Our busy summer fun

Wow, it's been forever since I've posted. We've been busy having lots of summer fun and rearranging all the rooms in our house it seems like. Dan and I are finally ready to have a second baby. Fiona is super excited and has generously donated many of her old toys and clothes to the new baby. Since we're still heavily potty training right now, Fiona also talks about how she will teach the baby to use the potty. I hope she makes good on this promise because potty training one has been enough at this point. Things are going along but there are still lots of accidents and frustrating moments. She just gets so involved with playing that she forgets she's supposed to be paying attention to her bottom. So that coupled with the fact that our poor dog is slightly neglected since we're concentrating on Fiona so much right now, it seems like there is pee around every corner. I'm glad we'll be taking up these carpets hopefully this winter when there's nothing much to do outside.

The other really exciting thing is that back in May Fiona and I went to a benefit walk at the Zoo with my mom to raise money for Wigs for Kids (who I donate my hair to every 4 years or so-it's almost time for my third donation, but it's hard to cut so much off all at once). Anyhow there was a raffle there for a play house and we won it!!!! We were so excited. Dan and I have been working for 2 months now on the house. I feel like we could seriously do habitat for humanity now. It's more completed now than the two pictures show, but the first one gives you an idea of the size-- It's HUGE!!! The second is a cute picture of Fiona painting the house. She had a great time helping out.

From blog Fiona in the house-you can see the adult sized back door

From blog The front has a little kid sized door and two windows that open and close

At this point the house is pretty much done, we only have to finish the interior. We're in the process of painting the walls and then I want to put some of that rubber interlocking floor matting down so it's nice to play on. I still can't believe we won this.

The other big fun of the summer was taking the train to Chicago for Fiona's 3rd birthday. Dan, Fiona, my mom, and I all drove to Michigan where we picked up Dan's mom. Then we took Amtrak to Chicago. Fiona had so much fun on the train. I think the three hour ride was the perfect amount of time. She did a lot of playing, we read some stories, got a snack, and watched the scenery flash past.

Some of the fun things we did in Chicago were going to American Girl Place where we had dinner in the cafe and a special birthday cake. We also went to Build a Bear on Navy Pier. I think this was the highlight of the trip for Fiona. She had so much fun picking out her kitty to make and finding clothes for it. Then we took the water Taxi to Shedd Aquarium where we met up with my friend Virginia and her two daughters that are about Fiona's age.

It was such a great trip and I hope we can do something similar someday. Maybe once little baby number two is older. I kind of wish they weren't going to be so far apart in age, but between moving and just starting a new job three weeks ago, we've decided it's best to wait a little bit.

Here are some quick pictures from our Chicago trip...

Tyto the Owl

We adopted a barn owl from Penitentiary Glen (an animal rescue and rehabilitation place) for my mom this past Christmas and, as part of the adoption, we got to meet the owl and also got a private presentation all about barn owls. The owl was Tyto and it was really beautiful up close and so soft looking. The woman doing the presentation dressed Fi up to be a like an owl, where she had to hold up two grapefruits-to demonstrate how large our eyes would be if we had eyes as large as an owl, and Fi also wore an owl ears headband to show where an owls ears are on the head, they are not level with each other and it has something to do with allowing an owl to tell better from what direction a sound is coming.

Fiona also pooped in the potty for the first time tonight!

A little artist

Here's a video of Fiona making a picture of herself at her easel. It was great watching her make purposeful marks with the paintbrush and to hear that she had a picture in her mind and was working at getting it down on the paper.

The end result of her painting was a totally blue piece of paper!

Dan and I started removing wallpaper from Fiona's room this past Friday, it's exciting to finally be making changes to the house, but it's exhausting to think of all the improvements yet to make. Fiona picked out 'French Pink' for her wall. It should look nice when it's all done.

When your toddler is more mature than you...

It's hard to admit when your two and half year old behaves slightly more like a grown up than you do. It started several months ago (before we even moved) when Fiona told me to stop picking my nose (come on, you know you do it too). Fiona has honestly never picked her nose and always politely asks for a tissue and daintily dabs at her nose when she thinks she has a "booga."

Then shortly after I got my contacts I was rubbing at my eye and Fiona told me not to put my finger in my eyes. Well, fine then.

Then, just a few days ago I thought I had lost her favorite turtle (Turt) at the grocery store and I felt horrible. I went into my room and started crying-it's also partially because I'm still stressed about moving and unpacking and therefore I am only slightly more emotional than usual. Turt is very important to Fi and she takes him everywhere. Fi came into my room and said, "it's OK mom, the hard shelled turtle can be my new turtle." The hard shelled turtle is a turtle puppet we found in the attic when we were moving. How can she have more common sense than I do and also be more level-headed. Although maybe it's not that hard to be more level-headed than I am, I hate to admit. She definitely takes way more after Dan in that respect than after me.. FORTUNATELY!!!!

We've been enjoying the warmer weather here so much! Today we took a walk to a small pond near our house. We packed a very small picnic for ourselves and brought along Mr. Bunglie and some of his friends and a picnic for them. I'm working on taking photos for a new Bunglie book called "Mr. Bunglie's ABC's" and 'p' is for picnic. In each picture readers are supposed to find other objects that begin with the same letter. For instance with the letter 'p' there is the pond in the background, pizza, plates, something pink and purple, a pear, a plum, a peach, pencil, paper, paints, and Puck the dog. The picture is still on my camera but here is the picture for the letter 'b'.



The text to go with this picture is "B is for bed, sweet dreams and good night." (it will be a rhyming book)
Find these other objects that begin with 'b'-- something blue, something brown, something black, a bear, ball, bottle, bat, bird, book, blanket, balloon, bow, bear. Sorry the picture is kind of small, it will be much much larger in the printed version of the book.

So far I've written all the text and taken pictures for 'b,' 'c,' 'p,' 's,' and 'x.' So it's coming along.

I did just finish two new Mr. Bunglie books this past week, Mr. Bunglie Down on the Farm and Mr. Bunglie's Talent Show. I really like the farm one so maybe I'll try posting it on here in book form at some point.

Animal friends at the "Duck House"

Yesterday, Fiona and I were having a picnic on the dock while Dan tried to figure out how to get the in ground sprinkler system to start working again. While we were watching the ducks swim by we noticed something swimming towards us that was too low in the water to be a duck. We thought it was a turtle at first just paddling around and just as it was coming into sight it dove under water and we could see that it was largish. I thought it might be an otter and Fiona thought it was a cat!

We watched the water for a while and saw the animal come up behind our neighbor's house so we went running over there and discovered that it was a beaver. It was so incredible. I've never seen a wild beaver before.


You can just see the beaver's head as it swims


Beaver chewing on log

Today we saw a wild turkey wandering around by one of the houses. For some reason it looked so out of place. They are super strange looking birds and it's hard to imagine why someone would have looked at one and thought it might be tasty. They have those weird long hairy patches on their chests that look like pony tails and then of course all the extra red bumpy skin on their heads and chests (the wattle). Any how it was still pretty cool to see one. The funniest was when there was one at the library where I work. In the middle of a really suburban place. This turkey was just walking around and then ran across a 5 lane street. Which of course solicited all sorts of 'why did the turkey cross the road' jokes.

Happy in the Duck House

We're finally here and mostly settled. The last two weeks have been chaotic but sort of fun, I guess. We had a lot of great help from my mom (who watched Fi), my dad and his friend to help us load the U-Haul, and the Demkos (Jim helped un-load, and Annie and the boys hung out with my mom and Fi). The unpacking process is still underway. Fortunately, though we are mostly left with boxes of things that never really had a place in the old house. The weird junk that we don't know what to do with but for some reason don't really want to get rid of either.

It's been great here so far (when we're not unpacking or frantically looking for something that is still packed.......somewhere........) We've seen lots of deer (and plenty of deer poop---signs that deer are roaming our backyard as we sleep), and we have a resident duck family that frequents our corn feeding area. Fi LOVES making sure the ducks have corn available all the time. I'm really hoping that they bring their ducklings by when the time is right.




We've all been really enjoying the back porch which is entirely glassed in, including the ceiling. And it's been tons of fun feeding the ducks and exploring the area in general. Even the cats and Puck seem happy here. We set up the huge floor to ceiling cat perch on the back porch and the cats are in kitty heaven. We took Fi to the playground yesterday and Dan and I were commenting on how she seems happier here, in general, than we've ever seen her.

Even daddies need extra special care every so often

Dan and I have been super busy as we pack everything up and get ready to move to our new house (which we are calling "the duck house" since there are lots of ducks in the water). We were packing up our kitchen nook table to take to the new house. I told Fi that we were packing it up to take to the duck house and she said, "so the ducks can eat with us?" I'm really excited about seeing deer and ducks near our new house. It's so exciting, just a week and a half away at this point. Since Dan and I are working so hard we've been especially exhausted lately. Fortunately we have a truly compassionate child. Here's a video of Fiona putting daddy to bed. She covered him up with blankets and then read to him from Minark's Little Bear book.


Dan and I are so lucky to have Fiona around to take care of us!

I can put Bunglie books on here now!

I thought this would be a fun way to share some of the Mr. Bunglie books. I might change or add different titles from time to time. Don't forget that if you'd like to add any of these books to your library you can click the link at the very bottom of the page or go here: www.lulu.com/mrbunglie

The other exciting news of the day is that everything has officially gone through with the house purchasing. We've decide on the house in the neighborhood with the beaches, lake, personal backyard dock, and backyard playgrounds as well as a couple community playgrounds.

I'm so excited. We should be able to move in March 11th or so! Time to get busy packing.

Everything will now come our way

After looking at houses to consider purchasing Dan and I went out to eat with my mom and Dan got this fortune cookie (it actually came with my meal but I was too full to eat it). We thought it was fitting considering we have all sorts of big changes coming. So we had to take a picture of it -right there in the restaurant-probably much to the confusion of waiters and other guests.

We looked at 6 houses today, all in different locations throughout the same school district. We've narrowed it down to two houses. Both quite different. One is older and needs some work, but it's on a canal with a private dock that leads to a large lake. The other is brand new and has a small pond in the back yard. It's such a tough decision to make. The first house is in a wonderful neighborhood tons of kids, 2 beaches, movies on the lake every Saturday night in the summer, playgrounds, two in ground pools, etc....

The other is a nice neighborhood too, but not all the cool stuff. In the end we think we are going with the less nice house so we can get all the amenities. I guess we decided to choose the more fun sounding way of life. Maybe someday we'll get a little boat and will be able to go out boating on the big lake directly from out own dock in the backyard. Sounds pretty nice and like a great way to relax.

WAHOOO!!!!

We finally got a bid on our house!!! I can't believe it, I'm so excited. Tomorrow we're going out to look at a house we went through before that we still like and we are also going to look at several others. Unfortunately we have to make all these big decisions really quick. The perspective buyers want to move in by March 15th. So in that time we have to find a house we like, make an offer, and possible wait for the current owners to move out themselves. It's going to be tight. The house we like the best still has people living in it, only they are down in Florida right now. I just hope that if we decide to buy that house that they can come back from Florida and move everything out in time for us to move all our stuff in before the 15th of March. It's all very scary and exciting.




Is this video clip familiar to you? It's Fiona's current favorite TV show. We've been getting old Reading Rainbow episodes on DVD from the library. It's really fun to watch these again and sooooo much more interesting for us adults than Barney and the likes. She loves LeVar Burton. And it's really funny to hear her say his name and ask where he is whenever he's not on the screen. The thing that's the most frustrating is that at some point after I outgrew reading rainbow they changed the intro to the show. It's not this cute cartoon anymore and the lady singing the theme song has a grating voice. This old original intro was so great. I remember watching this show all the time. You can't beat Reading Rainbow. So much fun information in a small period of time that's perfect for Fiona's attention span. She likes all the animal themed shows the best of course. I think her favorite is when LeVar takes his dog to a doggy birthday party at a real dog restaurant. The episode ends with a group of dogs sitting around the table wearing party hats and eating a dog bone shaped cake. It's really fun being a parent and sharing weird old 80's stuff with your kid and remembering why it was so cool in the first place when you were a kid yourself.

Dancing and Reading

Our new family goal is to get more exercise. We started this evening by dancing along to Moucercise. It was kind of an 80's thing, although there was a Moucercise revival at some point in the 90's with newer Disney songs--we should look into that one too. My mom had my old cassette of Moucercise and the corresponding booklet with dancing instructions and she actually found a CD version somewhere online so we could listen to it. We don't have a tape player anymore. It was tons of fun. Most of the songs are familiar ones from Disney movies. For instance "Step in Time" from Mary Poppins and "I Wanna be Like You-o-o" from Junglebook. In the Junglebook song we pretended to be elephants, bears, snakes, and gorillas with long swaying arms. Hopefully we can find a little time each day to do a couple dances and then we will all feel and look much better. Moucercise is a pretty good workout and Dan said he was feeling it after the first song we danced to.


This is a cool new web page one of the librarians I work with showed me. Fiona and I have been having fun discovering new books and actually being able to read them all the way through, as opposed to Amazon where you only get a few random pages. She loves to be able to point at book covers that look interesting and then we can read them. If she really likes the titles I can add them to our own virtual bookshelf. Pretty cool. Here's one we actually already knew from a story time I recently did about penguins. But Fiona was very excited to see this book on the computer too. Just click on the cover and you can flip through the entire book! If you want to see the book larger you can click on the orange eyes in the upper left corner.




Fiona making Valentine's for her friends at day care. She picked out a cute set with the Littlest Pet Shop characters on it.

We're here too!!

OK, we've been inspired, once again, by the Demkos who recently began their own blog. It looked like lots of fun so here we are too...

So to start off our debut in blog-land, here's a fun video of Fiona being Fiona. This is Fiona and Una the Unicorn (made for Fiona by grandma Connie at Christmas) dancing to Fi's favorite song being sung by Pinkie Pie the pony:



Yes, despite the messy appearance of our house it is still for sale. It's impressive how quickly it can go from very very clean to a complete mess with every kind of toy strewn around and more dishes than should be allowed for just three people.

I'm super excited that I can include videos on this thing and will probably do tons of those, I hope no one's computer explodes as a result. But I know there are grandmas out there who look forward to random little videos.

So here's all about us lately:

Fiona is amazing, I guess that goes without saying coming from a mommy. She's really enjoying daycare, story time at the library, and dance class. She's becoming very good at the forwards and backwards somersaults and she loves bouncing on the trampoline.

Dan's enjoying his weekend work shift still and it's great that we all get to see each other so often. Fi likes having her daddy around so much more.

When daddy is not around Fiona and I spend a good amount of time at the Natural History Museum. We seriously go there every Sunday and spend most of the day. It's the best museum for her right now. Every Sunday they have a live animal show. She's already gotten to pet a skunk, a snake, an iguana, and by mistake a tarantula. She loves seeing the animals outside, especially Jake the turkey and Lucy the otter. Fiona is also fond of the gift shop where she can find any number of soft cuddly animals that she takes up to the counter and hands to the sales lady before I've realized what happened. Fortunately Fiona is very good about giving the animal a kiss and putting it back on the shelf. Unfortunately mommy is sometimes not as good at this and every so often a soft cuddly animal finds it's way to our house.



And now before you go, I'll leave you with a rare moment of tranquility at our house. Picture a tiger, a pink tutu, and Arlo Guthrie. I will say no more and will let the video do all the talking. I hope you, too, have as peaceful and wonderful an evening as this!