaghetti it is one messy meal.  I have learned that if they are wearing anything that I want to keep I might as well make them take it off first, otherwise it's bound to be ruined.  We had spaghetti for dinner last night and I asked Lilly to remove her white shirt first.  She had to put on a sweatshirt since it was a little chilly.  I didn't notice until halfway through the meal that she never zipped it.  I don't know why but I just feel this is the exact same way Kid Rock would eat spaghetti too :).



Timberrrrr!!!!

Cut down trees - Check!  Scott took down all 3 trees in our yard this weekend and 5 in our neighbors yard (I guess the man likes to run a chainsaw).  To say I was a little nervous about having Scott tackle this by himself was putting it mildly.  They were not small trees by any means and some were darn close to the house.  I kept picturing a tree on top of our house (or the girl's swing set or the garden) and I may or may not have asked him repeatedly if he could handle it, or that maybe he should call my brother for reinforcements.

I am definitely eating my words now and did admit (more than once at Scott's request) that he was right :).  He did ask for help on one of them, but other than that he landed those suckers right where he wanted to.  I was actually quite impressed...and it's probably weird but it was kind of a turn on to watch him wield that chainsaw like a true lumberjack man ;).



It Has Officially Begun

We are getting a pool!!  Well actually we are getting my parents old pool (still totally awesome in my book).  I have always wanted a pool for as long as I can remember.  You see my parents put this pool in at their house the year I moved out (figures - right?).  Both our neighbors have pools and have gladly allowed us to come over and cool off whenever we want, but it's just not the same as having one in our own backyard where we can come and go as we please and have our own pool parties! You see we are homebodies.  We just aren't the type of people who do a lot of traveling and we are happiest that way.  So the more fun we can add to our happy home the better.  I love the idea of being able to step out my back door into my own little vacation world (even if this world is made up and only exists in my head :).  The girls are beyond excited too by the way and the pool has become a daily topic of conversation between them. 

Before we can put that sucker in though we have a TON of work to do.  We have to dig out the pool location, fill that same location in with sand and level, take down multiple trees, run electrical to that spot, hopefully put an extension off our deck to the pool, actually put up & fill the pool and I'm sure there are a ton of little things (or big things) that I am forgetting.

This is what the back of our house looks like currently

The pool will be going in the general location where Scott is standing in this next picture.  The oak tree on the left will need to be cut down...in the afternoon it will shade the pool and I'm not a fan of cleaning the leaves out of the pool on a daily basis either.

Here is a faint (and by faint I mean you are literally gonna have to squint to see that sucker) outline of our rough estimate of where the pool will go.  The 2 trees at the top of the picture are also on the docket to be taken down.

My brother was kind enough to deliver our sand with one of the farm trucks this weekend.

The girls got a big kick out of watching...from a safe distance.

So now we have the biggest sandbox you have ever seen in our backyard :).  We plan on digging out the pool location and then wheelbarrowing all the sand over to level it out.  And yes my back is already hurting just thinking about it - but I'm super excited to get this process started!

Our Little Farmer

Track season has begun and not only does that mean that Scott has a little assistant coach at every practice, but that we also had to figure out what to do with Lilly on meet nights.  My Dad, being the awesome Papa that he is, volunteered to have Lilly ride the bus home with him and then she could just tag along with him out at the farm.  To say Lilly was excited about this solution was putting it mildly - she talks about Papa's bus all the time and I've been talking up the farm and how much fun it is for some time now.  I don't know which she was more stoked about - the bus or the farm.  

Wednesday was Scott's first meet and Lilly popped out of bed bright and early and the first thing she said was "I get to go on the bus & to the farm today!!".  This was quite a change from having to literally drag her out of bed most mornings for school.  I dropped off her "farm" clothes on my way to work and couldn't wait to hear the stories when I got home.

When Nolee & I went to pick her up after work we couldn't find anyone - so we just started to follow the noise.  We found them quick enough - Lilly was actually riding with Papa in the Skid steer cleaning out the alley ways.  When she got done she ran up to us with a perma grin on her face and it was pretty obvious she was having a blast. 

The entire ride home she told us about her day and the kids she saw on the bus and how she helped Papa feed the calves, and how the calves ran towards her but they were on chains so they couldn't get her, and on and on and on.  She barely took time to catch her breath.  Then she tells me this...

Lilly:  "Mommy guess what!"

Me:  "What?"

Lilly:  "I got to ride with Papa and push the mud into the lake"

Me:  I was kind of dumbfounded for a second, because we do not have a lake on my Dad's farm.  They are in the process of building more barns, so the mud was possible, but didn't quite make sense.  Then it hit me & I just had to laugh as I told her..."Honey that wasn't mud and that most definitely is not a lake"

Lilly:  "Then what was....ohhh EWWWW that was poop?!?  Gross!"

Me:  By now I'm laughing my butt off and had to remind her that she had some "mud" on her boots still which brought on a whole more ewwws and grosses.

Oh and in case you are wondering and didn't grow up on a farm...the "mud" was manure and the "lake" was the very large manure pit.  My Dad is gonna crack up when I tell him.

The Mother of All Garage Sales

Well we have been busy busy busy over here.  We decided (and by we I mean Scott) that Easter weekend would be a great time to have our much needed and long overdue garage sale.  Scott was off all week on Spring Break and we kept our fingers crossed that the weather would cooperate.

We have been lucky enough to be able to store the majority of our unused stuff (and by stuff I mean hoards and hoards of little girl clothes, big toys, little toys, carseats, breast pumps, strollers, etc.) over at my parent's polebarn.  Which it was so nice to be able to store all that stuff over there - but when it is not staring you in the face...it sure does seem to accumulate and multiply quite quickly. 

So after multiple trips bringing all that stuff back to our house and then organizing and folding 15 totes worth of clothes (and re-folding after the girls inspected everything) we had 2 garage bays chock full.  Seriously it looked like a pepto bismal bottle exploded on the one side and the other side housed all the furniture, knick knacks and other misc items that needed to leave my house.

We had hoped that we would get some good traffic and had already determined that everything that didn't sell would either go to charity or would be headed for Goodwill.  We had no idea the amount of people we would get and were completely unprepared for the 100s of people that showed up.  Nolee helped with sales and would say hi and bye to everyone that walked in.  Lilly was in charge of the money...in the sense that she would take quarters from the till and my purses that were for sale and have her own little garage sale business going on the side.  Although I do believe some people may have made out pretty good on some of those purses that were marked at 25 cents that had 1.25 worth of quarters stuffed inside :).  At one point in time the girls were outside greeting people when I heard Lilly say "Good morning, thank you for shopping at Meijer!"  Everyone within earshot got a good laugh out of that.

It was crazy - but a good crazy and we sold everything except 4 small boxes that we are donating to charity.  One of the best parts is that everything is gone and man does that feel good.  The other best part...we made over $800!!  It was unbelievable and a total surprise when we counted up our earnings.  The girls got all the change to put into their piggy banks (which was around $15-$20 each).  Scott and I had some ideas of what to use the money on...and of course the cheap side of us just wanted to put it in savings, but we never do anything fun with extra money like this so we headed to town on Saturday, just to price things out mind you.  We went prepared with a list and wrote down the best prices on items we were looking at and where they were and we were then going to go home and determine which would be the best buy and hopefully be something fun for the whole family.

The plan was going well until we hit the last stop...Doug's Small Engine.  They sell new & used lawn mowers.  Right now we have a push mower and also borrow my brothers really REALLY old lawn mower when we need it (which I can't drive because it doesn't have brakes...and our yard has hills), but hey we don't argue with free around here.  Scott has been dreaming of a zero turn lawn mower for years.  I on the other hand would love just a normal riding lawn mower - so the girls can ride with us...and they are less than 1/2 the price of a zero turn! 

Did you know brand new lawn mowers lose a ton of value as soon as you drive them off the lot (just like new cars)...well I didn't either until I asked.  So with that little tidbit of information in our heads we asked to see their used lawn mowers and that's when the guy showed us this.

Some guy had just traded it in for a push mower.  Apparently he has a very small yard in town and realized this was too big for his needs.  It looks like he waxed the thing down every time he mowed and it only has around 50-70 hrs on it (lawn mower mileage is done in hours - learned something else new too!).  It included the bagger in back and the price tag was $700 - which is less than 1/2 the cost of the new ones we had been looking at and they didn't include a bagger! 

We quickly had my brother call his friend who worked there (whom I waved to as he was talking on the phone as I literally sat on the my lawn mower so no one else would come look at it.  After getting the go ahead from my brother - and his word that he would actually do work on it if we needed him to (saying he is NOT a John Deere man is putting it mildly) in exchange for free use, we made our purchase before anyone else could snag it up.

Scott has been on cloud nine since and I'm pretty sure my lawn will be mowed tonight when they deliver it.  And the cheap side of me was just tickled when a co-worker of mine informed me that he just bought basically the same machine for $3000!!!  Okay here's more pics of Scott's new toy :).  I have to say I grew up on a farm where green was a forbidden color, but I have to admit this shiny little guy has put a pretty big grin on my face as well :).

April Fools!

I was switching out the calendar at home on Sunday and informed the girls that it was April now and that that very day was actually April Fools.  The girls wanted to know what that meant and I told them that it was a day to trick or play pranks on people which lead to the question of what is a prank.

Okay so this is the part where I absolutely know without a doubt an evil grin came across my face and I may or may not have rubbed my hands together as I said..."I'll show you".  Scott had just put some brats on the grill and then jumped in the shower real quick, so of course I being the loving wife that I am, tell the girls we are going to play a prank on Daddy.

I told Lilly to go run into our bathroom & tell Daddy "The grill is on fire!" (and yes I know I am evil...you don't have to tell me but you do have to admit it's funny...and Scott totally wouldn't hesitate to do the same right back to me...we must be meant to be :)

Well it must be in the genes because once I told Lilly this she got that evil crazy twinkle in her eyes...and then a case of the giggles.  Then she got a case of stage fright and said she couldn't do it so we enlisted Nolee (because around here we do not hesitate to enlist a 2 year old to be involved in evil pranks). 

We made sure she knew what she had to say and we sent her into the bathroom.  Lilly followed close behind (with silly grin on her face the entire time) so she wouldn't miss a second, while I hid outside the door so I could here the entire thing while trying to muffle my snickers with my hands. 

So Nolee runs into the bathroom yelling to Scott in the shower...."Daddy, Daddy, girls on fire!  Girls on fire!".  Of course then Lilly and I are laughing at Nolee's mix up, which makes Nolee laugh and Scott is just standing there looking at us like we are all crazy.  Good times, good times :).