Saturday, April 24, 2010

Mommy's Little Helper Part 2


And the saga continues with today's cleaning task of wet-washing every surface in the house. This is our spray bottle (water only .... so far) and you can see Lucy has washed the cabinets and the fridge, but also all the windows she could reach, the entertainment center, low bathroom surfaces, and she even tried for the computer before I caught her and took the water away. What fun!

Mommy's Little Helper

I don't know where or how it happened, but Lucy is a bit of a clean freak. She hates to have dirt on her hands, despises the sand Shorty leaves behind on the couch after taking a walk, and positively goes crazy looking for bits of lint and debris to pick up off the floor. Where she learned this from I'm not sure, because although I don't think I'm a total slob, I'm certainly not as meticulous about it as Lucy would like me to be.

She's taken to "helping" with the chores. Here, she's unloading the dishwasher (dishes clean, thankfully). Without being asked twice I might add!

Monday, April 5, 2010

Easter Wishes

Last year (though she did have a peep) Lucy was really too young to enjoy Easter. This year, she didn't question why we hid eggs around the house but did thoroughly enjoy finding the chocolate in them. I tried to get her to put them into the basket but no luck there.

Eggs hiding in our house.

Beginning the hunt.

Early morning chocolate indulgence .....

..... and bliss.

Then we headed to Grandma & Grandpa's for another (can you believe it!) egg hunt and a delicious dinner. Sneakily, the Easter Bunny put socks and toy animals in most of the eggs at Grandma's, but it was fun hunting all the same.

And to top it all off there was a fun-filled basket waiting for us too, with some toys and a pinwheel that Lucy got the hang of right off.

Pinwheel spinning.



Lucy dancing like crazy to Uncle Ryan's music.



And the crowd goes wild!! Happy Easter!!

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Operation Pine Cone

Aptly executed for April Fool's Day, Lucy & I last night engaged in "Operation Pine Cone." As we're cleaning out what we're not moving to Iowa, I had a GIANT pine cone to get rid of (though Eric tells me it's from a Redwood, not a pine.) I'm certainly not moving that halfway across the country. I didn't want to just throw it away, so I got the idea to bring it into the university forest and leave it on a trail just to freak someone out. It made me almost hysterical to think about someone finding this enormous cone beneath one of the little pine trees that grows in the woods around here.

Last night we went for a walk to actually drop the cone. It hadn't been raining for about an hour so I dressed everyone up and we headed out into what had become a downpour in the time it took me to get ready for walking. We've been wet before, right?

Shorty hates being wet.

Lucy, however, apparently doesn't mind at all.

Here is the approximate size of the cone:

It was pretty big. I walked around for a few minutes looking for the perfect spot, visible yet not too obvious, and thought I finally had it. To get another perspective shot I thought I'd put the cone on Lucy's stroller tray ...

... to which she protested by tossing the cone off the tray and down a steep embankment to a drainage ditch between the trail I was on and the paved bike path about twenty feet below.

Not to be deterred, I walked all the way down the path to the entry point to the paved bike path. This was a drop I probably wouldn't even have done by myself without a stroller, especially in the rain on the wet leaves. We found the cone and walked all the way back around to the point I had found to do the drop.

I am really hoping that this gets a great rise out of someone (and they not notice right off either the dust or that the top of the cone was chewed off by a wolf-hybrid). Unlike the time my roommate Dave and I threw oranges at the workers from the Beyer factory and they thought they were falling from the sky, I'll never get to see what I hope was a fantastic reaction to this absurd pine cone placement.

Lucy was pretty sad about that too.