Lily’s little possessed zoo

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Christy

The other morning Lily came rushing into the bedroom first thing and grabbed my hand. She dragged me into the bathroom telling me that she had “something interesting and strange” to show me.

In the bathroom we saw this:

She turned to me and said “Look Mom, Last night someone rude like a monster or something put my zoo in the bathroom and made a big mess.”

After a few minutes of laughing my head off I explained that during the night I put her zoo on the counter because it was messed up and the elephant kept trumpeting over and over and scaring the daylight of out me. I mean I can only put up with a possessed zoo for some many days before I have to finally grab a screw driver at 1 in the morning and strip those darn batteries out.

I just love how Lil’s mind works. Not only was it a possible monster that moved her zoo, but a very rude one at that. I just love this kid.

Lily turned 4

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Christy

I seriously can’t believe that Lily is 4. I swear that it was just yesterday that I was in the hospital having her. I don’t know where the time goes, but I’m totally scared that I’m going to blink and she’s going to be all grown up. So I guess it’s good to remember to make as many memories as possible.

Since Lily’s birthday is 3 days before Christmas I try to make sure her birthday is totally separate from Christmas. I mean we do have a Christmas tree and decorations all over the place and there’s just nothing I can do about that, but for her birthday celebration I try to keep it separate. Since Lil’s birthday was a Saturday this year I wanted to make a day of it so started planning a few months ago. Not that I spent every waking minute thinking about this one day, but there’s a cake to decided on, tiny bits of decorating to think about and fun things to do to pick out. All year Lil tells me what kind of cake she wants and it changes all the time. At some point in November I told her she had to decide for sure and she knew without a doubt she wanted chocolate cake. She also said she wanted Minnie Mouse decorations, this surprised me since my Girl loves Hello Kitty like nobody’s business. But whatever, Minnie is a new find and so I ran with it. AT the end of the day my Girl had a wonderful time and I’m super happy with how everything worked out.

The day started out with balloons strung from the ceiling. I wouldn’t have done it again since we did it last year, but Lily insisted that is how birthdays are suppose to start.

Lily was thrilled with her hanging balloons. I missed her first opening the door because I got up earlier than her to do my makeup so I’d be ready to go, but she was a good sport and ran through them for me again.

Once it was time to get ready to start getting ready for our day she was very excited to put on the special birthday outfit I put together for her. Lily and I went to Target and found a cute pink shirt that I could decorate and she picked out the perfect black pants with a skirt attached which her new uniform these days so they were perfect. She loved her special birthday outfit.

To go with the Minnie Mouse theme I ordered Lil some amazing Minnie ears.

Lily loves the mall escalators and asks to go there all the time. We don’t shop at the mall that often for a multitude of reasons so I figured we’d go and ride the escalators a bunch for her birthday. We also decided to go to build-a-bear for the first time for Lily’s main birthday present. Two birds, 1 stone and all.

At Build-a-bear Lily picked a cat to make; which really didn’t surprise us at all.

We made it in and out of the mall before 10 in the morning. Even the weekend before Christmas it was just starting to get crazy right before we left, it was prefect.

I had originally planned to start Lil’s birthday with donuts for breakfast, but we decided to do a good diner lunch after the mall instead. And it was delicious and Lily was very happy with the food. After eating we went home so I could finish getting ready for Lily’s little party. I did everything I could before went to bed the night before, I just had to do the last few final things.

For almost the whole week before her birthday I spent night after night making Minnie Mouse heads for a birthday banner. I’m really happy with how it turned out. It just had to get hung up behind the table once we got home.

I made the cake and cupcakes the day before and put a crumb coat on them to keep them from drying out and to seal the crumbs. I also made the buttercream the night before. The recipe I found for the buttercream said I could refrigerate it without any problems. That was a LIE! When I got the buttercream out it was hard as a stinking rock. I thought I’d put the Minnie Mouse banner up and let the frosting come to room temp and everything would be fine. I was wrong. It refused to soften up so I put it in the mixer and thought I’d whip it up a bit and we’d be good to go. Boy howdy I was fricking wrong. I have never seen a frosting (or anything other than a glass) break so fast. The butter separated out and it quickly went into the trash.

I ran upstairs and looked up a super quick frosting recipe to replace the broken buttercream and Waldo ran to the store and got me the things I needed. When he got home I had just enough time to whip the frosting together, but it worked out great. While he was gone I convinced Lil to let me take some pictures of her and I’m so glad I had the time to do it.

Another thing I made the week before were little chocolate Minnie Mouse heads for the cupcakes. They were very easy to make and super cute. Once the cake and cupcakes were frosted I grabbed the Minnie heads from the freezer. They started to melt almost immediately, but they were tasty.

Then I grabbed some pictures of Lily with her cake and cupcakes before Waldo’s brother and his family showed up.

This next picture is a face that Lily was doing for a while. It was an adorable face and I’m glad I got a picture of it before it went away.

After Waldo’s brother and his family showed up we did gifts and then cake. I really went back and forth over singing happy birthday or not and in the end we sang and it nearly killed Lily. Unless she’s hates the spotlight less next year I think we are going to skip it.

Oh and then there’s the whole stress of blowing out the candle.

Thankfully Daddy’s are great helpers.

After hanging out with Waldo’s brother’s family for a while we got ready to do our last birthday celebration thing. That will be a separate post though because it’s going to be very picture heavy.

Ballet attempt 2

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Christy

We decided to give Lily another try at ballet a few weeks ago. It turned out to be perfect timing because the dance school she was in before was just about to start their winter dance session. We talked to Lil about it and she was super excited and we explained what we expected of her this time; that she had to be a good listener and do what the teacher said. We also informed her that I wouldn’t be staying in the class with her the whole time. She was fine with the first things, the second made her lip tremble a bit. We told her we’d work up to me not being in the room.

We had the first class last week and it went so much better than we expected. The class was a lot smaller which helped a lot and Lil’s more mature so that was a big help. I’m not holding my breath that she’s going to be Angelina Ballerina at the end of the 6 weeks, but as long as she has fun and listens well I’ll be thrilled.

Random Mobile Shots

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Christy

I’m trying to do one of the photo-a-day challenges this month. I’ve missed a few days, but I’m trying to not be too hard on my self on those days and just remembering to do it the next day. Most of these pictures are from that challenge.

My pretty new purse.

It has been snowing A LOT here the last week or so.

Cat tracks in the snow.

Just about every time we head out to play in the snow I fill up a few squeeze bottles with colored water for Lil to play with. she loves them. This time we went out I grabbed one of the sand table toys, it was a ice cream truck mold. I totally thought the snow would release from the mold easily and that is so not what happened. After a few failed attempts of straight snow trucks, I decided to try adding some of the colored water to them to help hold the snow together. It worked well the first time and the layers of color looked cool. The next attempt was a fail too.

Lily wanted to make a diaper for her baby so we made one out of paper.

We went to the aquarium last Sunday and Lily used her new camera. She loves taking pictures.

Our Thanksgiving trip

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Christy

A few weeks before Thanksgiving I got a text from my sister Jolene (who lives in CA) asking if we were coming home to visit for Thanksgiving. I told her no immediately, because well, we’re broke. She responded that I could at least talk to Waldo about it before I shoot the idea down and that it would be really cool if I came because Jody (our other sister and Jolene’s twin, who lives in OK) and her kids were going to be there too.

So Waldo and I talked about it and after he said no (because we think very much alike), we started looking at how much it would really cost. After all of the figuring we realized it wouldn’t be THAT much money since we could stay at my Dad’s house and most of our food would be taken care of because of the holiday. So I texted Jolene and told her that as long as there were no major blizzards on the mountain passes we had to cross, we’d be there.

A week or so later we found out that Jody bailed on us, something about needing to work. We forgave her, but it would have been so much more fun if she’d have been there. Jolene figured that since Jody decided to stay home we wouldn’t take the trip either, but Lily was so fricking excited that we couldn’t change our mind even if we had wanted too.

We, or I should say Waldo and his Dad, kept a close eye on the weather reports for the week leading up to our leaving. Everything looked good so we headed out Wednesday morning. The drive went great surprisingly well. We got rained on a tiny bit, but the only snow we saw was way off in the mountains no where near us. Then we got to Donner Pass and hit some rain and a lot of fog.

You should be able to see a whole lot further then you can here.

We got out of the fog fairly quickly and then it looked like smooth sailing. Boy were we silly to think that driving to California the day before Thanksgiving would be a good idea. Right outside of Sacramento we hit the bumper to bumper holiday traffic. It sucked! It was also the point where I took over driving, Waldo finally wanted a break. He says it was a coincidence, but I’m still not sure.

We finally got out of the crazy traffic about an hour or so outside of my Dad’s house. Thank goodness we finally got to my Dad’s and out of the car. We took Lily in the house and sat her down and told her to tell my Dad about her trip and we went out to the car to get our stuff. I know this doesn’t sound like anything worth mentioning, but for Lily this is a first and is totally amazing. We felt this was a good sign as to what was to come on our trip. I’m going to spare you the suspense and tell you that Lily got totally overwhelmed by half way through Thanksgiving day and went back to her standard shy self. But she still had a great time.

We went to my Aunt KK’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.

My Memaw and Pop were already there when we arrived, along with Kk and her husband Dixon. My sister Jolene and Olivia were suppose to be meeting us there, her son Max was already there too.

KK and Pop

Me and Uncle Dixon

Me and KK

Memaw and Pop at Thanksgiving dinner

Olivia was the only one that Lily cared about seeing so the fact that Jolene was taking her time was killing her. Finally we got ahold of Jolene and I told her I was coming to get Olivia and then she could take her time. Max went with me and it was very nice to get some alone time with him. I can’t believe he’s 16. It’s true what they say, kids grow up way too fast.

Olivia

Pop, Olivia and Lily

Very quickly Lily and Olivia were off to play in the playroom. It was so cute, seeing them together again.

Lily and Olivia

Olivia spent the night with us at my Dad’s, in fact she stayed with us almost the whole time we were there. The girls loved it.

Lily and Olivia accidentally sort of matchy matchy

Sleeping princesses

It works out great that Lily’s carseat is still backwards because it made it easy for them to talk and share tablets. This was how they spent all of their time in the car.

Happy travelers

Friday morning we went to Memaw and Pop’s for chocolate gravy (a huge tradition for our family). My Mom met us there.

Olivia and GG (my Mom)

Olivia

My Mom, KK and Memaw

Jolene did some Black Friday shopping so when she got to Memaw’s she tried to get some shut eye. HAHA, silly girl.

Sleepy Jolene

Lily got super overwhelmed during breakfast because of all the noise so Waldo had to take her outside for a little while to relax. The family on my Mom’s side is very loud when we get together, well some of them are anyway. After breakfast we took a bunch of pictures.

Me, our Mom and Jolene

Me, Memaw, Mom and Jolene

Me, Memaw, Mom, Pop and Jolene

Me, Lily, Memaw, Max, Olivia, Mom, Pop and Jolene

Olivia stayed with us the rest of the day and the girls couldn’t have been happier. After we left my Grandparents we went to visit my cousin Melissa and her family for a few hours. I realized when we got home that I didn’t take a single picture of Melissa and her family and I was so mad at myself I could have spit.

Saturday we decided to take Lily and Olivia to the zoo. Jolene, Max and KK met us there and we had a blast. The weather was perfect, the zoo wasn’t that busy and we had good company. What more could we have asked for?

Lily and Olivia

Waldo and Lily

Lily, Waldo and Olivia

Olivia, Jolene, Max and Me

Lily feeding her old friend

Lil

Olivia and Lil

Max and Olivia, such sweetness

Max and Olivia

Lily and Nosey

Max

Lily and Olivia

Waldo and Lily

Jolene and Me

Lily and Olivia

Right before we moved to Idaho the Zoo had just started working on a new Sea Lion enclosure. We finally got to see it all finished and I have to say that it was awesome. You could see the tank from above, level with it and below the water line. We got there right at feeding time and we probably could have spent a lot more time than we did, but Lily had to potty and we all wanted lunch.

After the zoo we went to lunch and then to my Grandparents to tell them goodbye. It’s so hard to say bye to everyone and especially them.

Pop, Me and Memaw photo-bombing us.

Memaw and Me

Back at my Dad’s Lily and Olivia helped get the Christmas tree decorating started.

Lily, Olivia and my Dad

Oh pretty

Little Christmas Elfs

I loved how much fun the girls had together, and we hated saying goodbye to Olivia. I’m so glad my sister was ok with giving her to us for a few days. I hated saying goodbye to the rest of my family too, but Olivia was the hardest.

My Dad and Me

We did finally say goodbye and headed out for home. The drive home was a lot better than the drive in. There was some fog in central California which didn’t surprise us at all. We did have to make a stop at a Target in a small town an hour or two from my Dad’s house. We left Lily’s Hello Kitty cup at my Dad’s and so we had to get her a new one. Otherwise it was smooth sailing all the way home.

I can’t wait to see my family again, but for now I’m so glad that we are home.

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Jinxyisms

Taking life one day at a time.

Category Archives: Lily

Lily’s little possessed zoo

Lily turned 4

Ballet attempt 2

Random Mobile Shots

Our Thanksgiving trip