The Gift

Thanks to Grandma for sending Jamie an awesome new tv seat for his birthday:

And some video of the kids acting silly, too:


Winter 2013 Kids from Kristin York on Vimeo.

I Love Lucy

I know that everyone thinks their kid is the smartest, cutest, funniest kid in the world ... but I know it for real.

Here's a recap of our weekend:

I took the kids for haircuts.  This was Lucy's first haircut, and she has been waiting for months to shorten her hair.  Poor kid, I kind of can't blame her because it is a beast to comb.  Hours of torture at the hands of mommy and a brush.  Eric desperately didn't want her to cut it and I (though feeling guilty about it) didn't either, as I had a feeling all her sweet curls would disappear.  I wanted to hang on to those as long as possible.

So, we get to the mall salon and Lucy hops right up into the chair and announces to everyone that this is her first haircut ever and do you want to know why she's getting her hair cut?  "Sometimes when I'm pooping" ... at this point every single person in the salon stopped what they were doing and looked at her ... "I tilt my head back and my hair gets stuck in my crack.  That's why I need a haircut."

She also pulled apart her lampshade, wrote her name on it and wore it on her head for a while.  I've got a picture in my mind of some party in the 1980s that's missing her here.

As well as spending a quiet afternoon watching Netflix on the ipad with her favorite unicorns, who also were required to wear headphones.

She seriously cracks me up.

Flat Stanley Visits

Hi Kate!  Hi Mrs. DiFrederic’s class!

Thanks so much for sending me to Ames, Iowa to visit the York family.  I had a super fun time and learned a lot about Iowa while I was there.  I hope you enjoy learning about Iowa too!

Here I am on a map of the United States.  Maine is all the way in the northeast corner of the country and has an ocean border with coastline.  The state of Maine is yellow on this map with a picture of a lighthouse, can you see it?  I am pointing to Iowa here.  Iowa is right in the middle of the country with no ocean borders, but there are rivers to both the east (Mississippi River) and west (Missouri River) of the state.  The state of Iowa is red on this map with a picture of a pig, can you see it?

Bangor, Maine and Ames, Iowa are 1,600 miles apart.  If you got in your car and drove without stopping it would take you 26 hours.  That is more than one whole day!

Ames, Iowa is almost exactly in the center of the state.

This is Lucy and Jamie in front of their house in Ames.  The houses in Iowa look a lot like the houses in Maine, but one difference is that almost all the roads are completely straight.  There are very few turns and curves.

You can see there is snow on the ground right now.  Iowa does get cold and it does get snow, but the winter comes later and is shorter.  Iowa doesn’t get nearly as much snow as Maine does, especially this winter.

Iowa is on the plains.  It is flat here with not a lot of trees.  Flat means it is very windy a lot of the time!

And windy means wind power.  There are windmills all over the place in Iowa.  Lucy and Jamie’s mommy works at a school that gets electricity from two windmills.  I visited the windmill at the school, but it’s not nearly as big as most of the windmills.  I wish I had gotten to see a wind farm, where there are 100 windmills or more, but the wind farms are far away from Ames and we didn’t visit one.  The windmill here is over 100 feet tall, even though I look taller than it in the picture! 

Most of the flat open spaces in Iowa are used to grow corn or soybeans.  Farming is very important to people here and there are a lot of jobs on farms or with farm products.  People also raise pigs, cows, and chickens for meat, milk, and eggs.  Do you know what a corn silo looks like?  They are very modern!

These are silos.  Most of the farms are very large.  Corn is stored in silos because the corn grown here is mostly not for people to eat.  It is grown to feed animals or make ethanol.  Do you know what ethanol is?  It’s super silly: Ethanol is gas for your car that is made from corn!

This is the ethanol factory.  There is a tractor trailer truck with a tanker trailer that is full of ethanol ready to bring to a gas station.

There are a lot of farm equipment stores around Ames.  I visited on with Lucy and got to sit in a tractor!

 This is me on a tractor.  You can see how big the tractor is compared to me.  There are also tractors that are called combines that are even bigger, and used to harvest corn.  Some combines cost over $1,000,000.  That’s a lot of money!

The tractors were a lot of fun to see.

Can you see how big the tire is compared to me and to Lucy?  It would make a great tire swing!

In Iowa and all over the midwest, the states on the plains in the middle of the country, water towers are important town landmarks.  They are very tall and you can see them from miles away.  Every town has its own water tower, and people in the town are very proud of them and how they look.  Sometimes they have special designs that show visitors something about the town. 

Ames has one kind of water tower:

And the water tower at Iowa State University looks different too:

Iowa State University is in Ames, where I visited.  It’s like the University of Maine but way bigger.  In fact, there are almost as many students at Iowa State University as there are in Bangor, Maine.  About 30,000!

The mascot for the university is the Cyclone, or Cy the cardinal (bird).  A cyclone is also called a tornado and there are tornados in Iowa sometimes.  This picture is at the entrance to Iowa State University and the sculpture next to me is supposed to look like a cyclone.

College football is very important to people here.  People are very excited about games and lots of people wear t-shirts to show they are fans of Iowa State University.  The football stadium is named Jack Trice Stadium and can hold up to 55,000 people.  That’s way more people than live in Bangor, Maine!  Ames gets very crowded when there are football games at Iowa State.

Thanks again for sending me for a great visit to Iowa State University and Ames, Iowa.  I learned a lot about Iowa and the midwest and I hope you did too!

Love, Flat Stanley

February 2013

December 2012

Race to 2013...

Thanksgiving was uneventful, just the four of us, and December went by in a flash.  I spent much of the month of November sick and recovering, about 4 weeks, and much of December playing catch up and trying desperately to get a Christmas picture of the kids together.  Ha.

Fall hike, nope.

 Sweet evening on the couch, nope.

 You're kidding, right mom?

 Why yes, we're wearing our bathing suits in the back yard with some red shirts on over them.  And yes, Jamie's shirt is on backwards so the print won't show in our Christmas photo.  Ha.

 Lucy held Jamie down.

 I strapped him down.

 Eric propped him up.

 I bribed with television and candy.  That worked well.

 In the park?  Nope.

 More fruit snacks!

  This is me, from behind bars after I have officially gone crazy trying to get a Christmas card photo.

 To another park?  No again.

 This one is sweet and I like the light, but not to send to our relatives and friends.

 I'm getting desperate.

 Now why, why aren't these my children?

 This is how I felt.  Sweet as pie, I think Jamie is the least photogenic child on the planet. 

Christmas wrap-up to come!

Happy Birthday Eric!

We'll never tell how old you are ... and it won't matter because you can't remember.

The kids and I finally made the Fun-da-middles cupcake box that Grandma sent ages ago (for some occasion, maybe Lucy's birthday?)  They were delicious, kids and cupcakes too.  Unfortunately the baking process didn't exactly allow Lucy to fill the tins by herself, but there was plenty of time for the kids to help and get sugared.

 Mommy's little helpers like the mixer.

 And the beaters.

 Poor Jamie went to bed before we sang and ate cupcakes.  Stinks to be little.  Lucy looks like she's plotting to steal Eric's wish. 

Hope it's a great year!

Art Class

Lucy took an afternoon art class through parks and rec with her preschool teacher Miss Karla this fall.  Since I saw there were 2 spaces available, we asked if Quinn would like to come as well.  I picked her up at her daycare after lunch (and sometimes kept her to play for the afternoon) and it was a lot of fun. 

The projects the girls made were adorable and apparently Quinn is talking about being an artist when she grows up.  Lucy, not so much.  We haven't talked about career aspirations lately but she'd been talking about being a pink and purple doctor in space.

Both girls sat intently through the 50 minutes of art class - they had about 10 minutes to play in the preschool at the start of every class.  Quinn was way more excited about the free play, but Lucy's there every day and they toys aren't new.  This is the Thanksgiving decoration - a stuffed turkey with loops.  The turkey is stuffed with newspaper, though, not bread.  That was good for a giggle.

Some finished products: a primary/secondary color study and the stuffed turkey.  Quinn is a much more precise and neat artist than Lucy.  It's not quite as evident in these projects but I've got a fingerpainting picture on my phone that is hysterical.  Miss Karla said Lucy's excitement level for fingerpainting was an 11 on a scale of 1-10.  Turkey stuffing day was much less thrilling.

Though Lucy has been at Small Wonders for over a year now, I rarely get to see Miss Karla in action.  She was great - every step had a lesson.  They talked about facial structure, what a loop is, patterns in the colors of the turkey comb, body parts, what to paint and what colors things might be in real life, etc.  The kids responded to her very well and were enthusiastic about sharing what they knew.

The girls were ever so proud of themselves.

 The painting of the turkey was intense.

 And the feathering of the turkey was even more intense.  A dot is a lot when it comes to glue and making sure the perfect amount of glue is on your paper is not easy work.  There was a little scuffling over the most beautiful feathers.  As in most of her friend-related interactions, Lucy totally steamrolled.  Quinn smiled and quietly found similar feathers in the pile, no longer showing them off to Lucy.  Fool me once ...  They ended up with almost exactly the same feathers on their turkeys, as Lucy has now decided that her favorite colors are pink, purple, red, and orange, just like Quinn.

 Beautiful, happy girls after a great art class experience.  Thanks Miss Karla and thanks Quinn!