5 years apart...

Fina and John by the Bonneville dam in Oregon, March 2008

Fina, John, and Eloise same spot March 2013.

I find it awesome that John is wearing a nearly identical shirt in both pictures, he does not. It was freezing cold and raining this time, but I couldn't resist making them pose. It's funny that the weather was similar both times too.

Hair

I decided to go different from the silly little baby ponytail today. Even though Wooz was not impressed with this turn of events and yelled "I like my hair messy! Go 'way, mommy!!"

It's a pretty cute little french braid, from a distance. I had to do it as fast as I could while she was trying to escape, so the spots where I added more hair aren't even, but I think she looks cute. She was excited when I showed her in the mirror.

Thrilled I tell you.

thrift haul

I haven't taken a bunch of pictures of my thrift haul for a while, but it kind of makes it fun so I decided to today.

First we have Weez's new baby doll. It has a vintagey look to the face so I'm not surprised she picked it out. It's small, like 8 inches maybe? A little smaller than a CPK teeny tiny preemie. Speaking of which:

Yellow hair and brown eyes. I haven't decided if I'm keeping her or letting Wooz have her or what, but I couldn't resist for some reason.

I tried to take a picture of the 2 Hanna Andersson shirts, laid out side by side on the couch, but Weez kept grabbing the sweater and trying to put it on. I finally gave in and let her try it on, even though I thought it would be too big, but it looks super good on her with leggings so I might just let her keep it. And this way I got a nice picture of it. The other one might be a tad big for Fina, but it was only a buck at the goodwill.

A bunch of toys. The little people helicopter came with the dude who is shoved in the back of the ice cream truck in the pic, because as I was trying to snap the picture, Weez came and moved the pilot and stole the little people airplane out of the picture. The cars came with a car track thing but it's annoyingly missing a piece. And Ernie's crane has a magnet on the bottom so he can pick up metal things.

I got Fina this miniature pillow pet butterfly which was new with tags. She named it "Pink wing Purple wing Pink wing Purple wing. You have to say it twice." (The dress she's wearing is the same size as the sweater Weez stole from the pile so I thought that the sweater was going to be for Fina.)

This is the ensemble that the TTP was wearing, which are both CPK tagged but obviously too big for her. The sippin' kid bib is either really faded or a strange color.

A birthday letter to my husband.

Dear John,
I'm sorry that your birthday card is a fart joke. Hopefully the cake I made is good and kind of makes up for it.
Love, Katy

My New Salt & Pepper shakers

Since we got married, John and I have never owned salt and pepper shakers. Well, for a while we had a set of really stupid grinders that we got at a yard sale because he just love loved the idea of grinding your own salt and pepper, but they were cheap plastic and I dropped one of them on the floor too many times so we use the remaining one for pepper because we don't use that much salt and also grinding sea salt onto your food is annoying (at least with these lever grinding ones we have) because you can't limit your amount as easily. So I saw these at the store the other day, AND they were on clearance, and you know a bargain like that is hard to resist even though they were only 30% off I snagged them up.

This lovely lady is the salt. I would prefer them to be colorful like real matryoshka dolls, but the white will go with pretty much any dishes I suppose. What's that? Where's the pepper shaker?

They are nesting dolls after all! 

The salt shaker is considerably larger than the pepper, but that's because she has to hold the salt AND fit the other inside her. They're so cool. The only thing I worry about is that the salt one doesn't snap together very tightly so if someone didn't know and held her by the bottom half, she'd probably fall right into their food. Also I like that the salt shaker only has 1 hole and the pepper has 3, because I'm the type that uses more pepper than salt. I suppose you could fill them up the other way around, but that's not what it said on the directions. ;) I also got a matching set of measuring cups, but I haven't taken them out of the box yet.

Sunday's dinner

I was looking for something else in my pictures and I saw that we had taken a decently appetizing picture of Sunday's dinner. Spinach and mozzarella stuffed meatloaf, gross mashed potatoes, and salad. Yum. Also do you totally love our new serving dishes? It's kind of fun to have awesome things to make your food look more appealing, even if we don't really have room to store them. We got them NIB at the goodwill store for considerably less than if we bought them new elsewhere. (And after reading the reviews online, I'm glad we didn't pay very much for them because apparently they have a tendency to break if you pick them up by the handles when they're hot, even though they're supposedly oven safe.)

Ipad adorableness

Isn't it funny how you sometimes have to eat your words? When Ipads first came out, I was horrified at the thought that people would let their kids play with something so expensive. When they came out with special cars that your kids could drive on your iPad I was baffled. I was apprehensive when my mom let my kids play with her nook tablet. And yet...

Look at the crossed feet and the intense concentration. So cute.

She loves it so much and I'm always amazed at the amount of stuff she can just do on it. That is, when she gets the chance to just play by herself. And she's only managed to buy 5 bucks worth of extras for her games. (We have it password protected but if I download her an app then you don't have to enter the password for like 10 minutes, so we found out the hard way that if she tries to buy things right after I've downloaded her a game, it just lets her at it. So now I only download new apps for them when it's my turn and kids won't be playing right away.)

...And 5 minutes later. "I'm just watching her, mom!"

Her solo turns don't usually last very long if Fina isn't at school. Also I think we have twice as many kid apps as stuff for us.

...and 5 minutes after that. Not shown is 2 minutes after that when Eloise realizes what happened and starts crying and slapping Fina in the head.

And as a bonus for reading my ramblings, here is a cute picture of my kids in the masks that they made earlier.

Super Fi and her well dressed sidekick. Little sisters always have to be the sidekick because they're copycats.

I cut Eloise's out for her but Serafina did all of hers herself.