Night Time in the Haren House

My heart melts every time I see this:

The One Where I Try To Get Creative With The Camera

I'm basically a professional now ;)

She Knows What She Wants

It seems that Charlotte can get around better than I thought ~ I came into the living room yesterday to this:


Apparently she wanted some puzzle pieces:

Our Little Artist ~ Part 2

(Credit goes to Sierra Hampl for the photos ~ thanks, Sierra!)

Isabella, Maya's best friend in the whole world, came over today and they painted on Maya's 2-sided easel. It's too funny to watch them paint ~ Isabella is *very* neat. Her colors don't mix on her paint tray, she is very precise about where the paint goes on the page, and paint never gets on her clothes or hands.
See how her colors aren't mixed? And how neat the drawing is? She's even holding her brush correctly! Sierra jokes that she will grow up to be a surgeon, or something that requires an equal amount of precision :)





Maya is the total opposite. The first time they painted together, we had to leave one of her paintings at Isabella's house because there was so much paint on it that it would not dry. Like, ever. All the paint colors get mixed, and there is no rhyme or reason about where her brush goes. I like to think she just gets inspired ;)



Check out her paint palate in this one:

Our Little Artist

Today, Maya drew a picture on her chalkboard. I asked her what she drew. Her answer? "Sierra, Isabella, Maya, Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte, Balloons, Dog Food, and Two Vitamin C". Genius.

Our Weekend, By The Numbers

45 pounds of flour purchased to make bread
0 loaves of bread made


3 new recipes tried
4 pounds of beef,
4 cans of diced tomatoes,
4 cans of kidney beans,
2 onions, and
4 spices turned into chili


1 banana tried and rejected


8 blocks turned into a tower


2 tickle fights




0 naps taken by Thing1


1 baby who learned to crawl using her legs AND arms


1 baby who learned to scream and blow bubbles


4 grandparents visiting


3 amazing friends


2 church services attended


1 baby dedicated


5 power outages
5 loads of laundry folded and put away
5 dishwasher cycles run
3 diaper blowouts
318 pictures taken

1 exhausted mom


1 exhausted dad


2 amazing kids who will hopefully be asleep very, very soon

The One That Will Embarrass Maya When She Is Older

I was cleaning Maya's room a bit today and had my back turned to her.

Maya - What are you doing, Mommy?
Me - Just picking up some books off of the floor. What are you doing?
Maya - Just picking my nose.

And she was :P

Here is an unrelated picture of Maya being silly :)

Watermelon

Michael and I wanted to try out creative baby pictures, a la Anne Geddes:


I think we missed the mark a little...

She can CRAWL!

Charlotte made her first forward progress on Thursday night, and since then has been wiggling and lunging her way forward.

New Blog Coming Soon!

A few days ago I told Michael that for my birthday (which is not until August) I might want a new blog design. There are sites where you can go to pay for a "pretty" design with custom signature, masthead, sidebars, etc. Well, I should have known that, being a software engineer, he would not want to pay for a new site ~ that night he started working on a new design for me! It is AMAZING!!! A few more days until we launch it, probably...I know that all 5 of my readers will be waiting with baited breath ;)

In the meantime, here are some pictures from the past couple of days:

The Boy and the Girl

Thanks to my Aunt Laura (Maya and Charlotte's Great Aunt), the girls got 2 ragdolls for Christmas. They are handcrafted with hand-embroidered faces, non-allergenic, washable, and have removable clothing. They are awesome! Maya, ever the creative one, calls them "the boy" and "the girl" This morning she wanted to watch a movie with the boy and the girl. The girl is technically Charlotte's (Maya picked the boy) but since Charlotte is only 6 months old and is still pretty much stationary, she doesn't mind too much that Maya plays with both of them :)

Well the weather outside is frightful...

...but that doesn't stop Maya from running around in her diaper! For various reasons we keep the house at 70 degrees, which means it feels like summer inside, even though it looks (and feels!) like winter outside!



Charlotte hangs out in just a diaper pretty frequently, too :)

Solids!

Charlotte tried her first solid foods on Tuesday! It's a little bittersweet, as it means she is growing up and is one step closer to weaning...but if Maya has shown me anything it is that solids do not decrease her need for milk! Her first food was a soft pear cut into slices ~ she was interested in playing with it, and tasted it a bit, but didn't really have any interest in actually eating it. I think Maya was more interested in Charlotte eating solids than Charlotte was!







We also tried sweet potato that was boiled and cut into cubes. She mashed it with her hands and slid it off the table to a patiently waiting Jane, but I'm not sure any actually made it into her mouth! :)

New Year's Resolutions

You know, those things that are almost always broken by mid-January? Ya, I made some :) Note that "workout more" did not make the list. I like working out and I fit it in when I can, but most days I have to count "chasing after 2 kids under 3 and 1 dog" as workout enough :)

1. Declutter and keep it that way
I am participating in a mothering.com challenge to declutter by giving away or throwing away at least 5 things every day in January. So I started going through drawers, closets, cupboards and bins, and holy bejeemenie, we have a lot of stuff! Broken or dried out pens, half-empty bottles of lotion (that haven't been used in years), expired medications, clothes that haven't fit OR been in style since we were in high school, sheets for a bed size that we don't have anymore, etc. Let's just say that I've gotten rid of WAY more than the 150 items for the challenge, and it feels good. Things are becoming organized. I can look in our hall closet and actually find what I need! My favorite find was a bottle of rewetting drops that expired in March of 1999! Ya, almost 11 YEARS ago! I haven't even touched the office or the kitchen yet, so I'm sure there will be much more to come!

Maya found a few things that she wanted in the "save" pile when I was going through my bin of hair stuff:





2. Not look so frumpy all the time
This would include showering on a regular basis, brushing my hair, and maybe maybe wearing makeup occasionally. And, I actually ironed a shirt this morning. I can honestly and unashamedly say it is probably the 5th article of clothing I have ironed EVER. See how my hair is down in this picture? That doesn't happen too much. We'll see if I can actually keep this one up :)



3. Take better care of our house
The house looks so nice when it's clean! I'm using a guide from motivatedmoms.com to try to keep on top of house chores (though thankfully I have a very understanding husband who puts "keep kids alive" at the top of my to-do list every day :))

(unfortunately I don't have a picture of my house looking all clean...but I will!)

4. Read through the Bible in a year
This is also from motivatedmoms.com ~ there is a daily reading and so far (6 days in) I'm doing well. I'm to the part where Abraham and Sarah are told they will have a son, even though they're super old (I'm paraphrasing, of course :))





5. Play with my kids more
This one shouldn't be too hard, but it seems like the days just fly by and I get caught up in the cleaning and the cooking and the caring for the girls, that I forget to slow down and just play with them. This year there will be more tea parties and Candy Land :)