Toddlers are weird.

This morning Beatrice insisted that she wanted to wear her pink and red snow hat to breakfast.

She wore it while eating quiche and a bagel.



She offered bits of her bagel to the photographs of the babies on the refrigerator as she always does.

Then she offered some to the dogs. Then she insisted on jamming pieces of bagel into my mouth.


Then she found a pair of pajama pants in the clean laundry pile and offered them to the photo-babies.

Then she used those pants to wipe down her chair and table, the dog kennels, the floors, the windows, and the back door.

She also kept sitting in my lap, hugging and kissing me, and singing "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" (she doesn't really know the words, or the tune, but she sings tuneless gibberish while making all the right hand gestures - I still need to get it on video.)

I quizzed her on some body parts.

She spent more than an hour dashing around the kitchen cleaning, singing, eating, and feeding the dogs and babies, then suddenly announced she was ready to "go [to the] car." So she went and got her shoes and my shoes and handed them to me for "help shoes" and we went to IKEA to meet Lucas and Veronika.

Why look, it's Beatrice!

I woke up this morning to find Beatrice (and Naresh!) in my daily Apartment Therapy newsfeed in a story about "fabulous photobooths."

I'm already planning her second birthday party now (which we'll be having early, in Apri or May, to accomodate Baby #2's due date) - I hope you make it!

Jack and Beatrice

I had to draw your attention to this post at Summer St. Pierre's blog, it's too cute.

Beatrice loves going to Jack's house so much she now recognizes it even from the street outside and will start saying "Jack! Jack!" (or sometimes more like "Gack! Gack!") as soon as we pull up.

Of course, as much as she loves Jack, I think she's mostly excited to see Summer, whom she absolutely adores...

Happy Valentine's, part two

Today we continued to celebrate Valentine's Day with a little cookie decorating party for the kids at Summer's house.

Summer provided Jack, Miller, and Beatrice with some heart-shaped sugar cookies, frosting, and sprinkles for decorating.

Somehow Beatrice was the only one who wound up with frosting in her hair.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Day is not one of my favorite holidays (those are Halloween and Christmas) but I still like any excuse for a celebration.

At the beginning of this month I hosted a Valentine-making party where my friends and I made cards for friends and family.

I made one ribbon-stitched card, one embroidered doily card, and one quilled card before settling on the final design of a bird with a banner, toile, and textured ribbon - the prettiest design as well as the easiest to make in large quantities.




Then I made about a dozen more bird cards and mailed them away.

I also made some Valentine's brownie cupcakes for the party.


I used Pediapress to make Dev a custom encyclopedia on the topic of Extreme Geography: The World's Most Isolated Places, featuring remote destinations like the Pitcairn Islands as well as a List of Places with Fewer than 10 Residents.

I also made him homemade ice cream sandwiches with peppermint ice cream. (Dev had been wanting peppermint ice cream since Christmas but we couldn't seem to find it anywhere - all we could find was mint chip ice cream dyed pink and dubbed "peppermint" for the holidays, but what he really wanted was vanilla ice cream with chunks of peppermint candy in it. I used this recipe for the ice cream and this for the cookies.)