Let’s begin with the apples!

We were invited to a friend of a friend’s house to go apple picking in their yard.  They have 17 apple trees so there was plenty for us to pick.  I wish I had brought my camera, but sadly I didn’t even think to bring it. 

I think Evan had the most fun picking apples.  He was my apple picker tool.  I held him up to the tree and with both hands he pulled as hard as he could and reached apples that I couldn’t reach otherwise.  He was soo excited when the apple came off into his hands.  He picked 3 apples! :) 

Alyssa on the other hand was a bit fussy and opted to sit in the stroller almost the entire time.  To each her own.  To keep her entertained I had a brilliant idea.  Give her an apple! lol

She sat eating an apple about this size while I was a few feet away talking with the other moms and picking apples with Evan. 

I could see her chowing down on her apple and loving it, but I didn’t realize that she didn’t know “HOW” to eat an apple.  At one point she said “bugger mommy” and handed me an apple seed.  I have no idea why she thought the seed looked like a bugger, but whatever, lol.  Then I noticed she had eaten her way through the entire apple, most of the core included!  It was pretty crazy.  I took after pictures of what was left of her apple!  She was reluctant to give even this much up!

Here’s a close up of the other side of the apple where you can see she ate most of the core.

While I was taking pictures of this apple, I turn around to find her putting money in her toes!  Luke asked me if I staged these pictures, but no I really didn’t!  I have no idea why she thought to do this, but it’s pretty funny.  She was cracking herself up too.  Hmm I think we might share the same sense of humor. :)

Oh and Evan has teeth now!  It’s so hard to get a good picture! Sorry for the food picture, but my mom has been asking to see pictures. This is a pretty good one of his bottom two.  Actually, in this picture I think only the left tooth was through the gum.  He now has one on the top and I’m thinking he’ll get his other top tooth any day now.  I wonder if he’ll eat apples like his sister now that he has teeth!

We had heard fun things about the Evergreen County Fair, which is only 15 minutes away from our house, so while Luke’s mom was here visiting we decided to try it out.  It was a crazy adventure because we had to squish into Luke’s Jetta because my car was out of commission (that’s a whole other story in itself) AND it was raining so we weren’t even sure we wanted to go.  But we attempted the drive and when we arrived it stopped raining so we decided to go inside and check it out. 

They had a bunch of these painted head cut outs.  Our goal was to get the kids to take a picture in each of them.  This is the only one we got. lol  We decided it was too much of a hassle to get the kids in and out of the stroller for these silly pictures.  But these turned out pretty cute.

They had a TON of animals.   There was an area full of chickens, cows, pigs, dogs, and more.  They had this really cute saddle for the kids to sit on and take pictures in the cow buildings.

We also came home with a few things.  Luke’s mom took Alyssa to browse the shops while Luke and I finished eating lunch and they came back with an animal balloon.  I’ll never forget the look on Alyssa’s face when she came back to show us what she had.  She was so excited about her balloon.  We didn’t capture the look on camera, but one of these days I’ll get it.  I don’t usually buy things at fairs, but I’ve seen this hair comb thing before and so I had the lady “do” my hair and we collectively liked it and decided to get it. :)  It’s been a couple weeks now and I still like it!  We didn’t get a good picture of it either, but it looks really neat.

I would have LOVED to come home with this bear in a tree thing, but maybe we can make our own when we cut down a couple of trees in our yard this winter! :)

This was the very first time Alyssa has ever WANTED to pet animals.  We’ve gone to several different petting-zoo type places before and she has always been very afraid.  But not this time, she went right up to pet the baby cows, goats & sheep.  The baby cows were sooo cute! We even had a hard time getting her to want to leave.  Poor Evan was so tired that he wasn’t able to stay awake long enough to go to the petting-zoo.  Grandma stayed behind to watch him in the stroller, but she was still able to peek through the fence to watch Alyssa. :)

The entrance to the petting-zoo part was actually really cool.  They had a maze/scavenger hunt set up for the kids.  They were given a basket and then had to collect certain things like eggs from underneath the chickens, potatoes half buried in the dirt, apples from a wooden apple tree and they even got to milk a fake cow!

On our way out we decided that we couldn't leave without kettle corn and blackberry frozen lemonade.  As soon as we got our yummy treats it began to POUR rain.  We huddled under a booth for a little while and then decided to make a mad dash for the car.  It was an exciting ending to our day at the fair.

This might not come as a surprise for those of you who have kids, but it is always interesting to experience these sorts of conversations with your kids for the first time.  Here is a conversation my husband had with my 2 year old tonight:

Luke: Alyssa it’s time to go to bed after we read this book

Alyssa: No

Luke: Alyssa you don’t tell daddy no, it’s time to go to bed soon

Alyssa: Nope

Luke: Alyssa, you don’t tell daddy no

Alyssa: I said Nope

Luke: That’s the same thing, you can’t tell daddy nope either

Alyssa: No Way

Luke: Alyssa, you can’t say no at all

Alyssa: Way

Oh and something else that cracked us up today.  She came down into our room from just waking up from her nap and said:

You guys wanna watch a movie?

We both laughed.  Since when did we become “you guys?!”

I love giraffe’s.  Whether live at the zoo, stuffed animals or even cakes (obviously).   Well maybe I don’t love them as much as my friend Kristi’s mom who has lots of giraffe statues and such, but I do think they are awfully cute.

I recently joined this group on a website titled Moms4mom.  I’d say I’m slightly addicted with potential for mass addiction.  Luke turned me on to it today and I’d like to say thank you. :)

On this website mom’s sign up to ask questions, answer question, vote on answers and the like.  It’s also a little bit on the nerdy side because it gives out achievement awards like on X-Box.  Hence the addiction part. 

ANYWAY – A recent question from a mom was “What are some good baby shower gifts”  She goes on to elaborate

“As a new mom I often have friends that ask me what would be a good baby shower gift? I would like to use establish a good list. As a mom what are things that you found to be the most useful? Please list one thing per answer so that they can easily be voted up or down. Feel free to post as many answers as you would like.”

Well I was reading through the list of responses and I found this:

“Sophie the giraffe is great. Especially when babies are teething or just learning to grasp things.”

Website Price: $21.99

Seriously?!  20 bucks for a chew toy?!  The Saturday Night Live skit of “Really?!? with Seth & Amy is running through my head right now.  Really!?! This is a toy targeted solely for the purposes of teething.  Here is the website description:

Born in 1961, her success is legendary in France. Made in the French Alps with natural rubber and non-toxic paint, Sophie has been safely cuddled and chewed for over 40 years! She is soft, light, and easy to grasp and fits perfectly into little hands. Sophie is loveable and amusing. She even makes a happy sound when squeezed. Babies especially love her bumpy head to soothe their teething gums.

I do have to admit she is very cute and that I am quite curious as to what her “happy sound” is like.  And wow, 40 years?! Really!?!

Well now despite that I have totally made fun of her I do wish to ask one thing of you.  If you have had any experience with Sophie I want to hear about it!

While my parents were here visiting my mom was kind enough to yield to my blueberry picking craving and went on a journey with me and the kids to find a blueberry farm.  She had never gone berry picking before, except backyard picking, and wasn’t sure she was up for getting her feet dirty.  Well, it turned out that it wasn’t muddy or even that dirty at all and I think she had a pretty good time. 

Evan really enjoyed picking the blueberries off the bushes, with the help of my mom, and I gave Alyssa her very own bowl to use to collect the blueberries she picked. I’m pretty sure there were only 1 or 2 blueberries that actually hit the bottom of the bowl AND to my dismay the bowl  actually mysteriously disappeared during our picking!  DISPITE the last 15 minutes of our trip I spent hunting down the isles for it.  Ah well. 

It was probably not the best idea to go blueberry picking right before lunch time, but we didn’t think of that when we left for our outing.  We tried to convince Alyssa to pick and eat the blueberries from the bushes, but she insisted on eating them out of the box.  So for most of our trip our blueberry pickings disappeared faster than I could fill it.  Hmmm sounds familiar to the strawberry pickings you say?  The only difference from our strawberry experience is that Evan was also helping to empty the box!  So we had 1 blueberry box filler, 1 baby holder and 2 blueberry box emptiers.  In the end we came home with 2 pounds of blueberries and ONLY because my mom took the kids for a ride in the stroller while I finished picking the berries! lol

In the end we came home with 2 pounds of blueberries for $4.00 and ONLY because my mom took the kids for a ride in the stroller while I finished picking the berries!

You can sort of see in the picture below that the bottom of my box is BARELY covered.  Two pounds sounds like a lot, but I’m pretty sure we ate the whole thing in 2 days…maybe less.  When we got home my dad was like, wow now we can make a pie.  I laughed because I knew by the end of the day there would very likely not be enough berries to make a pie. 

I went to the grocery store this week and they had blueberries on sale $3.20 for 2 pounds!  I bought 10 pounds.  We’ve eaten 4 and I have 6 pounds frozen in the freezer. lol

We celebrated Evan’s birthday a week early because my parents were in town the week before his “real” birthday.  We didn’t have a big shabang, just a little after dinner cake party with our neighbors and one of our church friends. 

It actually just started out that I was going to make a little cake for Evan to enjoy with just our family.  

Then we were outside talking with our neighbors a couple days before and we decided to invite them over for cake too.  (Hysmith and Peterson Clan)

Then I was talking on the phone with my friend from church and decided to see if they wanted to come over too.  (Hennessy Family)

So now that I had invited over a few more people than I was originally expecting I decided to make some sort of fun cake.  I got on the internet and found directions for this really cool monkey cake.  Except then I was thinking that Evan probably needed a milk free cake and so I figured I should make a “real” cake for everyone else.  That’s when the giraffe cake entered the picture, especially since the monkey cake turned out to be really fun to make.  Here is the progress of my cake making.

Rice milk cake – to be the monkey            Regular cake – to be the giraffe

I had to do surgery on the “bear ears” of the cake to bring them down a bit for a more monkey shaped head.  Original iced monkey to the left.  Finished product monkey cake to the right.  I decided that the dark icing blended in too much so I made the nose, mouth and added a little hair in a lighter color brown.  When I was done I was slightly disappointed because I liked the original iced monkey better, ah well.

Here’s the progress on the giraffe.  I just added tons and tons of icing to make the triangled ears which ended up falling off and I had to stick them back on using my fingers.  I was pretty freaked out at first, but it you couldn’t even tell when I was done. To Luke’s excitement I used dum dum suckers for the giraffe’s head. Why in the world do giraffe’s have pointed knots at the top of their heads anyway?!

So onto the party! :)

Evan opened a few gifts…or rather we had the other kids open his presents for him since he was only interested in the “actual gift.”  Thanks to everyone he now finally has a few really cool boy toys and fun outfits.  

My dad was especially excited to give Evan a USC outfit which turns out currently fits Alyssa! So he was even more excited to see it on Alyssa.  Alyssa was equally excited about the outfit and wore it 2 days in a row!

We then moved on to the main event of the evening….

        CAKE!

We lit a candle, sang happy birthday and let Alyssa do the honors this time around.

Evan LOVED his cake.  I let him “dig in” to his cake, since I figured noone else would want the rice milk cake anyway. :)  Luke got a great video of Evan eating his cake!

He started out pretty clean, but then he just kept at it and inevitably gooed himself up. We did give him a piece of cake on a plate, but after he sucked off all the icing he handed it back to us. lol 

I think the cake was the highlight of the party!  After everyone had had their cake we called it quits for Evan.  We took off his clothes and cleaned him up a bit and then he was in bed sleeping before his guest left. :)  Ah the life of a one year old. 

     HAPPY 1st BIRTHDAY BUDDY!