Sibling day

In honor of national sibling day I thought I would post some pictures/videos of my two favorite kids.



Despite the constant fighting and crying, they really do love each other. Jack is a typical big brother and is always finding ways to get under Lily's skin. He likes to chase her and scare her, he thinks it's funny to trip her and put her toys out of reach. And in doing this, he is turning Lily into one tough cookie. She has given Jack his fair share of scratch and bite marks. No one will be able to mess with Lily once she is a little bigger.

But every once in a while, the crying and teasing and torturing stops and Jack and Lily have moments of pure love and enjoyment for each other.

Like when Lily will lay in bed with Jack at night and he will sing her a song. Or when she will bring him books and sit in his lap and he will read them to her.


Or when they hide together and he lets her share the iPad with him

Or when they just play together nicely...and all is well with the world 

Awesome biking skills

Jack learned to ride his bike with no training wheels this past week. We tried to take the training wheels off his 16" bike but it was too hard for him since the bike is pretty big. I went to Walmart and got a cheap 12" bike and he was riding with no training wheels after only 10 minutes. Way to go Jack!

Lily wanted a bike of her own, so I got her a strider bike and she loves it! 

Lily and her strider

Although, she does go pretty slow yet...

Cruising the lake

The Garden

Our apartment offers 10'x10' garden plots, so I decided it was time I learned how to plant food. I have never grown anything in my life so this will be quite the adventure.

The kids and I spent last week getting our plot ready. We spent several hours picking all the weeks and things out of our dirt. Jack absolutely loved it and already offered to pick weeds for our neighbors. Then the next day we went to till the ground with a huge tiller that was almost like a lawn mower. Come to find out, we could have skipped the whole picking weeds process and just tilled the ground first, then just pulled out the big weeds. Oh well.

Then we planned what vegetables we wanted to grow and went to buy seeds. Apparently there are only certain times when you can plant seeds so even though we had a whole list of seeds to buy, we only got a few that we can plant right now. So far we have planted carrots, broccoli, spinach and arugula. In the next few weeks we will add green beans and asparagus. And eventually we will also add tomatoes, cilantro, jalepenos, bell pepper and sweet peppers. I just hope something will grow. Jack is already looking forward to "his" carrots, so they better turn out. Otherwise I might just have to buy carrots at the store and plant them in our garden for Jack to find. :)

Getting the garden ready

Jack loves picking weeds

Lily loves dirt. She is not sleeping, she
is laying in the dirt. And then she
proceeded to eat the dirt...fresh
manure and all. 

First seeds planted

Other misc. news

Luke and my dad have started brewing beer. So far we have made an Ale, a Wheat and a Rye Pale Ale. It's quite a process and takes over a month from brew date to drink date. In fact, so far we have only been able to try the English Ale and it was quite delicious. I am looking forward to the Wheat beer as that is my favorite. Jack even got to make his own root beer which only had to sit for five days and was pretty tasty.

Transferring the beer

I have still been running and finally got myself a new stroller. I was using my double stroller, but I only run when Jack is in school now and it is really awkward running with a double stroller with only one kid in it. So I splurged and got a really nice single jogging stroller. Lily loves it and the best part is that it fits through our front door!! So now when she falls asleep, I can just bring the stroller inside and let her keep sleeping in it.

Luke started his new job and he spends three days a week in Colorado Springs. He leaves early Tuesday morning and then he comes home Thursday around dinner time. The kids try to skype him the nights he is gone.

It is becoming a ritual that we play charades when Luke gets home on Thursday night. I think this is Jack's all time favorite game.

Now that I have kitchenware again, I can finally bake! Yay! Although I quickly discovered that Lily is a butter fiend. She will devour butter like no one else. I now have to hide the butter whenever I use it to avoid any tantrums from denying her indulgence:

Lily "greasing" the pans

Luke's band

Luke and a couple of his buddies started a band and have been working on putting together a set so that we can go to the local open mic nights at the breweries. The band has no name yet, but we are working on it. They play great music and the kids love dancing to it. 

Jack decided he wanted to join the band too, so he is now their official "shaker"

Look who's talking

Lily has been talking up a storm lately. She can say at least 50 words and she is starting to combine words, like "more please" or "water please" etc. This video is a few months old, but you can hear some of the words she can say. I think it's funny that when you ask her to say "Lily" she says "Mama." (Sorry for the video. My phone is slowly dying and the audio/video are not in sync).

One of Lily's favorite things to say is "I know." This girl wants to do everything by herself!

Luke's Farewell England Trip

Luke had to fly back to England for a week to finish up the dirty work of cleaning out our storage. It was a sad and messy trip and I'm really glad I didn't have to do it. Although Luke and I did skype every morning and I watched as he went box by box through all our stuff and I had to decide what to keep and what to give away. It was a sad week. I hope I never have to do that again. 

Lily talking to Luke over skype

Luke's new job gave him some money to help us sent back 13 boxes of stuff. Each box cost about $100 to ship so we had to make sure that we filled it with more than $100 of value to make it worth it. We were able to send back things like our nice, expensive sheets, our hiking backpacks, our mementos, etc. About two weeks after Luke's trip all of the boxes were delivered. It was like Christmas all over again. Jack didn't even remember most of the toys that Luke had packed.

The kids inspecting the boxes

What a mess! Now we have to find space for all this stuff

Jack is most happy to have his Wii back. I think I am most happy for my food processor. It has been over two years since I've used it. I shipped it with us to Switzerland, but once we got there we realized we could never use it because of the power supply. So it sat unused for two years, and now I finally have it back again!