Happy Arbor Day

I'll get to the Arbor Day thing in a few minutes. :-) We had a nice week. We visited Grandma Betty on Wednesday for a little bit. Ella's speech was cancelled on Thursday but Andrew said I should still take her out. So we went out for lunch and visited the library where she picked out her own books. She picked Curious George Takes a Train and How Does a Dinosaur Say Goodnight, among others. It was fun to go out with just Ella. It's funny to think that's how I used to spend my day before Lily came along.

Ella is obsessed (or should I say she's very nurturing) with her Wilbur pig. We take it EVERYWHERE. She has to tuck it in for naps and bedtime. She shushes me when its "sleeping". She feeds it. Worries that the sun is too bright for his eyes. She puts him in the doll stroller and Lily's booster chair at the table. I've never seen her so attached to anything. It's very adorable in some respects. He's filthy as, well, a pig. She's not aware, but the Easter bunny purchased a second pig from Target and its hiding in our closet should we need to "replace" Wilbur due to unfortunate circumstances.

One of her favorite things to do lately is play zoo. She found our play yard baby gate and decided to set it up in the living room. Then she set her pig and various other animals outside the gate. Found a piece of her train track roughly the size of a digital camera and proceeded to tell me she was at the zoo and taking pictures of the "animals." (Okay, maybe I take a few too many pictures). ;-)

I know I tend to post more Ella stories, but really Lily is at the "Monkey See, Monkey Do" stage. So mostly whatever I say about Ella, Lily tries to do the same thing in her own limited manner.

The girls spent last night with Grandpa Gary and Gramma Clare. While they were there, Andrew and I made a trip to Menards. We filled our cart with a hose, a fashionable hose "box" to hide it, various cleaning supplies, and a deck box to hold our chair cushions and the kids folding chairs. We were standing in the check out line and an older couple behind us said, "So, how long have you had your house?" I laughed and said, "Since December" and Andrew said, "Is it that obvious?" They laughed and said they could tell it was our first "season". :-)

Andrew mowed the lawn for the first time today. And we had Grand Tom and Grand Pat come in for a visit. We spent the evening playing with the girls in the backyard. (Okay here's where the Arbor Day greetings come in.) In honor of Arbor Day, Tom and Pat brought us a pine tree seedling to plant in our backyard. So we dug a little hole, planted the tree, and took the girls first picture by it. I have a feeling we'll be taking the girls picture there often to see how they grow along with it. :-)

I've add a new April album to the pictures website, so enjoy!

A treasure hunting we will go....

Do you see anything in there Ella?

At the Arboretum I came prepared to take the girls on a "treasure hunt". I knew there was a letterbox located there, so I printed out the clues and brought our stamps. When we got near the area where I knew the box was located, I asked Ella, "Do you want to go on a treasure hunt with me?" She got very excited. (Lily was sleeping in the stroller at the time so I participated for her.) We followed the clues and had to go off the paved path a bit, but Ella was game and followed right along. And there in a tree, we found our first letterbox! Ella was very excited!

Oh, there it is!

We opened the box and looked through what other people had stamped and written. And then I got out our stamps and ink pad and Ella put a dolphin stamp in for her and a frog stamp for Lily. Then we put the letterbox's palm frond (or maybe it was a fern) stamp in Ella and Lily's books.

Here's our entry into the letterbox's notebook.

Ella had so much fun, she wanted to keep "treasure hunting". She wanted to find "More!". I told her there were a lot more "treasures" we could find, but they were in different places and we would have to find them on a different day. She seemed satisfied with that answer and resigned herself to treasure hunting on a another day. :-)

PS. If you haven't noticed from the pictures....Ella's little pig, Wilbur, travels with us EVERYWHERE! See if you can spot him!

Keeping Busy

Spring has finally sprung!! I can't tell you how excited I am by this. Yes, I appreciate the seasons once again now that we're living in Minnesota. And snow in April (as it did last week) is just NOT fun! And what is even more NOT fun is that there were a couple really nice days before that which led me to believe that the cold yucky weather was behind us. Ha! Well, knock on wood, I hope it really is behind us now. Currently, as I write this, I am sitting on our deck basking in the glow of a nice 70-degree sun while the kiddos take their nap.

It seems we've been crazy busy lately, but it doesn't really seem like I have a lot to report. I'm having deja vu, have I written that before? We pretty much only have to really plan our day on Mondays and Wednesdays now which is nice. We have our Ari/Jody playdate on Tuesdays and Ella's speech appts. on Thursdays and Fridays. The weekends seem to just whip by.

There is a park about a 1/2 mile from our house which is wonderful, we can walk to it! So we've done that a few days. Some of the pictures in this post are from there. I've started getting books from the library for Ella. And she loves it! She has really gotten into having me read to her which is so great. And I have way too much fun picking out books for her. I try to find ones with things that interest her in them: princesses (Disney and generic princesses), dinosaurs, balloons, trains, fairies, etc. And if I can combine any of those into one book, well I've hit the lottery! She has one right now entitled, "Princess Dinosaur". She is on a Curious George kick right now which is fun because they have books that I can incorporate with other things like Curious George goes to the Zoo, or the Aquarium. There is a new firehouse that just opened down the road from us and we pass it pretty much any time we go anywhere. So we got some books for her to learn about what goes on there. The other night she fell asleep in her bed with books all around her! I just can't think of a sweeter picture!

Andrew had to work all weekend because the New York Rangers made the playoffs. They called on Friday and said they wanted all this stuff done by Monday so they could put it up on the electronic billboards in Times Square. All of them, at once! At any rate, it was a looong weekend for everyone. But as a reward we spent some family time together this morning. We visited the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum which is about 7 miles from where we live. We loved it there! So much so that we put today's admission toward a membership so we can go whenever we want. There are fairly easy stroller-friendly walking trails all over. There's one place where there are little houses for kids to play in and a "treehouse". I put that in quotes because there used to be a tree that the treehouse sat in, but the tree was struck by lightning in 2001 and they cut all but part of the trunk down. So now its a trunk with some stairs and a roofed platform. They also have a really nice Visitor Center there and many activities throughout the year. For those familiar with the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, CA, it reminded us quite a bit of that, but with Midwestern landscapes and trees. And not quite so regulated. You can picnic and hike and go pretty much wherever you like. There's also a three-mile road you can drive around if you like. Anyway, a great family place.



I also like to do little projects with the girls every now and then. Here's a picture of one:I picked out these little snap-on things for their shoes. They wear these on when they play on the deck and sometimes around the yard. I picked ones that I thought sort of "represented" them; Lily got Nemo, a frog, and a turtle while Ella got a princess crown, dinosaur, whale, penguin and monkey (for Curious George). The girls had a lot of fun picking out each thing to put on and telling me where to snap them on their shoes. I found the little snap things at Michael's craft store near the checkout.

Hmm...what else. The girls and I have spent a couple Sundays over at my dad's house so Andrew could have some time to himself or work (as was the case this past weekend). Yesterday was so nice, my dad got the sand box out and the tee ball. The girls had a blast playing in the yard. Ella was really hitting the teeball well! She bats left-handed but throws right-handed! She's just so Ella! :-)

Happy Easter!

We traveled to Racine to visit Andrew's family for Easter weekend. We had a very nice time. The girls were very excited to find eggs with candy in them in the morning. (They've been practicing with empty eggs for the past couple weeks.) And they loved their Easter baskets. Ella got the Charlotte's Web DVD and a little Fur Real Friends pig that oinks and makes little noises. Lily received the Happy Feet DVD and a lamb like Ella's pig. We enjoyed visiting with everyone during Easter dinner and relaxing afterwards.

Hope you all had a nice Easter!

A Banner Day in the Isaacson Household

Okay, some of this may be TMI (too much information) for some of you. But we believe (knock on wood) that Ella is finally potty-trained!!! We just got fed up last week and told Ella when her current pull-ups were gone, we weren't going to buy any more. We have been trying to potty train her for a year and a half. In January I thought maybe we were close. I think I posted that I bought the Little Mermaid vanity as a reward/bribe for her. She earned stickers each time she would go potty on the toilet. When she finished the chart, she could have the vanity. Well, that was not enough incentive for her. I guess she didn't want the vanity THAT much. It sat in her closet for months. Every now and then we would get to add a sticker.

Well, she took the news of no more pull-ups pretty well. And was actually excited about wearing big girl underwear. On our trip to Target this week, she went over to the underwear all by herself and picked some out. She used her Dora seat (yes, I've been carrying it around everywhere we go) at the grocery store, TGIFriday's and a pancake restaurant we went to.

All this time she would only go #1 on the potty, but #2 was another issue. Then, last night after we tucked her into bed, she got up to use the bathroom and then excitedly called for me. She had to show me her "accomplishment." She had gone #2 in the toilet!! Finally, she is offically potty trained! We used the last pull-up yesterday. She's been rationing them, about one a day for a week.

And this morning Ella got to play with her Little Mermaid vanity for the first time!!! We are all extremely thrilled with this particular milestone! Here she is in all her Little Mermaid glory!

Randomness for a Sunday Morning

This morning I logged into Google as part of usual morning routine, and glanced over the news headlines. I read this article on cnn.com about Amelia Earhart which I found to be really fascinating. It suggests that she and her navigator didn't crash into the ocean as once thought, but perhaps landed near an atoll and were castaways for a bit. I've filed this one away in my brain to suggest to Ella or Lily if they ever have to do a school report on an important woman in American history or something like that.

Also on cnn.com, an article about global warming. My regular blog readers will know this is a topic of great interest to me and I am just amazed at the impact that Al Gore has made on the general public. Before his movie, An Inconvenient Truth came out, you barely heard about global warming, and many people didn't even know what it was. Now, I find information about it EVERYWHERE. There are articles almost daily on the internet news headlines. My Time magazine this week devoted a double issue to the topic. Anyway, just thought I would share and further promote this issue.