Macy Mondays

We LOVE Macy Mondays!!  David loves having a playmate all day long, and I love how well he and Macy play together and keep each other entertained.  

enjoying some warm autumn weather 

9.20.10

painting with apples

9.27.10

cuddling Lida

9.27.10

A New Year's Visit

On New Year's Day, Carrie and Andy came for an overnight visit. The boys had fun playing together...mostly with trucks. They also had a great time blowing raspberries with their food. It was a lot of fun to see them together now that they're old enough to interact a bit more.

Carrie brought supplies to make these great reusable shopping bags out of old plastic bags. We only finished one big one (and a midget one), but we have enough plastic bags to make many more. This is just one of the many reasons why I love Carrie so much...she's always full of fun, useful and crafty ideas.

Thanksgiving Snack-tacular

The short days have begun to wear on us. After dinner, Keith and I look at each other and at the clock and say, "what are we going to do with this kid for another two hours?" If it were summer, we'd go for a walk or a bike ride or at least play in the yard, but when it's dark at 6:00 PM, our options are limited.

A few evenings ago, we decided to make the most of our late-fall evening family time by doing something fun and productive...an activity, if you will. I had seen the idea for these little Thanksgiving treat bags in a magazine and bought all the supplies to make them with David. Now when I say "with David," I am fully aware of what that would mean in reality. David would scoop one load of pretzels, miss the bag, dump them on the floor, and then catch sight of the candy corn and spend the rest of "activity time" snacking while I filled all the bags.

I have to say though, I was pleasantly surprised by what happened. David stood on a chair and carefully filled eleven bags with snacks. He did so with great concentration (so much so that he didn't even both to taste the goodies until at least half the bags were filled). Of course, he spilled some and took great pleasure in letting us know each time ("uh-oh, uh-oh"), but overall he did an amazing job.

When the bags were finished, I asked him who we should give them to. His answer? You guessed it....Papa....and Tutu.

See more snack-bag-filling photos.

Taking this blogging thing seriously

I've been finding small chunks of time to scrapbook here and there in the past few weeks, and I'm proud to say that I'm almost up to date with David's books (yes, he has three so far; yes, I know that's ridiculous; yes, I know I'll be in trouble when kid #2 comes along). My only regret is that I didn't keep better notes on all of David's milestones, big and small. He has grown and learned so much in his first year, and I know I won't be able to capture all of that in his albums. So I'm going to do my best to blog more often as a way to keep up with all that he's doing (Goal #1).

A few months ago, I set up a twitter account to record some of the bits and pieces that make up David's day. I haven't been too consistent with that either, but I think it's a great tool and would love to make better use of it (Goal #2). Basically, it's like a blog for very short blurbs of information. The idea is that you post what you're doing at any given moment during the day. It won't work quite that way for me because I don't always have ready access to a computer. Instead, I'll try to post things as often as I can. It will be a great way to document all the small things that David learns and does that don't quite warrant an entire blog post. You can create your own twitter account and "follow" me, if you like, or just check the updates in the right-hand column of this blog.

On the other hand, our general family scrapbooks are sadly behind. I have just a couple pages to finish in the 2006 book, but haven't bothered with it because scrapbooking a baby is much more fun. I also had fun a few nights ago beginning our 2007 book. I've decided to go digital (or at least give it a try) for these "year in the life of Goldfi" albums, and I created this first page.

I had a major realization though, that I could save myself a lot of time and headache if I actually kept up with this blog. If I posted about each noteworthy event throughout the year, it would be so easy to go back and pull the photos and even journaling from each post to put together my scrapbook. So Goal #3 (which is very similar to Goal #1) is to blog really well this year. This also means that I'm going to retroactively blog some events that are weeks and months old. You might notice some random posts popping up in the archives of the blog (if you even pay attention to that sort of thing), and now you'll know why.

So wish me luck...to me, preserving memories is almost as important as making them, and I'm hoping these goals will help me to do a much better job of that.

Digital Scrapbooking Success

The other night, I created my first from-scratch digital scrapbook page using Storybook Creator Plus. It was very fun, and I didn't even have a mess to clean up when I was finished! Check it out:

The journaling on the page says:

Each week that you were growing in my belly, Daddy took a picture of us by the front door. As your due date approached, my belly got bigger and bigger. You arrived two weeks early, and so we took a week 39 photo just for fun. Having you on the outside is so much nicer.