thesellers.net

I was inspired by a shirt I saw on Etsy to make a monogrammed shirt. I made my first one for Leah to wear home from the hospital. She also modeled it during a home photo shoot for her birth announcement photo.

I have also made a few for gifts. Emmie was happy to show off her shirt from Aunt Jen.

And this one was for baby Corinne.

I'm linking up to Made by You Mondays at Skip to my Lou so you can see other fun, crafty things being made.

We had a lot of fun learning about 'G' this week! Molly loves music, so we made a 'G' for guitar. I saw the idea on Always Something to Learn.

Molly has been very interested in games lately. We've played Uno Moo more times than I can count! It's great for her matching skills. She kept asking for something else to play, so if you have suggestions for your favorite toddler board game, let me know!

We celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday with a reading of Green Eggs and Ham.

We then used Molly's great-great-grandmother's recipe to make green egg-shaped sugar cookies. They were yummy! Real green eggs would not have flown with this toddler!

I hosted playgroup this week and involved them in this week's stART project. We read Go Away, Big Green Monster!

The story build's a monster face by talking about the all the different features of the big green monster, so as I read the story the kids glued on each of the parts. The book's pages provide great stencils for creating this craft. I found the idea at Teaching Two.

Molly was excited to show off her big green monster.

I organized a gymnastics playdate in honor of ‘G’ week. Molly and her friends had a great time.

And we couldn't go through 'G' week without playing Daddy's guitar! We have started singing songs before bedtime from The Christian Children's Songbook.

You can check out what other moms are doing with their tots at 1+1+1=1.

I organized a gymnastics playdate in honor of 'G' week. Molly was so excited to be there that she was doing summersaults!

She was bouncing so fast down the trampoline run it made getting a picture difficult.

She loved all the bouncing fun!

The kids then moved on to an obstacle course.

Spinning around with these hula hoops was fun too.

We ended our session sliding into a big foam pit. It was a bit challenging to get out of the pit though!

There were so many 'D' things that I wanted to do this week but we ran out of time, so here is what we did get to.

Molly helped me make dinner while Daddy was out of town - pepperoni and pineapple pizza.

The beginning of our letter 'D' began with a little feather painting.

We added a few feathers, an eye, and a beak and I thought we were done. Molly then said, "Mommy, he needs feet!" and she was so right. Here's our cute little duck. (Found at No Time for Flashcards)

I created a doodle rubbing for Molly to try.

Here's the finished art. Molly's coloring is a bit sporadic, so I helped a bit to uncover the doodles.

I introduced Do-A-Dot art this week. She loved it! I think she colored 8 pages. She kept asking for more.

I made Molly some Dora dominos. (I saw them as part of this Dora Tot Pack.) She had fun matching the characters. Daddy even played it with us for our first "Family Game Night" on Friday night.

On Saturday morning, Molly had an extra special treat at Dunkin Donuts. While waiting in line, she spotted the strawberry iced donuts and immediately wanted a pink one!

She loved pointing out all the letters, especially all the D's!

We also made a popsicle stick dragaonfly, but Molly was too busy flying it around for me to get a good picture of it! You can check out what other moms are doing with their tots at 1+1+1=1.

Our letter this week was 'K', however Leah decided to start the week with the letters 'E.R.' due to a dislocated elbow. You can read about it here.

To share my Louisiana roots and celebrate Mardi Gras, I hosted a Mardi Gras playdate. Molly helped me decorate one of the two king cakes that I made. She did a great job pouring the colored sugar only where she was told.

We worked on crafting our letter 'K'.

I combined ideas from No Time for Flash Cards and dltk-teach.com to create our K for King.

Molly worked on her counting skills with this kite matching game.

She made a cardboard kazoo and then serenaded Leah with a song.

Aunt Caroline and Will came over for a visit. They had fun stamping paper for our last K project...

a kaleidoscope! Molly enjoyed the kaleidoscope for a few short minutes. She had more fun stamping the cover!

Leah wanted to try out the kaleidoscope too. Ok, so maybe she just wanted to chew on it, but she was looking through it by default!

You can check out what other moms are doing with their tots at 1+1+1=1.

Again this year, I hosted a Mardi Gras playdate. It was such a popular activity with my MOMS Club that it filled up in 12 hours and even had a wait-list! Next year, I might just have to host two!

I tried my hand at making a king cake from scratch this year. I even made it with yummy cream cheese filling like Chad prefers. I learned a few things that I know to do differently next year, but overall it was a success.

In addition to eating king cake, we listened to traditional Mardi Gras music, and had fun making jester hats.

Molly and her friend, Allison, happily modeled their new hats.

Molly is her father's child when it comes to cake. She licked all the sugar and icing off the king cake, then asked for another piece. Clearly, she does not need to be able to see to do this!

I made sure that both girls were sporting their Mardi Gras fashions for the day. Here they are taking in a little reading after the party.

Leah beat out Molly for the prize of "First kid to the ER" yesterday. She was admitted for a dislocated elbow, also known as nursemaid's elbow.

It happened just after noon yesterday when Molly rolled Leah from her front to back, and Leah's arm got caught underneath her. She let out a cry of pain and it took over an hour to calm her down. By 3:00 PM Chad noticed that Leah was not moving her right arm, so I called the doctor and was told to come in. After the third attempt to reduce her elbow, we thought it was back in place, so Leah was given some Tylenol and we headed home. The pediatrician called at 7:30 PM to check on Leah, and was not satisfied that we had corrected the problem, so she sent us to the ER.

We were swiftly taken back to the pediatric ER and by the time Chad showed up (he had to put Molly to bed and wait on his mom to arrive) the doctor was walking in. X-rays were taken and showed that nothing was broken. So, the doctor attempted the fourth try at reducing Leah's elbow. This time it worked! She was laying in my arms and immediately reached up toward my face. But then it took another 10-15 minutes for her to move it again. It was like she didn't know she could move it (we enticed her with Molly's sunglasses as seen below). We were given the OK to go home and were out in less than 2.5 hours. Leah was in bed by 10:45 PM and the craziness was over.

It was the best ER experience we've ever had (not that you ever want to have that!), and Leah's doing better now. Her arm is not at 100%, but she is moving it more and more as the day progresses. I was reassured by both doctors that this is very common for infants and toddlers, but I sure hope that we don't have to go through that again!

While being snowbound due to record breaking snowfalls we had a lot of time for some 'H' activities. I loved my friend's idea for this week: "H for housebound, hot cocoa, and holy moly this is too much snow!!" Though very funny and so true, we stuck to our Valentine theme of "H is for hearts."

Molly had fun gluing and sticking hearts for her letter H project.

For our stART project, we read the story Clifford's First Valentine's Day.

We then used a heart-shaped cookie cutter to paint hearts,

and then turned our heart stamping into valentines for some very special people!

Molly practiced her counting with Valentine candy. She enjoyed some candies along the way, and Mommy may have had a few too!

I made these alphabet matching cards as another aid for learning lowercase letters. Molly quickly realized that the colors for the pairs matched, so next time we'll try something a little different.

Other activities this week:

These word puzzles are also a fun toy to help with lowercase letters.

Finally, in honor of the Vancouver olympics, a friend hosted a "Make a flag" playdate. Molly was so proud of her new flag.

You can check out what other moms are doing with their tots at 1+1+1=1.

As I talked about previously, we've been snowbound around here. In my last post, I left off Tuesday with an unplowed street and another approaching storm. Well, it indeed started snowing Tuesday afternoon and snowed throughout the night. The next morning, we had around 6 new inches on the ground and thought we'd never get out. Then, much to our surprise, we saw this in front of our house:

Yes, that's a front loader clearing our street. This first storm dumped so much snow that normal plows on trucks couldn't cut it, so they brought out front loaders to pick up the snow and move it around. We were very relieved, but it was still snowing and we were under a blizzard warning, so we still weren't getting out of the house.

That blizzard warning turned into a full fledged blizzard (if you're unfamiliar, blizzards have little to do with how much snow you have and more to do with high winds and reduced visibility). We had winds gusting to 50mph and at times we couldn't see houses at the end of our street. I didn't get a picture of the blizzard in full force, but here's a shot of what it looked like as it was winding down:

That lasted into Wednesday night, and we wondered when we might get plowed. It had taken 5 days for our street to be cleared last time, so we were really surprised when we looked out our window the next morning and saw this:

Yes, the front loader was back and clearing our street again. It was not snowing. Freedom was in sight. Of course, there was a little bit of snow to take care of first.

I never heard a number for Columbia, but Savage (not far away) got 18 inches in this second storm. Added to the 33 from the previous storm gives us 51 inches in under a week. That's a lot of snow. In fact, the official Baltimore total for this winter is now up to 79.9 inches, shattering the previous record from 1995-1996 of 62.5 inches (and winter's not over yet). And not only do we have crazy snow at our house, but crazy icicles as well. Yes, this big one reaches all the way to the ground:

So, I got to shoveling. Molly helped (well, sort of). She really enjoyed playing in the snow as well. She liked throwing snowballs a lot. We threw a few at each other, but she much preferred to throw them into the street.

She also liked eating the snow and just getting her hands in it.

Eventually, I got through shoveling. It took over 4 hours to shovel out (and that was with the help of some very nice neighbors), but both of our cars are now clear.

So, we're now free! We can leave our house, though we haven't done it yet. We don't have an urgent need to get out and the county government has asked everyone to stay off the roads since it's still quite windy and the snow is drifting a bit. That said, it feels like this craziness is over (or close to it).

I have been trying to wait to post this until the saga was complete, but I cannot wait any longer. As most of you know, Maryland and surrounding areas was hit by one of the biggest snow storms we've ever had this past weekend. It started snowing a little after noon on Friday and didn't let up until late Saturday afternoon. Here's what it looked like out of our back door Saturday:

The Bible is there for a little perspective. Out front, my car had disappeared and Jen's was barely still visible.

Molly and I played in the snow a bit (and shoveled a bit as well). While outside, we heard a loud snap. A neighbor's tree had buckled under the weight of the snow and snapped right in the middle of its trunk.

How much snow did we get? Officially, the news says 33.8 inches. I measured just under 32 in our front yard, but there was still and inch or two on the ground from the last snowfall. I generally measure a bit less than the official number, as some of the snow blows around.

How much snow is that? Well, it's basically my legs.

On Sunday, I shoveled our driveway out. Here's what it started to look like halfway through:

The problem you can see here is that while I may clear my driveway, it does no good unless the snow plows come by to clear the streets in our neighborhood. They always come by within a day after a snow storm, so we thought they'd come by Sunday. They didn't. Howard County then assured us all streets would be plowed on Monday. Well, that didn't happen either.

It's now Tuesday. We've been snowbound since Friday and we're running low on certain supplies (like milk). According to the forecast, we're about to be hit by another snow storm dropping between 10 and 20 inches of snow. Consequently, the snow plows have been pulled off of plowing neighborhoods and have started preparing (salting) the main streets for the new storm. Because of our need of supplies and the imminent storm, we gave up on waiting. We got my mom (who was plowed Sunday) to come pick up Jen to take her to the grocery store. Jen walked through the snow to meet her on a bigger road that has been plowed. Here's our hero returning from the store with the needed supplies:

I'm not sure when our street will be cleared. Perhaps Thursday or Friday. We're all very ready to have the freedom to go where we want back. I'll update here when we manage to escape.