Awake the Lakes

"Awake the Lakes" is apparently the adverstising tagline for Memorial Day Weekend here in Minnesota. This explains the northern movement of three-quarters of the states' population "going up north to the lake" for the long weekend. Andrew and I decided to join the mad dash this year. We left early enough to miss most of the traffic on Friday but still saw our fair share of boats and camper stampers (as my stepdad, Dave would put it).

We made good time and arrived at the Grand View Lodge just north of Brainerd in Nisswa, MN. The lodge is located on Gull Lake which is over 9,000 acres! As we checked in, there was a sign saying the lodge was on the National Register of Historic Places. Upon further reading in the room, it was built in 1919 and added as a historic place in 1979. It's funny though, the trees grew so high around it, the view became more trees than lake. Meaning the view is not as grand as the name indicates. But it really is a wonderful place. Trees, paths, and flowers everywhere. A great beach on the lake with a poolside bar. A ton of different things to do. Very family-friendly. We may bring the girls with us and go back next Memorial Day weekend. Ironically, my People magazine just did a cover story on the 20th Anniversary of the movie Dirty Dancing and this place completely reminded me of the hotel in that movie. Complete with an activities schedule when we arrived! They had pontoon cruises, watercolor classes, campfires with s'mores, etc. We only took the pontoon cruise around the lake. It was pretty cool to see all the beautiful lake homes.

How Andrew spent a lot of his vacation

There are several golf courses associated with the lodge, and Andrew played three of them! Our room looked out on the 9th hole of the Woods course at the Pines. He played all three nines at The Pines and 9-holes with me at The Garden course (which is where all the people who don't know how to play golf go). And then he also played at Deacon's Lodge, which is a signature Arnold Palmer course. Andrew said every hole looked like a signature hole. He didn't play super great anywhere but he enjoyed himself. I got a 47 on the nine we played together, but I pretty much took a mulligan on each hole. I hadn't hit a golf ball in about 2 1/2 years and actually had a few really nice shots and could putt pretty well overall which was NEVER my strong suit. To say the least, we had a lot of fun!

We spent Saturday afternoon and evening up in Bemidji where our friends, Jon and Jess have a cabin. We stopped at the Northern Lights casino on the way there. Andrew had absolutely no luck at the Black Jack table, but did win the jackpot on a penny slot machine. He won 19,030 pennies!! Can you believe that?! We loved visiting with Jon and Jess and their family and seeing the cabin. We hope to get up to visit them again sometime when they are there.

How I spent a lot of my vacation

Other than that, I pretty much laid around and read all weekend while Andrew golfed and we ate and shopped and relaxed. It really was a wonderful vacation, especially when you know that we had nothing planned except the tee times and just decided to wing it the whole time. Everyting just sort of fell into place.

We came home Monday afternoon and found the girls had a great time with Grand Tom and Grand Pat. A giant thanks to them for watching the girls for us!

Grandma Mazie turns 80!

Last weekend our family celebrated my Grandma Mazie's (my dad's mom) 80th birthday with a surprise party! She thought we were all getting together on her actual birthday on Sunday, May 20th up at my aunt's cabin with just the family. She told everyone, "No party! I don't want a party!" But as the Engelhart's are, they didn't listen to her. And the family plus many friends and neighbors from the old neighborhood gathered to wish her well at Doyle's bowling alley (owned by a friend of the family). When she walked in she was floored! She had no idea and she was just shocked. Then she started in on us with a smile on her face, "I told you guys, no party!" :-) A good time was had by all, food, cake, bowling, and more. Plus, as my birthday gift to her, I put together a video of her life. It was so much fun to see the old photos of her and the rest of my family. I am planning on updating our Isaacson movies page very soon (in the next couple weeks) so look for it there!



In other news, we have been furniture shopping the last few months and purchased an entire room of furniture for our livingroom/dining room. The room is currently completely empty. The girls have commandeered it and are using it as a large gym/play area, but that will soon come to an end. By Thursday next week, we will have a dining room set. And by July (darn custom orders!) we'll have the living room stuff. It was a lot fun and somewhat stressful to make the decisions. As many of you who have visited us know, all the furniture in our house is pretty much from the IKEA catalog (Not that there's anything wrong with that:-). So it's a new thing to go to a furniture store and purchase real furniture that you don't have to put together yourself and you actually pay some money for. Hopefully everything we picked out will come together well! I'll of course post pictures when it all gets here.

This post is currently brought to you by me, sitting in a white lounge chair, on a beach with lake water lapping gently in the distance. Andrew and I are vacationing at the Grandview Lodge in Nisswa, MN for Memorial Day Weekend. More on that in a couple days!! :-)

Ella the Flower Fairy

I enjoy photography (if you can't tell from the millions of pictures I always take) and like to try and capture the girls in fun and interesting poses. Ella was out in the yard picking dandelions one night and I just couldn't resist capturing the moment. Enjoy her flitting around!

Happy Mother's Day

Hope all the mothers we know out there had a nice day yesterday! I had a wonderful Mother's Day. We spent the weekend visiting with my mom. We went to the park and had my aunt and Grandma Betty over for dinner on Saturday night. My mom left on Sunday morning and then Andrew took the girls out to Chuck E Cheese and the Arboretum. I enjoyed lounging at home and then did a little shopping for myself. That night we walked around Round Lake and picked up Applebee's for dinner. It was a very nice day and I didn't have to lift a finger all day. Andrew also put together a movie of me with the girls which I will put up on our movies site when I have a chance. And I'm getting a knew stroller called the joovy caboose! Now I won't have to carry Ella back to the car when she gets tired after following me around on our outings.

We had nice visit with Andrew's brother Benjamin last weekend. He and Andrew had a great time playing with the girls outside and catching up on their brother bonding by playing video games. We had fun watching him run in the Budbreak 5K at the Arboretum despite a little rain.

We have a weekend off from visitors next weekend but we are looking forward to Memorial Day weekend when Tom and Pat are visiting again to watch the girls. Andrew and I are taking a little getaway up to Brainerd , MN, also known as the Brainerd Golf Trail. Andrew is planning on playing 3--18-hole rounds and a 9-hole round with me. Mostly, I plan on just relaxing and reading, hanging out by the pool.

There are new pictures up in the May album. Enjoy!

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.

More of the same

Ella at 13 months playing in the toy box

Ella and Lily in the toy box today

And still making messes!

I uploaded new photos from March today. Click the link in the sidebar. Still no Super Bowl pics. Did I mention those are on Andrew's computer? I might never get them uploaded. However, the best ones were posted on the blog posts. So you're not really missing too much. :-) Enjoy the new pictures!

It's been awhile....

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Guess I just haven't been in a writing kind of mood. :-) We have been very busy though. We have Ella's speech twice a week, and our playdate with Jody and Arianna. Plus, we spent one morning visiting the Aquarium with my cousin Cindy and her family. It's great that she's on maternity leave now because maybe we'll actually get to see each other more often.

We had Tom and Pat visit a couple weekends ago. Andrew and his dad got our new tv hung on the wall and the sound system hooked up to it. So now, when we watch a movie, we can pretend we're actually there. We tested it out with Gladiator (not when the kids were around) and I told Andrew I wanted to feel like I was at the fight. And boy did I! Tom also moved our thermostat around the corner from where it was located. The sun was beating down on it and so the heat wasn't coming on when it should. Now, everything is much more controlled. Obviously the builders of this house had no brains when it came to deciding on the location of the thermostat. They put it directly across from our large south-facing picture windows. Anyway, much better now!

Last weekend we took a little road trip to visit Nana Mary and Papi Dave in Iowa. We had a very nice stay with them. The girls were excited all the way there. Ella kept asking, "Nana's house?" which was her version of "Are we there yet?". We visited the Science Station which is a children's science museum that was built when I was probably about 10 or so (still has many of the same exhibits). It was a free day and it was raining so we thought we'd try it out. Ella really enjoyed it. Lily mostly thought about taking a nap the whole time. The headquarters for Rockwell Collins is located in Cedar Rapids and they were the ones sponsoring the free day. They had little activities set up for the kids: gumdrop architecture, paper airplane races, egg drop, etc. Ella and Andrew really had fun with that.

Sunday was a gorgeous day, maybe even close to 80 degrees! We decided to have a picnic lunch at a park. I have some friends in California who are interested in letterboxing and I've been wanting to try it with the kids. I think it would be a fun activity to do in nice weather. It's sort of like treasure hunting, but mostly the prize is the satisfaction of actually finding the location of the letterbox. There was a fairly easy clue that lead to a park in Cedar Rapids, so we decided to venture there. We enjoyed a nice lunch, the kids played at the park, but we did not locate the letterbox. Turns out we had the right spot, but we couldn't find the box. Maybe we'll be successful on our next outing.

It was really nice here in MN when we returned on Monday so while the girls took their nap, I got our deck tables and chairs out and they LOVED being out there when they woke up. We also put their sand (aka rock) table on the deck and they played out there on Tuesday even though it was much colder and windy. Then the rains came...

So now, we're just waiting for it to get nice again so we can go out and enjoy the outdoors again! We got a taste of it this weekend and it's been hard to be cooped up with it raining the last few days. I have some new pictures to put up, I might get to it tonight. We'll see.

Hope you all had a great March!

February Photos

I have some new photos up in the February album. Still no Super Bowl pics though. Maybe I'll get them uploaded tonight. They are on Andrew's computer so it makes it a little harder. And I have a few more pictures to add still, but we left the camera at my Grandma's house. It's always something.

Enjoy, and hopefully we'll have some more new ones very soon!

Ella-isms

Okay this post would fall under the heading: shenanigans.

So I take my shower in the mornings (I need it to wake up, I'm not really a morning person) and I'm gone for about 15 minutes. I just have to trust that Ella and Lily won't burn the house down in that 15 minutes. Although, they haven't done any lasting damage, it does seem they get into some kind of trouble while I gone, almost everyday. Yesterday, Ella moved a dining room chair over to my junk cupboard above the phone, which just happens to be where I "hide" the candy. Apparently, I need to find a new hiding place. I came downstairs to find Ella, Lily, and Ella's baby doll in a corner of the living room eating chocolate.

I gave Ella a time-out for getting into the cupboard (she knows that's a no-no) and for eating candy without asking. When she was finished with her time-out, she promptly got her baby doll and gave the doll a timeout in the corner. I thought this was hilarious! (Lily didn't get a time-out because I decided she was just an innocent bystander in the whole thing and it looked like she hadn't had any candy yet.)

Today, Ella did the same thing. She got another time-out. The doll did not seem to be an accomplice this time. Today, I will be moving the candy.

Ella has a couple cute/funny things she says. She is the most polite 3 year old I know. Instead of saying just "no" to things. Everything is "No, thanks." Example conversations:

Me: Ella do you want to take a bath.
Ella: No, no thanks. (and she shakes her hand a little).

Ella: I'm thirsty.
Me: Do you want some milk?
Ella: No, no thanks.
(she wanted juice instead)

Me: Ella, do you want to go take a nap?
Ella: No thanks.

Me: Ella, do you want to sit on the toilet like a big girl?
Ella: No thanks. (shakes the hand back and forth)

You get the idea. :-)

Then she also says, "No. More." very definitively. Meaning stop, or I don't like that, or just no more. She often adds a hand gesture that is similar to "Talk to the hand".

Me: Ella, should we sing the ABC song? A, B, C, D....
Ella: No. More. (Hand gesture)
Apparently she doesn't think I should audition for American Idol anytime soon.

In the car driving home from an outing...
Me: Girls, stay awake. Keep your eyes open. We're almost home. Here, I'll turn the radio up for you.
Ella: No. More. (Hand gesture)

I serve Ella a plate for dinner that has broccoli on it...
Ella: No, thanks. No. More. (as she puts all the broccoli on the table away from her)

Oh, and another fun shenanigan story. I go to book club once a month. Once a month, I get out of the house completely by myself for an hour and a half. Yes, that's all. 90 minutes. So this past Monday, I leave feeling a little guilty because Andrew was still working and seemed stressed but told me to go anyway. So I said good-bye to the girls and told them to be especially good for Daddy because he was a little stressed out. And I told Ella she needed to be Daddy's Little Helper. Well, apparently she took what I said to heart. Andrew started to make pancakes for the girls for dinner. He got so far as to put the pancake mix in the bowl and then got a call and had to go up to the office. Not sure how long he was gone, but when he came back, Ella had indeed been a little helper. She was sooo proud of herself with a big smile on her face. She had helped Daddy make the pancake batter! She added some apple juice that had been left on the counter. And since the spices were right in the cupboard above her, she thought the pancakes could use a bit of Nature Seasons and black pepper. She was so excited to show Daddy how she had helped. Needless to say, they had hot dogs for dinner. And when I came home the house was in shambles. I guess that's what I get for being gone for 90 minutes. :-)

Snow pictures

Andrew and Ella "enjoying" the snow last night while Andrew shoveled us out. Lily and I watched from inside. We were the smart ones. :-)

The view out our front door. There is a street there somewhere.


Those would be the very tippy tops of the small bushes buried in front of our house.

This is what our deck currently looks like. Half of the snow we got last weekend had melted away, there's about 15 inches or so in the middle of the deck.

The snow is ridiculous

Not much else to do today but blog, since the whole state is pretty much shut down due to insane amounts of snow received in the last week. I already reported we received 12-18 inches last weekend. Well, it started snowing again Wednesday night and pretty much did not stop until sometime in the middle of last night. AND we're expected to receive 1-2 inches more. Oh, what's another 1-2 inches when you already have over 3 FEET on the ground?!

It's too bad for Andrew that he works from home or he might have been able to get away with a snow day like the rest of the state. In fact, like the entire Midwest. My mom and Dave were without power in Iowa for 76 hours starting last Friday night. They were supposed to come up this weekend to celebrate my Grandma's birthday but since the highways are actually closed (yes, it's actually illegal to drive on them, punishable by spending up to 90 days in jail, plus extra costs and punishment if you get stuck and emergency crews have to come save you).

We're all going a bit stir crazy as we like to get out once a day and haven't done anything fun since our Tuesday playdate with Jody and Ari. Here's to hoping the snow stops and the sun comes out and melts it all away.

Where do I begin?

It's seems like I have a lot to report today and I'm not sure where to begin, so if this post is rambling and not very well organized. That's why. :-)

Let's see, first, we got somewhere between 12-18 inches of snow over the weekend. All Thursday and Friday, I kept hearing people talk about the storm heading our way. But since I never have time to watch the news or our television is programmed to mindless kids shows, I never hear about these things. Everyone was like, "You ready for the snow?" Well, first how does one ready themselves for the snow? I guess some people go to the store and stock up. We didn't really do anything special. In fact, we drove an hour north on Saturday to visit my cousin Cindy and her family who just welcomed a new baby boy, Braeden Carl Roseland! He is a super cutie pie! And it was fun to get to see someone's baby so new, we've always been far away from everyone. I didn't meet their daughter until she was 8 or 9 months old. So it was a real treat to go see them when he was two days old. Congrats Roselands!

We tuned into the Oscar telecast last night along with nearly 40 million other people. I thought Ellen did a nice job and was pretty amsuing. And most of the dresses were nice. I hated Kirsten Dunst's and wasn't real fond of Anne Hathaway or Gwyneth Paltrow's. But many of the rest were quite stunning. Andrew and I did our annual Oscar ballot. Unforutately (for me), he won this year. I think I have pretty much won every other year, so this is quite a blow to my ego. ;-) Interestingly enough, we picked the exact same picks in every category except Costume and Best Picture. He picked correctly in both of those. We enjoyed all the hoopla about An Inconvenient Truth. They interviewed Al Gore on the red carpet and there were several things during the telecast that were about being "green". We were happily surprised when Melissa Etheridge won for Best Song. That was a big upset over the Dreamgirls songs! So anyway, Andrew can now put that he has worked on an Oscar winning movie on his resume! He was like a little kid all night so excited to watch the show.

In other news, the girls are doing fine. Lily is Lily, not much to report with her. She is 17 months old and basically does everything Ella does. We got her off the bottle last week. She was a little upset with us, but seems to have gotten over it now. She's saying alot. She's slightly misproportionate where she's wearing 2-3T shirts but only 18months pants! Long torso, short stubby legs. She's adorable and so sweet. Very animated with scowls, smiles, and silly faces.

Ella is doing great. She loves her once a week playdates with Ari and Jody. She always asks me when we're going to see Ari again. Our trip to the zoo two weeks ago was very fun. They have two indoor wings (the Tropics and the Ocean) and Ella loved all of it. We got to see a dolphin show and both Ella and Lily sat there for the whole 45 minutes completely intrigued and loved every minute of it. Last week, we ventured back to Adventure Peak at Edinborough Park. This week we're having Ari and Jody over for a playdate at our house. Ella's already looking forward to it tomorrow.

We also finally brought Ella to be evaluated by a speech therapist. We've always been concerned about her lack of talking, but it really pushed me when I noticed she was making up her own sign language more than adding verbal words to her vocabulary. The speech therapist told us that Ella has 23 of the 25 characteristics of verbal apraxia. This just means that there's a disconnect in her brain between knowing what she wants to say and getting it to come out of her mouth correctly. She understands everything she hears, she knows how to respond to it, and what it is supposed to sound like, she just doesn't possess the motor planning skills to get her words to come out. So she'll be going to speech therapy twice a week for one-on-one help and she should be talking much better in 6 months to a year. And hopefully completely normally by the time she starts kindergarten. We're very happy that we know what it is and that it is treatable. She'll be so excited and happy when she can actually say things she's trying to say!

So that's about it for today I think. Hope you all have a great week! I will try to get the Super Bowl and other new pictures uploaded this week. :-)

Happy Valentine's Day

Nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" more than a heart-shaped pepperoni pizza, flowers, and some champagne!

How Many of Me?

A friend of mine had this on her blog and I thought it was interesting so I looked it up. Go to www.howmanyofme.com to see how many other people in the United States have your name.

There are 175,482 people in the US with the first name Holly making it the 340th most popular name in the US. There are 9, 239 people with the last name Isaacson making it the 3,939th most popular last name.

There are five people named Holly Isaacson.

When I put in Holly Engelhart there are only 870 people with the last name Engelhart making it the 30,847th most popular last name. And there is only 1 person named Holly Engelhart in the US. And I'm thinking maybe she doesn't even exist with that name anymore. :-) I always knew I was unique! :-)

There are five other Ella Isaacsons and Lily is the only Lily Isaacson in the United States!

Now, Andrew is a different story. There are 808,415 Andrews in the US. It's the 54th most popular name and there are 25 Andrew Isaacsons!

James is the number one most common first name overall and Mary is ranked 5th overall and is the most common female name.

There you are, some thoroughly fascinating statistics for a Monday morning. Check it out when you have a chance and I'd love you to post in the comments what your name ranks. I'm just weird and these things are interesting to me! :-)

Have a good week!

Project Canopy: Finished

About a year ago I saw "this" at the aquarium at the Mall of America and thought it would be a cool idea to do as canopy over Ella's bed whenever we moved and got our new house. The way that Ella's room was painted when we moved in was perfect for her! It was turquoise and green striped; perfect for an ocean themed room. On my mom's last couple visits we bought fabric and all the supplies and finished the canopy. The first thing I had Andrew do when he got home was hang it because I was so excited to see what it looked like! And if you look at the "inspiration" picture from the aquarium (which I hadn't looked at again until after my mom and I had finished the canopy) we ended up using the same exact fabric they had used! Pure coincidence!

Here it is in all its glory including progress and close-up photos. I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seats with excitement now! ;-)
I have also added a couple pictures to the January album, started a February album and added a few new pictures to our house album. Super Bowl pictures are on hold for the moment because "someone", not mentioning any names, left the camera battery in the hotel in Miami and is waiting for Greg in the NY office to send it back to us. :-)