Fun in February

We’ve had a nice month. The winter has been extremely mild (nice!) and we haven’t had too much going on so we’ve been reading, playing, and building a blanket fort around our favorite six month old!

Oh and giving her lots of kisses!

We also went to Family Fun Night at Avery’s school and the kids had so much fun. Here’s cute Camryn showing off her face painting.

Lily has been growing up much too fast! She’s a pro at getting up on her hands and knees, but she hasn’t quite mastered the fast crawl. She can scoot around slowly and roll around quickly so she spends most of her time on the living room floor exploring.

For Valentine’s Day Merrick got the girls a cardboard coloring clubhouse. It is pretty big, actually. Probably 5’ x 3’ x 4’. Cool huh?

I let them keep it in the living room for about 5 days and then it was relocated to the basement. I clipped a reading lamp in there and they had a fun time though. Lily loved sitting in her Bumbo playing with her big sisters.

One warm(er) afternoon we went outside and took a few quick pictures of the girls. (Avery, of course, wearing a skirt. She prefers to wear a skirt and tights to school instead of pants now. Got holes in all three pairs of her tights last week! Luckily thick tights are on clearance right now!)

So we’ve been having good times. Usually February is one of my least favorite months of the year in Wisconsin – it’s cold, the snow isn’t melting, and spring isn’t coming for a while. But this year the snow has been sparse and melts within a few days. Makes me happy. Hope your February has been nice too!

Valentine’s Fun

This Valentine’s Day is brought to you by Pinterest! :) There are so many fun ideas floating around the web on blogs, etc. and using Pinterest you can quickly sort through the masses and find great ideas. I do spend a lot of time on there – mostly on my iPod while I’m nursing - but I really do a lot of the ideas I find on there. Here are some random Valentine’s things I’ve done lately.

First up, I saw an idea for a baby photo shoot that I loved. I took Lily’s pictures with some large white letters I cut out to spell LOVE. Isn’t it adorable?

And then I decided to get pretty crafty and paint a wall hanging like this one.

It turned out pretty cute, I think. I used this technique (also from Pinterest!) to help me paint the letters – you print off the words, then put them on top of the wood and trace over the words, which indents the wood. Then you use that as your guide when you paint. It worked pretty good but not perfectly because my letters were pretty small.

I also made these strawberry cookies to give to our neighbor for a FHE activity on Monday.

They looked better than they tasted. The cream cheese frosting in the middle was delish but the strawberry flavoring was from a strawberry cake mix so they tasted a little artificial.

We also made a fun heart garland for the kitchen like this one:

Super easy. Oh and I printed off an 8x10 of this subway art at Costco to put in a frame for another decoration (below is their picture – not mine). Don’t you just love subway art?

Oh, Avery and I decided to make these Valentine’s Butterflies for Avery’s valentines to bring to her class. Super cute right?

On Friday Avery had the day off from school so we made some heart shaped cinnamon rolls (which was our reward for reading 30 days straight of family scripture study – woohoo!). I made mine from scratch like I would normally but then unrolled them a little and reshaped them into hearts like this:

I’m sure they would be super quick to make with a tube of premade cinnamon rolls.

It’s been a fun February so far! And I’m not even done Valentine-ing yet! Happy Valentine’s Day!

Lily Jumpin’

Lily has really enjoyed her Johnny Jump Up lately. I know they’re probably long since recalled, and my particular model is an old hand-me-down so it was probably made 10 years ago, but she loves it. She’s really gotten the hang of the jumping too.

So I took a video. I took it vertically on my camera, which wasn’t the best idea, but you get the gist. I hope this brings a smile to your face. (I don’t know how it couldn’t!)

Lily jumping her heart out! :)

 
(If you doubleclick on the box it will open up in a new window where you can view it full screen, which is nice because it's pretty small.)