around here

Around here we are playing dress up in summertime clothes, just to get us ready for the warm weather just around the corner. Plus, at the rate Ivar is growing, he is not going to fit into this sweet outfit that Mimi and Papa brought back for him from Hawaii!

Around here we are having more trouble with our naughty cat than we are with our infant son.

Around here we can't get over how "healthy" our son looks. We laugh at how it looks like he has rubber bands around his wrists.

Around here we are so elated that the snow is melting. Rory was out all weekend working on the yard and added 11 bags of woodchips to our front landscaping.

Around here we are debating if perhaps now would be the right time to take down the artificial Christmas tree we put up on our porch five months ago. It's hard to know...we'll be putting it back up again in only 7 months.

Around here we are living through our baby's first fever, cough and cold. It means that we're snuggling a lot, reading lots of books together and that I am still in my pajamas from Saturday night.

Around here we're low on the staples: milk, bread, eggs and butter. Hard to get by without those ingredients.

Around here we are celebrating the tulip buds that are popping up all over our front garden. I can't wait for spring flowers!

Around here we rearranged the living room furniture. Because that just needs to be done once in a while.

Around here we have added a high chair to our kitchen table set up so that our little man can start eating sweet potatoes and carrots with his mom and dad. It's the best. He's very proud to have joined us. The last time I posted an around here post was over a year ago! It is so amazing to track the day to day details and to see how hugely our life has changed in one year... You can read that post by clicking here.

time to get your game on!

Family Fun Magazine has some super simple practical jokes that are ready to print and enjoy. My sister emailed this morning and said her 5-year-old, Mara keeps asking, "what are we going to do for April Fool's Day?" as if she believes it is a major holiday. So if you're looking for some fun ideas to get your creative juices flowing, check out this Family Fun April Fools link. My favorites are the easy, printer-ready ideas found here. I can't wait until Ivar is old enough to help me celebrate this very major holiday!

fill-in-the-picture books

This post is another tip of the hat to my mom. Somehow she finds these awesome albums that tell you what pictures to place where. This book is a book about Ivar's baptism that she put together. This is her 7th baptism book as she has made one of these for each of her grandkids. It means that she comes to the service equipped with a list that she usually passes onto my aunt louie with items listed like: exterior of the church, baptismal font, baby with pastor, inside of the church etc. Then those 20 pictures get placed throughout this book that weaves a story around the pictures, explaining what baptism is and then you add the details:

It's a super cool teaching tool for passing on the faith, so that when Ivar is older we can talk about baptism and what it means to be baptized into the kingdom of God. My niece Sonna was baptized in Flathead Lake and she will "read" this one to us with her own script, "once I was a teeny, tiny baby and there's pastor wayne in his shorts and we all walked into the lake..."

The baptism book mom uses can be ordered online here or here, if you're interested.

the mini album

My mom is the queen of the mini album. For each of her grandchild she has created a "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" book using all of the members of our family for the different pages. My niece, Sonna, once called and told me she could 'read' her book all by herself and then read the thing to me three times in a row.

I love these books because they reinforce family no matter how far away the family is. All of Ivar's cousins on the Harrington side live in Montana or Washington, so books like this are really, really important to me.

Mom also makes small albums for each grandchild after she visits them. She takes a ton of pictures on her trips and then comes home to develop and assemble an individual book that will be sent in the mail. She has done this since her grandkids were babies, so when you visit my brother or sister, you will find these 4x6 albums strewn all around the house. Again, it is reinforcing family and all the fun we have together, even when we live an airplane ride apart. To see these simple albums, click here.

Ivar's baby book

Yesterday I wrote about our Family Album. The plan for the Family Albums is that I will not make multiple albums for multiple children. Rather our kids, if they ever care to, can take those albums and scan or make copies of whatever pictures they want. But a baby has got to have a baby book. I found this Eric Carle baby journal at Barnes and Noble and loved it for its bright colors and tons of blank pages for special pictures. All of these pictures are duplicates from the Family Album, but these pictures pertain specifically to the topics listed in the journaling questions on the pages in between. And even though there are proper spaces for each picture, it is becoming more of a "scrapbook" on other pages...in the front cover I mounted my favorite pregnancy cards, in the back cover I mounted Ivar's baptism and dedication certificates. And on any empty area in between I have stuck in other special mementos: the napkin from Ivar's restaurant in Seattle sent from Uncle Ben and Aunt Jeanette, a picture of Ivar drawn by his cousin Mara, a little note my grandma included in with her gift. It's all in the pages of this book.

And now all that's left is the journaling. Heaven help me. That is an overwhelming task! I think I'm going to take a page a day. And I also plan on printing a lot of my blog posts and maybe add those in an envelope in front so that those stories are included within the pages of the baby book.

My final goal with this baby book is that it stays out and is read with dirty fingers by an excited little boy. I mean, not super dirty fingers, and not a super little boy, but that one day (after his ripping pages stage) Ivar can enjoy this book throughout his childhood.