Holiday Book Drive

(I posted this on my book blog, but thought some people who read our regular blog might be interested too.)

Stepping back on my soapbox....ahem...is this thing on? *tap* *tap* :-)

Barnes and Noble is doing their annual book drive again this year. If you have the opportunity and inclination, please visit your local store and buy a book for a child. This program usually teams up with a women's shelter or other organizations who work with children who are in a situation where their parents may not have extra money to buy them books. The Barnes and Noble near us is doing a great thing this year where you can buy a children's book or an adult book (or both); the organization they are giving all the books to will let the children pick a book for their mom and the mom gets to pick a book for their child. I think that's pretty cool!

I'll be taking the girls again this holiday to pick out a book for another child their age and explain to them that some mommys and daddys aren't as fortunate to be able to buy their children books. This way we can help those kids have some of the books we love so much!

Christmas is on its way!!!

We started decorating the front of our house a few weeks ago. I got some grief from our California friends about how early we were putting up our lights. But you know it does get cold here! ;-) We got almost all of them up before it turned really cold the last week and half. Here are some pictures for you:



Ella and I could hardly wait for Thanksgiving to be over before putting our Christmas trees up. That's right, you read that correctly, we have treeS, plural. Three to be exact! We have our tree from past years in the front window with generic, bought as a set, ornaments from Target. Then we have our deal of the century tree in the family room with our special ornaments that all relate to us somehow or someplace we've visited. The third tree is a little Princess tree we got on clearance after last Christmas. The girls have had a ton of fun decorating and redecorating that tree. They helped put the non-breakable ornaments on the other trees. It was very cute, they were all clustered along the bottom. But of course, anal person that I am, I rearranged them later. :-)



We went to Eden Prairie Center the Friday before Thanksgiving to see the arrival of Santa. We waited outside with a crowd of other parents and children and watched Santa arrive in a red wagon pulled by two real reindeer. All the kids were given jingle bells to shake while he rode by. We didn't wait in line to see him that day, but plan to go one day soon. We did pet the reindeer before we left though. Ella is VERY into Santa this year. While we were watching him arrive, she told me, "I want to see him fly, Mom." I told her that Santa only flew on Christmas Eve when he had to deliver all his presents. She also informed me that she was going to ask Santa for an Ariel Glitter Barbie doll and the Curious George Christmas book. I told her those were both very good things to ask Santa for (and easily findable for those little elves helping Santa make his purchases. ;-). When you ask Lily what she wants from Santa, she just says she's scared. She doesn't want to have anything to do with Santa, but informs us that it is okay for Ella to see Santa. Lily also calls Santa by the name of Ho Ho Ho.




So now that the house is all decked out, we're looking forward to more holiday fun the rest of the month!

It's Arts & Crafts Time!

Ella LOVES arts and crafts and Lily is getting to the point where she likes them more and more. Ella's preschool sent home a fun family activity that we tried two weekends ago. We found a bunch of broken crayons around the house, sorted them by color and put them into a muffin tin. We used my silicone muffin cups even though it said just put them in the muffin tin. I wasn't sure how they would come out of the tin so we used the muffin cups. Needless to say, those will be our crayon muffin cups from now on (which I sort of figured would happen). But we had a ton of fun sorting the crayons, watching them melt in the oven and then we let them cool overnight in the fridge. In the morning the girls were very excited to see the finished product and to try them out.






The girls and I also attended a Thanksgiving craft party on the Wednesday before Turkey Day. It was at a place called Kidcreate Studio. We had attended a birthday party there before and enjoyed it so I thought this would be a fun Thanksgiving activity. It is a bit overpriced for what you get, but the girls did have a fun time and I now have a great idea for a craft to do for one of their birthdays next year.

For creating fun, easy, and creative crowns:
Place a piece of clear packing tape of the table sticky side up. Be sure it is long enough to go around your child's head when finished. Have the child place feathers, sequins, leaves, anything that is reasonably flat and goes with whatever theme you are aiming for. Confetti would work great too. Once finished decorating, place an additional piece of tape over the first, lining up the sticky sides together. Press the two pieces together to seal the masterpiece. Measure it around your child's head, tape the two ends together, and Voila! You have an instant crown!



We had a very nice Thanksgiving at our house with my mom and Dave, Tom and Pat, my Grandma Betty and Aunt Carol, besides the four of us. It was a nice number to have and the food turned out very tasty with almost everyone contributing something. Ella even OFFERED to help wash some of the dishes afterwards! She also helped me clean the house before our visitors came. We're just calling her Cinderella now. :-) We are very thankful for all our family and friends, our beautiful house and MN surroundings, and Andrew's successful job. We had no idea what to expect for this year of adjustment to our new life in Minnesota and we are very thankful that life has surpassed any and all of our expectations!



Hope you all had a great Turkey Day!

Ella's School Report

Here is Ella's school picture. Honestly, I think its pretty good considering she had to sit there posed, with big bright lights and without Mom or Dad there. I had prepped her all morning that she would have to sit and smile pretty like all the other kids. So here's what we got. She looks a little tired I think, but we were at a birthday party that morning. :-) At least she's smiling right?

Andrew and I went to her parent/teacher conference this morning. Overall, she is doing pretty well. This conference is mostly to talk about how she is developing socially and there is another conference in March to talk more about how she's developing academically. There are some things she needs to work on: she's easily distracted (hmm.....Mom, does this ring a bell? Didn't every single one of my report cards say something about that?) :-), she has some trouble remembering directions if they are given far ahead of when the activity happens, and she has a bit of a hard time sitting still. But she has some strengths too! She is very polite and helps her friends clean up after she's done cleaning up her own toys. She is pretty good at sharing with her other friends, and her speech doesn't seem to be an issue at all in the classroom with the other kids. She always tries whatever it is they are doing, and she loves music time. Overall, the teachers said she is always happy and always has a smile on her face which is great to hear!

They asked her a few questions so they could give us the answers. When asked, "What is your favorite thing about school?" Her response was, "We get to make a lot of art." (I saw that one coming!). When asked what her favorite area of the classroom was, she said, "The book area." And when asked what she wanted to be, she said, "A bookstore owner." How great is that!! The teachers said that was one none of the other kids said. And I swear I did not prep her to say that. She definitely takes after me there!

We're so happy to hear she is doing so well and adjusting to school and loving it!

Down to Iowa and Back

The girls and I spent last week visiting Nana and Papi in Cedar Rapids. I was a little nervous about making the four hour drive in the car by myself with the kids. They have been known to be awful on our trips to Wisconsin so I had very low expectations about how well the trip would go. But I learned four hours is much much easier for them than 6.5 hours. I was armed with a couple new movies they had never seen. They ate lunch, watched a movie and promptly slept for a couple hours. Then started watching a new movie and we were there! It was really great! Same thing on the way home.

We had a lot of fun at my mom and Dave's. We spent quite a bit of Sunday outdoors playing in the fall leaves and on the neighbor's swing set. Ella is so funny. I told her in the morning that we were going to take a few pictures outside after Lily's nap. She was all cranky about it at that point. Then when it came time to take the pictures, she was ready. And continued to be ready for a while afterwards. :-) We went next door to play and she kept posing herself and saying, "Picture Mommy!". I actually got some very cute ones. If only she was like that all the time!

We did a lot of shopping while we were there. We played at the mall play area in Cedar Rapids on Monday. We drove a little ways and visited the Coral Ridge Mall on Tuesday where we went to the Barnes and Noble story time and then the Iowa Children's Museum. We went to the museum last year and Ella had a great time, I figured Lily would really be into it this year too. We went to the grocery store, a pizza parlor, the arts and crafts room, a motion room, a hospital, a farm and a visit to Indonesia. The kids really had a great time in each area. After several hours of play, I figured it was time to go home. We were walking out of the mall and Ella said she wanted to play in the play area. Both of them played for another hour! It was 3pm by the time we left! Lily usually naps at 12:30. I can't believe she made it that long without getting cranky.

Wednesday we visited the Cedar Rapids Public Library for a story time about Owls. It included books, songs, and finger games. Ella had a great time! Lily and I walked around and looked at books for most of it. I had an enjoyable kid-free dinner with my friend Molly on Wednesday night and got caught up with her. Thursday and Friday we did a bit of shopping and just played around the house. We returned home excited to see Andrew Friday evening.

All in all, it was a really fun trip. Thanks Mom and Dave! And hope you guys are getting your house back in order. :-)

PS. New photos up in the Oct. & Nov. photo albums.

Catching up...again

I can't seem to keep up with "Keeping up with the Isaacsons". :-) A lot of random things to report on. First, October 28th we went to the Vikings/Eagles football game at the Metrodome. Andrew's company created a new opening video and several new graphics for the team this year. He has a contact on the inside who got us field passes and awesome seats in the Legends Club. And since they've been season ticket holders for about ten years, we thought we would take along my cousins Cindy and Shawn. We all had a fantastic time despite the fact that the Vikings are hopeless this year. Shawn was like a little kid in a candy store down on the field before the game. He kept getting chased by security guards during the warm-up for stopping in the end zone to take pictures (you're supposed to keep moving). We all indulged in free catered food and drinks too. Definitely the way to spend a few hours watching a losing team. We also got to meet some of the cheerleaders and Ragnar the Viking mascot guy. There will be more pictures in the October album soon!

The next weekend Andrew went to Buffalo and met up with Benjamin for the Bills/Bengals game. They had a great time hanging out in the control room for the game. I think the most exciting part for Andrew was that he had 9 football games on a screen so he could keep track of his fantasy football team. ;-) You can see photos from their outing at Ben's website here.We had a really nice weekend at home this weekend. Ella has started swim classes through the Parks & Rec. I signed her up for Saturday mornings so Andrew can take her. It's a fun Daddy/Daughter thing for them to do. They go get breakfast first and then head over to the pool. Ella really seems to be enjoying it. So far the instructors have just been getting the kids used to the water.

We took the kids to see Bee Movie Saturday. It was pretty entertaining for all of us. Unfortunately, Lily is still a bit young to want to sit and watch the whole movie so she and Andrew ventured to the lobby a couple times. I liked all the pop culture references and it was pretty funny for adults as well as kids. Then we came home and rearranged the living room and started (finally!) to hang some stuff up on the wall in there. It's really starting to look finished in there now.

On Sunday, we headed over to Grandma Betty's house to visit with her, my Aunt Jean and Aunt Carol and Mark. Carol and Mark made a really delicious lasagna (thanks again!) and we watched the first half of the Viking/Packer game. We tried to take a picture of the four of us in front of our house in honor of the football game. The girls are not thrilled in the picture, I think its just because they are sad that the Packers are going to kick the Vikings butt. Whenever I look at it, that old Sesame Street song "Which one of these is not like the other?" comes to mind. ;-) I had fun giving Andrew crap for his shirt on the way to Grandma's house. I told him I had to get it all out before the game because we all knew the Packers would wallop the Vikings.

After getting home from Grandma's we set out to start putting up our Christmas lights. We got about 2/3rds of the way done. Good thing, I think that was our last nice warm day for a bit. As soon as we finish, we'll post a picture. I refuse to turn them on before Thanksgiving though. It really bugs me how it seems that Thanksgiving doesn't even exist anymore. The day after Halloween (if not before), all the Halloween/Harvest stuff is gone from the stores and holiday decorations are already up. Poor Ella thinks its Christmas already. I keep reminding her we have to celebrate Thanksgiving first, then Christmas. She can't help but be confused when Santa has already made his mall debut!!! What the heck?! Remember the time when you watched the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade and the first sign of Christmas was Santa at the very end? Jeez.

Happy Halloween

It's finally Halloween!! Yeah! Or "Candy Day" as Ella and Lily might refer to it. We started the day off by going to Ella's speech appointment. Many of the therapists were dressed up so Ella got a kick out of that. And her whole speech session revolved around Halloween. We are focusing on the "H" sound or "ha" right now. So Halloween was a perfect word for the day. :-)

We played at My Gym this afternoon as we do every Wednesday. I'm beginning to get to know a couple moms there a little better. It's nice to have some other people to chat with every once in a while.

And then it was supposed to be dinner time and trick or treating. Well, Ella fell asleep ten minutes before dinner was ready despite my efforts to keep her awake. And she absolutely did not want to wake up to eat. Great. I had to convince her to wake up to go get candy! So our pictures out in front of the house did not turn out the greatest. She is crying in most of them. So I didn't get my perfect picture, but they still turned out cute. I really wanted to get one of Andrew and Ella together where you can see her face and their whole costumes. Oh well. ;-)

They had a great time collecting candy even though it was pretty cold. I handed out hand-fulls of candy to about 11 kids and we still have a ton left. Our house is not situated in a really great place for trick or treating. Andrew thinks we should hand out whole candy bars next year. Maybe bring some more people in that way. :-)

We headed over to B-pa and Gramma's house after going up and down our street. We visited a few of their neighbors and then surveyed the candy stash. Lucky for me and Andrew (hee hee), I removed all remnants of any peanut/peanut butter candy from their pumpkins (due to Lily's peanut allergy). We'll find a good place for that candy to go. ;-)

The girls each delved into their pumpkins picking out several pieces to munch on before we convinced them to save some for tomorrow. When we asked Ella what her favorite part of today was, she responded, "The candy!!" Now they are sleeping soundly in their beds with visions of candy corns and pumpkins dancing in their heads.
Happy Halloween to all of you! Hope you had a great time!

Pumpkins Galore

Remember when we were kids and Halloween consisted of waiting until the 31st, maybe getting to wear your costume to school and then braving cold weather to trick or treat at night? Well, Halloween really has become a month long process! No complaints here though, we all love Halloween around our house. We put decorations up the first of the month, we have visited THREE different pumpkin patches, went to a pumpkin festival at Ella's school and a neighborhood halloween party. All BEFORE October 31st! It was beautiful the past two nights but looks to be pretty chilly with a strong wind for trick or treating tonight.

But hey, with global warming Halloween should be pretty tropical before we know it! (there was sarcasm there, in case you missed it.) ;-)

Below are some pictures from our various Halloween activities. Enjoy! Click on the images to make them slightly bigger. And look for actual Halloween pictures (and more pumpkin pictures on Shutterfly) in the next day or two. Costumes revealed then!

Our glitter pumpkins! The blue one on the left is a Cinderella pumpkin,
the middle one is the Prince and the white one on the right is
a Sleeping Beauty pumpkin, according to Miss Ella anyway. :-)

The pumpkin the girls carved with Daddy.
Ella had fun blowing the candle out repeatedly
(that's good practice for her oral motor
skills for speech too!)

Ella at the Pumpkin Fest with her
favorite friend from school, Arpita.
They share a locker together.

Decorating pumpkins at Pumpkin Fest

Here they are!
Mine/Lily's on the left and Ella's on the right.
She says hers is B-pa (because of the mustache)
and the left one is Gramma Clare. :-)

PS. Perhaps you've noticed a certain head tilt in many of Ella's pictures. This is her "photo" posture. And you'll notice, Lily is starting to adopt it as well. I have no idea where they get this stuff from. Andrew claims she gets the head tilt from me. Not sure I agree with that. I'm just glad she's smiling for pictures now, head tilt or no head tilt. Fine by me! :-)

Bad Moon Rising

Okay, did I walk under a ladder, open an umbrella in the house, or have a black cat cross my path and not know it? It is getting close to Halloween, maybe the cat's the thing? There is one as decoration in the townhouse across the street from us. I say all this because since Sunday we have had something bad luck-wise happen pretty much every day I think. It all started with a terrible dream I had Saturday night. I hardly ever remember my dreams but this one was vivid and very realistic. Sort of threw me for a loop. Then a small rock hit our windshield on Sunday while we were driving. It made a tiny crack, which will only get bigger as the temperature gets lower (supposed to be our last nice day today!), leading to having to get a new windshield. Monday was reasonably normal. Then Tuesday I didn't feel very good, thought I was coming down with Ella's cold. But I must have fought it off.

Tuesday night the hard drive of my computer was fried. And I was just six days PAST the end of my warranty. Luckily they waved that at the Apple Store and fixed it for free. However, I had to get a new hard drive, thereby losing ALL information from my computer. Including applications that were added after the factory install. Andrew called me from the store and asked me how important the stuff was on my computer, and gave me a dollar amount to compare its worth. I told him it wasn't worth it for them to try and recover the info. I've only had this computer for a year. And when I thought about it, most of the information I use these days is internet-based. My email, blogger, photos are pretty much on Shutterfly. I was sad to lose all my internet bookmarks and all those pleasant preloaded things you type into various webpages and they just pop up later on, like you address, etc. (are those called cookies?). I told Andrew it was just hugely annoying but nothing life or death. Thankfully, I had just printed out my christmas card list in August for Ella's birthday thank yous so I have the updated spreadsheet printed out at least.

Oh, you are probably thinking that is it. Nothing else bad/unlucky could happen this week, right? Well, guess again. I got up this morning, went to get Lily some orange juice and the fridge was completely warm. NOT COLD at all!! And the freezer was completely defrosted! And guess what, to top it off, I had just gone to the store yesterday!! So it was stocked full! UGH! We did some troubleshooting and figured out that it has an automatic defrost mode and just runs it every now and then. Well, it must have locked up on the defrost mode and the temperature just never came back on. So we unplugged the fridge and plugged it back in and then we were able to adjust it back to cold. It seems fine again, except that I have to empty the entire fridge and freezer and go buy all those groceries again! There's always a silver lining right? On the bright side, we didn't have to buy a new fridge.

Andrew asked me this morning, "Is it a full moon or something?" And the odd thing, YES, it is!!! When he said that and I thought about all the stuff that happened in the last week, nothing earth-shattering, but yes, very annoying, I couldn't believe it! I never really believe all those superstitions or anything, but now, hmm......might be rethinking that. So here's to hoping all of you did not feel the effects of the full moon in quite the same way.

(Sidenote: I guess I should believe in the power of the full moon because there was a full moon when Lily was born. And I had to wait 2 hours to start my scheduled induction, because so many women were having babies all the rooms were full. And I had to wait a while to be moved to a postpartum room too. They were even putting women on a different floor because they didn't have enough rooms in the maternity wing. One of the nurses told us, it was because of the full moon. They always had more women give birth during the full moon. Lucky for us, we had good luck with the full moon that time around. :-)

The Lily Report

I think after this post, I'll be all caught up. I really shouldn't neglect the blog as much as I do. We're way too busy to keep up!

Lily had her two-year checkup two weeks ago. She is in the 90th percentile for weight and 97th for height which the doctor thought was a nice proportion. She's doing great with everything else. Right on target or above (especially with her talking, thankfully!). The only concern with her (of mine, not the doctor's) is she thinks and acts older than she is and I think she tries to do things above her level especially in gross motor skills like running, climbing, etc. She tries to keep up with Ella and she's just not quite ready yet with her coordination and balance. And sometimes its seems that she's extraordinarily clumsy. We made a trip to urgent care a week and half ago because she knocked her eye (between her eyelid and her eyebrow) on the edge of the coffee table. It wasn't very hard, she hardly cried, and it hardly bled. But it was sort of wide. So I took her in and she got three stitches. She was an exceptionally brave girl and laid very still for the doctor to put the stitches in. And was equally calm when Aunt Lisa took them out this weekend. (Thanks Lisa!!) Her eye looks great now. But you might notice the stitches or some bruising in some of the October pictures. Just thought I should explain. ;-)

I took the girls to get haircuts on Thursday. Ella's was just a trim, but Lily got a new do! Her hair is really weird. Very curly on the bottom in back and not at all on the top or sides which sort of leads to quite the mop top look most of the time. So I had the stylist cut quite a bit off and shape it into a stacked look in the back and sort of a bob cut. I think it turned out really cute! And I think it will look much nicer as it grows out.

Well I think that's about it. We actually have a weekend at home with Andrew this week so we're planning on doing stuff around the house. Maybe buying shelving and getting our mountain of boxes organized in the basement! And maybe visiting the pumpkin patch by our house.

Hope you all have a good weekend!

School Days

Ella's First Field Trip
Ella is LOVING school! She can't wait for it. And Tuesdays are her favorite day of the week! Every time she talks about a day of the week, she talks about Tuesdays. And a couple weeks ago, Tuesday was that much more exciting. She went on her first school field trip! She was so excited to ride a school bus, or as she said, "A big big big BIG bus!" They went to an apple orchard in Jordan, MN. Her favorite part beside the bus ride, was the donuts for a snack on the bus. She had a donut with sprinkles!

It was a bit cold that day so I'm not sure how much she enjoyed the wagon ride, but she liked picking the apples "right from the tree". She picked a baby one for Lily and a regular sized one for me. She had so much fun, she fell asleep on the bus ride home. Sorry no pictures. Siblings were encouraged to NOT attend so I couldn't chaperone this one. Maybe next time!

Ella's First School Project
Every month Ella's school focuses on a different topic. Last month it was "All About Me" where they were getting to know each other. This month the topic is: Creepy Crawlers. They are learning all about bugs. Ella likes bugs quite a bit so she's pretty into it. They were looking at a caterpiller when I picked her up the other day. Now, we have a family project to work on. She has to make a bug. Any kind of bug, real or imagined. We went to the library and got a book about real bugs and a story about a little boy and pretend bugs. I let her pick what kind of bug she wanted to make. She chose an Indian Moon Moth (inspired from the book on the right). So we went to Michael's and picked up a bunch of stuff. Andrew and I only helped Ella with the shape and the pipe cleaners. She did everything else all by herself! I made a moon moth too (pictured on the bottom in the picture on the right). It kept me from micromanaging Ella as she did hers. :-) We are very proud of our bugs and Ella can't wait to take it to school on TUESDAY! She wanted to bring Mommy's too, but I think I've convinced her that Ms. Laurie would probably only be interested in hers.