Category Archives: toddler

Yummy yummy, fruit salad!

So, my mom (Hi, Mom!) bought the kids a Wiggles DVD. I have heard of the Wiggles, but never actually watched them. The kids… weren’t huge fans. There was some dancing, but ultimately they wanted to watch Paw Patrol instead. However, the next day out of the blue, Enzo asked for the Fruit Salad song and I had to wrack my brain to figure out what he was talking about. For whatever reason, it is the only song that stuck out to him on this DVD and he has found enormous pleasure in getting it stuck in my head. Out of the blue he’ll suddenly start singing “Yummy yummy, fruit salad” and he’ll look at me and crack that smile with the adorable dimple and giggle while repeating it over and over until he has it stuck in my brain. Now we go back and forth with it. Sometimes I’ll sit down next to him on the couch and sing it in his ear to get him to smile, and this weekend I wouldn’t be surprised if he wakes me up by singing it.

We’re supposed to get a nice storm early next week, and while the weather won’t be terrible this weekend, I think we’ll stay in and maybe do some more painting. Enzo asked to paint something besides paper, so I picked up a little project for them (obviously I can’t spoil the surprise). Otherwise Phoebe has really been into Barbie and princesses lately, so I imagine there will be a lot of that as well.

Oh, and for the curious… (Sorry) Oh, and my bad… it’s “Fruit salad, yummy yummy” not vice versa. 😉

Oh, those imaginations!

With the cold finally settling in, we’re having to get more creative with how we spend our time around the house, and even though we’re guilty of spending a bit more time in front of electronics than I would like, the kiddo’s imaginations are definitely not suffering. In fact, dare I say it, but their imaginations have actually benefited.

One game that Phoebe has been enjoying lately started somewhat by her brother, but ultimately was created after watching Paw Patrol. Enzo always insists on watching this one episode with a ghost (which ends up not even being a ghost at all), so we now have a new game that started up one day out of the blue. The other morning when Phoebe padded out of her room in the with the sleep barely wiped out of her eyes, she looked at me and her eyes went big and she yelled, “Ghost!” I continued with the game and said, “Oh no! What do we do?” So she continued with the mock surprise and yelled, “Run! Hurry! Hurry!” This morning Enzo pretended to be the ghost while chasing Phoebe who was first in my arms and then at one point in Josh’s arms while Enzo and I chased them both.

I wish I could remember all of what Enzo comes up with (because it’s awesome), but there are always a lot of details to keep track of. It was funny, though, the other day in the car when I realized he was using ideas from Beauty and the Beast, and episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and a Harry Potter game that Josh picked up for the PS3. See picture below:

It was a big story with 2 dinosaurs who happened to be brothers and then there was a spell and the big dinosaur was asleep so naturally the spell needed to be broken before the 3rd petal fell and he would be asleep forever. So, Enzo waved his magic wand and sang Twinkle Twinkle and poof! The spell was broken. Then unfortunately, another spell was cast and Enzo asked me to use my wand because, “You have the biggest wand I’ve ever seen.” I failed the first time and accidentally put the whole car to sleep, but after waving my wand and singing Itsy Bitsy, all was well.

They seriously just get more and more fun.

Gingerbread Architects in the Making

We’ve never made a gingerbread house before, so we decided to start out small and easy and I picked a super easy one up from Trader Joe’s. Okay… we once attempted to make an enormous gingerbread creation years ago, but that was a huge mistake for multiple reasons. The first was that I had never even made gingerbread before, and mid-baking we realized that the oven we had was too small for our largest cookie sheets, and it was at that point I threw my hands up in the air and admitted defeat. So, perhaps next year we’ll attempt something homemade, but from a box worked just fine this time around.

The kids also had Hot Cocoa cookies to eat since they wouldn’t get to eat the gingerbread house and asking children this small to not eat something made of cookies, frosting and candy is a pretty tall order.

It was a lot of messy fun and the kids thoroughly enjoyed themselves. It’s always fun to watch the kids be creative and this was no different. They started out just randomly sticking pieces on the house, but then Enzo especially would start to look at it more critically and slowly place his candies. Until he realized Phoebe was just putting on as many as possible and then he had to hurry to make sure he got as many on there as she did.

Another project to cross off our “Bucket” List.

Crafting with Kids

Confession time… no, scratch that. A confession makes me sound guilty, and I don’t deserve that guilt. Let’s start over.

As a mom who works full-time, it’s not always easy to find time or energy to do a lot of crafts with my kids in the very short amounts of time we have together in the evenings or on the often busy weekends. Also, day care usually comes up with better ideas than I do and I’m okay if they want to do all of the Pinterest projects that involve paint and glue and glitter. We learned the hard way that Phoebe cannot be trusted with glitter when we attempted to make snow globes that I very poorly planned out.

I figured another easy December “craft” we could do was to cut out snowflakes and hang them up around the house. We weren’t getting any actual snow outside and it was a relatively quick and craft, which is also important when working with small children. Generally they last maybe 10-15 minutes, if that.

Enzo has used scissors before, so he got to work right away while we tried to give him a few pointers on how to get fun designs. Phoebe, however, has never worked with scissors, and probably won’t for a while. She had a moment of interest in cutting paper and then wanted to cut everything else in sight. I am very thankful for dull child safety scissors. I’m also fairly certain that she will be the child who one day gives herself a very avant garde haircut.

So, while Enzo took it very seriously, Phoebe preferred to dance around in her robe causing havoc. Needless to say, we should probably do more crafts together.

Big Girl Room: Take 1

Well, it seems like I can’t stop changing stuff in the house, and even though these pictures weren’t taken that long ago, they are now outdated as I’ve already moved stuff around in Phoebe’s room and will probably do so again. As for Enzo’s room… well that time will probably come too.

So far Phoebe is loving her new big girl bed and I really like it as well. The drawers are nice and with an extra mattress, it can also be a trundle bed too… however I’m not really sure where one is supposed to store said mattress. As you can tell from the pictures there isn’t exactly room for it anywhere, so I don’t know what Ikea had in mind.

Enzo and Vega also like Phoebe’s new bed. We’re still working on storage issues and toy placement, but this brown cube shelf is gone and now I just need to either get rid of some toys or figure out a better method of storing them. I think our real problem is too many large toys and also the fact that Phoebe forgets there are toys anywhere she can’t immediately see, but Enzo is also that way so January will be filled with more rearranging and storage switching so that we can get a feel for what the kids actually play with and what can head out the door.

It’s probably just a good thing neither kid messes with cords or electrical outlets all that much because I have yet to figure out a good way to keep those from being in the way since the outlets seem to be in all the wrong places… that or we have way too many things that need to be plugged in. I have a thing with lights, though… it can’t be helped.

Ah, here’s a good example of something that is gone – the panda. While Enzo has always been a fan of his giant bear, Phoebe never really bonded with her panda, so we gave it to a new home and she never even noticed it was missing. In general the kids aren’t big on stuffed animals, so I think we’ll probably let more of those go. I bought too many before they were born and thought they’d enjoy them more than they actually do. Instead they have a select few dolls and animals that they really love, and for those I’m thinking one of those wall hammocks would work great and would definitely free up shelf space.

Now to go take updated pictures of what her room looks like now, or maybe I’ll wait until January since several rooms will have changed by then.

Dino and Bunnies

Every day adventures