An Interview With a Three Year Old

Recently, Jack turned 3.  Did you know that he also turned into a little man?  He says thinks like “that’s unfortunate!” and “How in the world did that get there?”  His vocabulary is incredible, and I love having conversations with him. 

After catching up with my favorite blogs in my Reader, I saw that a bloggy friend’s daughter just turned 3 this month as well.  She did an interview with her daughter and plans to do this every year to see how things change.  I love that idea, and I’ve seen it around other places and have been meaning to do this before.  Here is my interview with Jack, my just-turned-three year old.

1. what is your favorite color? Green

2. what is your favorite toy? John Deere

3. what is your favorite fruit? Grapefruit (really? it’s not the blueberries or strawberries you ask for EVERY DAY?)

4. what is your favorite t.v. show? John Deere or Winnie the Pooh (I asked it twice, and got two different answers)

5. what is your favorite thing to eat for lunch?  grapefruit (again, really?)

6. what is your favorite outfit? John Deere pj’s  (he doesn’t own any)

7. what is your favorite game? Marbles (he just finished playing a magnet marble game that he never plays)

8. what is your favorite snack? fish crackers (I never buy these, but he knows about them!!)

9. what is your favorite animal? fish or zebras (I asked it twice as well, and the answers were different each time)

10. what is your favorite song? I can’t say

11. what is your favorite book? Otis (By Loren Long is currently on loan from the library. It’s about a tractor)

12. who is your best friend? Roo (from Winnie the Pooh)

13. what is your favorite cereal? Frosted Mini Wheats (he likes to eat just the frosted part)

14. what is your favorite thing to do outside? play in the mud (we don’t play outside all that often)

15. what is your favorite drink? milk

16. what is your favorite holiday? Christmas (I’m surprised he knew what holiday meant)

17. what do you like to take to bed with you at night? Pooh

18. what is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast? Frosted Mini Wheats (really?  Not the pancakes you ask for EVERY DAY?)

19. what do you want for dinner on your birthday? No answer

20. what do you want to be when you grow up? A TRACTOR!!!

The final answer was my absolute favorite answer of all time.  I love my little tractor boy!

Three Sisters A Shop

Have I ever told you how many cousins Jack has?  He has 8 cousins.  This may seem like a standard amount of cousins to grow up with, or it may even seem like very few to you.  But to me, it seems like a lot.  Until I was in high school, I had 2 cousins.  TWO! And they were about 16 years older than me.    Then, 20 years ago, my youngest cousin was born, and I now have a total of 3 first cousins.  That made for very small family gatherings growing up. 

Jack will grow up with different family dynamics.  Thanks to my sister, he has two cousins on my side of the family.  And thanks to my husband’s sister and brother, he has 6 cousins and counting.  Our family gatherings with Rick’s side of the family are much bigger (and louder) than my side.  Here is a look at all the cousins on that side:

 

Aren’t they beautiful?  (pardon the littlest girl’s skin…she had fun putting ‘makeup’ on that day with some markers she found) Thanks to our newest member, the boys aren’t so out numbered like they used to be!  It’s going to be fun watching those boys grow up together.

The three oldest girls are possibly the most creative girls I know.  They are also the most talented girls.  They write, draw, paint, take pictures, knit, crochet, and who knows what else?!  The oldest has a passion for all things British.  She is planning to study in England someday (hopefully at the end of this year). That isn’t cheap, as we all know, so she and 2 of her sisters have created an Etsy shop to sell their creative wares. This will help her (and any of the others if they can someday) get to England to study and work.

Want to see what they make? Here’s a sample:

Look at how cute these little dolls are!  Aren’t they adorable?

And these little animals.  So sweet!

 

They also make paper crafts like these flower  balls. They’re bright and fun!

These notecards are all personally hand drawn by the youngest of the three sisters.

Head on over to Three Sisters A Shop on Etsy to check out everything they have to offer.  I’m so proud to be their aunt, and I couldn’t be happier to advertise for them here.  I can’t wait to hear all about her trip to England…we’ll be able to swap stories then!

Jack is 3! (And a Few Growth Chart Moments)

Jack had a birthday last weekend.  I can’t believe my little guy is 3 already!  Here is a collage of his 3 birthdays

We had a very small celebration the morning of his birthday.  Rick and I had decorated the kitchen after Jack was in bed, and we laid out his many presents for him to see when he came downstairs in the morning.  He was surprised, that’s for sure. 

We don’t do a big Christmas – only three presents each – but we love to do big birthdays.  Actually, I should rephrase that. We don’t do a big Christmas for JACK, but do do big birthdays for JACK.  When it comes to us, we still do birthdays pretty low key. It’s so fun to lavish Jack with presents!  It’s also hard to resist the toys in the toy aisle when everything you look at shouts “Jack would LOVE this!”  So, we over did it.  I’m not worried about it.

The other big part of Jack’s birthdays is the cake.  We love being ‘creative’ with his cakes.  When I had a minor computer crash last year, I lost very few photos.  We were really lucky.  But the one set of photos that we did loose were last year’s birthday pictures.  So, if you want to see our AMAZING (well, impressive perhaps, but amazing, I’m not sure) train cake from last year’s birthday, please check out last year’s birthday post.  We were pretty proud of that one. This year I found a cake on Pinterest that I knew had to be Jack’s birthday cake this year.  The original is so much prettier than mine, but ours turned out much better than I thought it would.  This was a super easy cake to put together!

The fun part was that the inside was a surprise- it was construction colors.  If you go to the original link, you can see how much better hers was.  And you can see a picture tutorial on how to make the diagonal cake design from one of her links. 

The best part is that Jack loved it.  He wanted to help the backhoe dig up the cake.

Jack’s such a big boy now.  He’s completely potty trained – even at night.  He talks up a storm, using words and phrases like “I realized I had the wrong one..” and “I’ve been thinking about ….”  He uses utensils like a champ when he eats .  He listens to chapter books at bedtime now (Magic Treehouse). He wants to do everything himself and he’s usually pretty good about doing it right.  He helps us cook and even puts the toothpaste on his own toothbrush without smooshing too much out on the brush.    We’re very proud of him and hope we haven’t ruined him yet in his first three years.  Hopefully he’ll get a little brother or sister this year.  That was our hope last year, but it looks like this year will be more likely.  Fingers are crossed!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACK!

Time For My Bi-Annual Junk Drawer Cleaning

It’s amazing to me that I let something get so messy and leave it so messy for YEARS.  Who does that???  Almost two years ago I wrote a post about how I cleaned my junk drawer.  In that post, I mentioned how I had cleaned it out a few years before, but that it had gotten out of hand over time.  So, I have to assume that every two years I will clean out this junk drawer.  At least It gets cleaned.  Eventually.

Here is the before THIS time:

I think I see the trays in there from last time I organized.

After cleaning everything out and throwing a lot away, here is the after photo:

I think it’s even better than the after photo from last year time.  The two jars are what I love the most.  One jar holds twist ties and the other holds gumbands.  Raise your hand if you know what gumbands are!  (put your hand down, Mom.  I KNOW you do!)

I know you come here for riveting posts. Glad I could provide for you. 

Change of Scenery

I’m finally coming to terms with the fact that, while I really like my blog theme and layout, it’s time for a change.  I am going to call this “done” for now, even though I’ll probably tweak it some in the days or weeks to come.  I’d love to incorporate my old header with some new inspiration.  I wonder if I’ll ever figure out what that means and how to do it.  I’ve got some ideas up my sleeve, but the time must have fallen out. 

Thanks for still hanging around.  Just think….you can say, “I’ve been here since she had that busy so long ago.”

I’m Not Dead! (And Our Floors Are done)

I don’t think there were too many people out there wondering if I’d actually died or not, but I’m sure someone other than my mother was wondering if I was ever going to blog again.  I am!

I’d like to get back into a sporadic-regular blogging schedule, but we’ll let that work itself out in the future.  I have tons of stuff (by tons I mean about 5) to blog about, but I haven’t had the motivation to actually sit down and get any of it into word form. 

Anyway, I thought I’d update you on our floors.  They’re done!  They were done before Christmas, which meant we were able to host our annual family Christmas Eve celebration with my sister’s family and our mom.  I LOVE that Christmas get-together.  I love them all, really, but because this is the only one I host, it seems more special to me I guess.

Here is a look at our floors in the few Christmas pictures I could find that showed off our floors. I never took a really great AFTER picture, so these will have to suffice. 

This was the night that we actually finished.  I was in love.  We have since changed out the metal registers for wooden ones.

Here is the widest shot we have from our Christmas Eve party.  Those are my sister’s boys.  Jack (and the rest of us) LOVE them!   You can see how our dark coffee table and our dark secretary (in the back to the left of the tree) look with our dark floors now.  I like it. Though, I have my eyes on a light beige shag rug (that I’m hoping comes way down in price soon) to put under that coffee table.

This is our Christmas morning.  You may notice an absence of presents under the tree.  We usually stick to the rule of 3 presents for each of us, but this year, Rick and I decided to count our floors as our gift to each other, so we didn’t get gifts for ourselves.  I love how, on Christmas morning, I asked Jack “It’s Christmas morning, do you know what that means?” and his response was “Yeah!!  We get to get out the train!!” 

This last picture is blurry.  Too blurry to show as a good picture on a blog – unless you’re trying to show the length of the new floors you just put in, and you’re trying to protect the identity of the Plasma Car thief in our house.  It also does a good job of hiding the clutter in our kitchen. 

We love our floors, but it was HARD WORK putting them in.  It took about a week (or 2) longer than we expected, and we had two big situations that required us to pull up floor that had already been laid.  It was very interesting ad frustrating. 

Thanks for still hanging around my blog to see if I’m alive.  I appreciate all my readers, even the ones who never comment.  If you are so inclined, please leave me a comment today saying that YOU’RE alive, so I know if anyone other than my mother reads my blog.  I have missed you, blog friends! I hope to be around more often on your blogs as well as writing more posts for my own blog.

Happy 2012!