Poor Angelina learned the hard way that naked bums and corn stoves do not mix. This morning Trinity had stripped down because she wanted to take a bath. Angelina followed suit by taking off her pants and diaper while they pleaded to take a bath. They were standing in front of the corn stove since the nice warm air blows out from there. I told them they could take a bath and Trinity ran off to the bathroom. Angelina, however, leaned over to pick something up. This movement placed her bum square on the door of the stove - the only part that gets hot.

I took her to the doctors and she has second degree burns. Most of her right cheek is burned and about 1/4 of the other. It is going to be a challenge to get her healed up since she can't wear a diaper. We can't risk getting poop on the burned areas. So, looks like we begin potty training by default! Here is a picture of her laying on the floor watching a movie. Please be praying for quick healing for her and an extreme measure of patience for mom!

Happier days... Trinity and Angelina were washing the floor (their choice!) but also managed to have a little squirt fight.

Earlier this week...what do you get when you cross a two year old and paint?

This was from last Sunday. We filled spray bottles with water and food coloring to create snow paint.

The girls loved it - anytime they get to spray they are happy

This was the beautiful sunrise that greeted me one morning this week. It was actually much more stunning in person than I was able to capture.

After seeing a bald eagle and a herd of almost 50 deer last week, I started carrying my camera in my purse. Sure enough, this past Wednesday I was able to get a shot of a bald eagle while on my way into Des Moines to the library.

Grace and peace be with you!

Posted in: Slow Lane on Saturday, January 31, 2009 at at 2:18 PM 0 comments    

Here are the girls "doing school" one morning. They both wanted to dress up that day. (what a surprise! ;) Trinity was doing a coloring sheet of parrots and Angelina worked on a puzzle.

I took some really cute video of the girls dancing, but I can't get it to upload. I will keep trying....

Posted in: Homeschool Lane on Sunday, January 25, 2009 at at 7:43 AM 0 comments    

Posted in: Slow Lane on Monday, January 19, 2009 at at 1:35 PM 0 comments    

Before I get into the birthday pic's, here is one I snapped of the backyard the other day. Our sandbox turtle is almost completely covered in snowdrift. It is doing a good job of blocking the snow from the little tykes garden set.

Since David will be working tomorrow, we decided to celebrate Trinity's 4'th birthday today. She had spent the night with her friend Katie, who just celebrated her 5'th birthday yesterday. She had a good time but was missing her mommy pretty badly. She cried when she finally saw me at church this morning. Next sleepover will have to be at our house. :) But it worked out nicely that I got to take Angelina shopping yesterday and get stuff for the party. We picked up balloons, a cake mix, and presents. We blew up the balloons and set out the presents so everything was waiting for her when we got back from church.

Trinity had quite the haul for her birthday:
Bead necklaces, (a set that is supposed to be party favors)
play dough,
a box of 24 colored pencils, (her favorite coloring tool these days)
a 2 pack of flashlights, (gotta have 2 or we'd have wwIII here!)
Disney Princess bubblebath,
Winnie the Pooh books, (thanks Grandma Mary!)
A baby doll that crawls, cries, says 'mama', and giggles, (thanks Grandma Barbara and Pop Pop!)
and a Mariposa Barbie Doll. (from her friend Katie)

I had promised Trinity that she could make the cake mix all by herself. She did really well with everything - especially the eggs. I had to help a little with the mixer, but she was pretty excited to be able to make her cupcake mix.
As you can see, Angelina had to crawl right up and keep an eye on what was going on.

I had to pour the cupcake myself. We tried to do it together, but it just didn't work so well. But, free from the pouring responsibility, hands were free for dipping into the batter. It made me think about how dad used to be grossed out by us kids eating cookie dough. :)

Now, do you want to take a guess at who had the bigger chocolate icing mustache?

Angelina wins!

Angelina was having a great time bouncing this balloon in the air and following it around the room. They have managed to pop all but two balloons today. That doesn't leave much for her actual birthday tomorrow, but I suppose that's okay. (somebody put some pants that fit on that girl! :p

And here is the Barbie Mariposa doll. Trinity really loves this doll.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Barbie movies, Mariposa is a fairy. That is why she has the wings on her. And did you notice the chocolate smear on the side of Trinity's face and the chocolate all over her sleeve? That would be why Angelina won the mustache contest - Trinity wiped hers off on her sleeve!!! (sigh, thank goodness for Oxyclean)

We had wanted to take the girls to go bald eagle spotting at the Mississippi river for Trinity's birthday, but with David working tomorrow, I think we are going to postpone it. We might go next Sunday when we can all go together. That gives me a week to research it and find out the best location. Hopefully we will have some good pictures from that outing to post. :)

Grace and peace be with you!

Posted in: Slow Lane on Sunday, January 18, 2009 at at 8:32 PM 0 comments    

A big happy birthday to Grandma Barbara (her birthday was yesterday) and Grandma Carol. (her birthday is today) We love you both very much and miss you - so do your grandkids. Trinity is always telling me how much she misses her grandmas and grandpas. :(

Here are some pics of life at our house. This first one is Angelina waking up after a nap in the recliner. She was laying in a lovely contortionist position, but by the time I got the camera, she moved into a more normal pose. I took the shot anyway of the sleepy girl.


What to do with kids when it is freezing cold out and you can't go out and play? Turn your house into a gymnasium. Here the girls had piled pillows and blankets into the corner and were taking turns jumping into the soft pit.

Snack break. I thought the girls looked cute sitting and eating their ice cream cones.

This was our excitement yesterday. A car ran off the road right into our yard. I circled the area where you can see the snow scraped away as the car left the road and headed down the steep slope into our yard. Our yard continues to incline down, so they went all the way to our barn.

They showed up later with a truck and tried to pull the car out. That didn't work out as nicely as they would have liked, as the road is not wide enough for them to actually get the car pulled up on it before having to turn. So they ended up dragging the car along the side of the ditch all the way into our neighbor's yard before they were able to get it up on the road again. And people think living in the country is boring! ;)

Today the girls wanted to play store. So we played endless rounds of shopping, checking out, and restocking the shelves to open the store for the next day.

Our kitchen playset was turned into our check out stand. One of the benefits of having a mom who runs a consignment sale is having an extra scanner for zapping bar codes. Trinity is very good at finding the bar codes and scanning them. She will be helping me at my sales very soon!

The other news is that we did make the final decision that we will be homeschooling the girls. Trinity has not returned to preschool after Christmas break. We are excited about it though - especially Trinity. She was more than happy to stay at home and do school with mommy. I have been looking at the Charlotte Mason method and the Classical method based on the trivium, but have more than enough time to decide since Trinity is only turning 4. We are going to start spending 5 minutes a day working on phonics since Trinity is showing 'reading readiness' signs - she is always pointing to words on things and asking me what it says.

David put in an application with a local grocery store that was looking for shift managers. We will see if anything comes of that. We would love to get him working inside again. I tried to get a part time job working the overnight shift with Walmart, but the shift runs 11pm-7am. David has to leave for work at 6:30 so that knocked me out of the running - I wouldn't be flexible for scheduling. I am going to check with another grocer. One of the moms was telling me that HyVee has overnight stockers and she thinks the shift ends at 6.

Oh, yeah...how could I forget. We finally got David's cosmetology license for Iowa. So this is another option that we are going to look into.

Here is a parting picture of our corn stove so you can see that we are keeping toasty warm in this arctic blast. :)

Grace and peace be with you!

Posted in: Homeschool Lane, Slow Lane on Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at at 2:38 PM 0 comments    

Well, we are all snuggly and warm with our corn burner working nicely now. I had a few pictures to post so I will fill you in with the pics.

The Waldenbooks at our closest mall is going out of business so they were having killer sales to clear the inventory. I picked up a monster History of Art book for $3.75 and a Children's Atlas for $1.50. Even a broke person like me can't resist those deals! The kids have already enjoyed looking through both of them and I am sure they will provide us with lots of knowledge in the years ahead. (especially since David and I have finally made the decision to homeschool the kids)

Here are some pics I snapped of David looking at the atlas with Angelina. She was only mildly enthusiastic as you can see in the pictures. (read that with heavy sarcasm :)

I have been trying to take the kids outside for a walk whenever the weather is nice enough for it. "Nice enough" being a very relative term. Today was in the 20's, only a little wind, and no precipitation...that qualifies for outdoor time in my book. So, off we went down the road with our bags to collect treasures along the way. This was the neighbors cow watching us walk by. Most of the time they aren't in the field by the road, so this was a rare sighting of the cows in this pasture.

Angelina spotted this nest. Since we couldn't put it in our treasure bag, this one had to be captured via picture. Angelina also spotted a bald eagle and a flying crocodile. She is very alert for a two year old! ;) I can't blame her for thinking she saw an eagle. We have seen several of them in the last few weeks. I was reading about them and discovered that in January and February there are 5000 bald eagles that come to the Mississippi between Illinois and Minnesota. It is considered to be the next best place to see them outside of Alaska. We may take a road trip to the river for bald eagle spotting on Trinity's birthday.

Trinity had quite a few treasures in her bag by the time we made it home. BTW, did I mention that little Angelina decided that she was too tired to walk anymore and I had to carry her all the way home?? She managed to wake up nicely once we were indoors again despite her insisting that she needed to go home and take a nap. I sure got my exercise today!

I digress...back to Trinity's treasures... pine cones, leaves, rocks, twigs, a corn cob, and the piece de' resistance - a wooly caterpiller. She put him in a jar with some of her other treasures to keep him company. Hopefully this one will stay in the jar and not get loosed like the caterpiller she brought in the other daySigh, another shot of Trinity's fake smile. I hate trying to catch a good shot of her these days because as soon as she sees the camera, she says "say cheeeeeese" and puts on this horrid little fake grin. Her smile is lovely, just hard to catch on camera.

And, yes, I did let Trinity go for a walk in her princess dress. I made her put pants on with it, but thought, why not? You can only get away with that kind of stuff when you are young, so she may as well enjoy it now!

Grace and peace be with you!

Posted in: Homeschool Lane, Slow Lane on Friday, January 9, 2009 at at 3:43 PM 0 comments    

I was watching Wall E with the girls and there was a scene showing a galaxy. Trinity says excitedly, "I know what that is!"
I tell her, "that's a galaxy."
Trinity says, "I know, it's a galaxy and it's called the Milkshake."

LOL!!

Posted in: Slow Lane on Saturday, January 3, 2009 at at 10:24 AM 0 comments