Life is a Party

Ponytail Singers from Natalie Shirzad on Vimeo.

Easter Funday

Easter this year was very low-key. Well, the girls did a lot more celebrating this year compared to last year. They had no idea what Easter was a year ago. This year we hung up a "Happy Easter" banner decoration that they were excited to talk about every day for the few weeks before Easter. They also received Easter baskets from Lindsay, our nanny, and another from us that they loved. We did a little indoor egg hunt with them Sunday morning, but they were more interested in opening each egg as they went along rather than collecting a bunch at once. This is likely because I put jelly beans inside and that is a huge treat for them.

We had gorgeous weather here in Portland so we played at the park in the morning, went out for burgers for lunch and then spent the rest of the day playing outside, packing a few boxes and doing yard work. Marcus loves doing yard work and was so excited to spend three hours outside on little landscaping project. Simple pleasures, right?

So we didn't do our usual big dinner event or go out to any activities, but we had a great day as a family.

Busy Bag Success

Well, the busy bag swap was a success! A bunch of my MoM (moms of multiples) friends (and a singleton friend too) got together for the swap in February, but I'm late on blogging lately. We all went home with a slew of activities to keep our little toddlers busy.

Here is most of the loot. A few more came in the next week for a mom who couldn't attend the swap.

If you want to see links for all the busy bag activities and how we organized our swap, check out this post.

20 months

Lexi, Keira, Zara

Zara, Lexi

Lexi, Zara

Zara

Lexi

Lexi, Zara

Well, its February and the girls are 20 months old. I am actually starting to think of 2 year-old birthday party ideas. Craziness.

Big news this month is that the girls have molars! They went many months sporting their eight front teeth. Then we hit a rough (and long) patch of cranky kids and slowly out came the molars. They had several colds during that time too. So glad that is over with for a while.

A&Z are both getting better at using a spoon and fork. I guess eventually I will work with them on drinking out of an open cup, but maybe I'll wait until summer. Summer is really my procrastination plan for everything these days. We'll just hang out in the backyard naked drinking lots of water out of open cups and peeing in the little toilets. No mess and we won't come back inside until they are potty-trained and cup-trained. Hmmm, I think it just may work :)

Their favorite activity is still reading books. Marcus and I read at least 50 books a day, each and I'm not exaggerating. I confess that we sometimes hide books we get really sick of. Both girls really like doing puzzles (the basic wooden ones) lately and also love to color with coloring books. They ask to color at least once a day, but usually spend most of the time trading the crayons back and forth with each other and less time actually coloring. A&Z also spend a lot of time playing in their kitchen. Pretend play is in full-swing with cooking eggs or soup and serving each other tea. One of the biggest squabbles is fighting over pretend washing their hands in their kitchen sink.

In the pictures above, you might notice that the girls are often missing some clothing. They are starting to develop opinions about not wearing clothes, what they wear and want to dress themselves, especially Lexi.

Like all kids their age, language skills continue to explode. It seems like we hear new words and phrases every day lately. Of course, "no" is the most popular! Lexi is very good at pronouncing all of our friends names and names all of our family members in photo albums. Zara recently started saying "no thank you" and "excuse me" - its a little off on the pronunciation.

We started letting the girls watch a little TV a few months ago and they are really into Elmo and that's about it. His voice gets annoying, but I like the 20 minutes of free time enough to tolerate him. Oh my do they love "Meemo". They both sing "la la, la la" along with the opening song and shout and wave, "HI MEEMO" and then later when Mr. Noodle comes on Lexi says, "Hi Mr. Noonle". We recently introduced them to Yo Gabba Gabba and they like to watch that one and dance along to the songs. Those are the only two shows they will watch so far.

What Kids?

I kid. I kid. Marcus and I took a getaway to Hawaii in January. THANK YOU to our awesome in-laws/parents/grandparents for taking care of the girls in Yakima while we were gone. We had an amazing time together relaxing. We stayed in Princeville on the island of Kauai and highly recommend it.

As you can see we enjoyed paradise - swimming, hiking, eating and exploring. So much fun!