Friday, February 27, 2015

A questionnaire: FIVE

Tomorrow is Daisy's birthday. In lieu of a babybook, I ask the following 20 questions to my birthday girl (starting with the third birthday). You can see Daisy's previous answers, here and here. So, this afternoon while making our traditional pizza dough for Friday night pizza movie night I fired away. 
  1. What is your favorite color: red
  2. What is your favorite toy: legos. leapreader. dollhouse. magnets. all our toys! 
  3. What is your favorite fruit: watermelon 
  4. What is your favorite movie: Beauty and the the Beast
  5. What is your favorite thing to wear: my long skirts 
  6. What is your favorite animal: ladybugs. zebras. 
  7. What is your favorite song: "Let it Go" 
  8. What is your favorite book: any Bearnstein Bears books, any Ivy and Bean, Never Girls or the Rainbow Magic Fairy Books 
  9. Who is your best friend: Annie and Lily 
  10. What is your favorite breakfast: oatmeal  
  11. What is your favorite lunch: peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cheese crackers, fruit 
  12. What is your favorite dinner: pizza movie night (Mom's note: on Friday nights we make pizza and watch a movie together as a family. Basically, it's our favorite night of the week). 
  13. What is your favorite snack: popcorn; grapes 
  14. What is your favorite dessert: cupcakes  
  15. What do you sleep with at night: blankie  
  16. What is your favorite thing to play outside: pirates and princesses (a pretend game the girls and J play together), potions (we have various colors of water in various types of bottles and we mix them and pour them and measure them and pretend to cast spells on the bugs and flowers in the yard), jump rope
  17. What do you want for your birthday dinner: fruit salad and roasted cauliflower (I'll also be making panko crusted chicken tenders and we'll be having vanilla almond cupcakes with blackberry buttercream for dessert) 
  18. What do you want to be when you grow-up: an astronaut (Mom's note: She has wanted to be an astronaut for a while now and her knowledge of space is incredible. She wants to be the first girl on Mercury. She says she'll send me a postcard.) 
  19. Where is your favorite place to go: disneyland
  20. What is your favorite game: memory, who shook hook 

Sunday, February 08, 2015

Letter to my little Violet: 182 (+ 6) days

Dear Violet,
Last Monday was your half-birthday. At six months you are 15 pounds, 25 inches long and a full-fledged baby. One who can roar like a lion, roll to across the playroom in the blink of an eye, and wave hello. Over the past few weeks, you have really blossomed. Where was once a cuddly little baby, there is now a BABY! who MOVES! and SCREECHES! and EATS REAL FOOD!

It’s like you’re a real person or something. 
Your first food was butternut squash. You loved it. You've since had cauliflower, sweet potato, avocado and carrots. 

You have never been a particularly loud baby. You have always loved to watch and let your environment just soak in, but lately that has been changing as well. You are beginning to make all sorts of noise – squawks, roars, grunts. You babble at your toys. You squawk in your carseat. You squeal in delight in the bath and grunt at the dinner table when you’ve finished but the rest of the family has not.

You’ll notice this letter is a bit later than usual; that is because this past week will go down in the Rossini family history books as The Time We Were All Taken Out With The Flu. In fact, on your big day, instead of celebrating with great fanfare (you know, with bites of sweet potatoes and a flurry of photos) you and I spent the better part of the day curled in the fetal position, feverish, shivering and moaning.
But, you know what Violet, even in the midst of your misery; you were still such a happy baby. You spend most of your time smiling or laughing or gurgling with a sort of unyielding delight. You love to be placed on your back with your Sophie the Giraffe above your head, so you can flip, roll and grab it yourself. You love to watch your sisters play, smiling at their antics and laughing at their silly faces.

Lately, your hand-eye coordination has improved exponentially. We would not have know it a few months ago, but it turns out that you are a hand-eye GENIUS. I brag about it all the time. You can grab your toes! You can splash water! You can turn the pages in board books! You can practically feed yourself! Your father, sisters and I delight in watching you grow and learn and change. I think I can speak for all of us when I say we could have never imagined that having you would bring us so much joy.
Sometimes I pick you up, shower you with kisses and exclaim I LOVE THIS GIRL! And it feels like I just cannot contain it, like there is love for you popping out of me in twelve direction at once. But, it’s true, sweetheart. It’s true.
I love you more than all the stars in the sky and the water in the ocean.

Love, Momma

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Sick Girls

Today is a sick day at the Chez Stars household. Me and all three girls are recoving from bad colds, so we're on our third day of Operation Lay Low, feel yucky and Mostly Do Nothing At All.

Actually, that's not true. We've read about a million and one books. We've watched several movies. I've read two novels (The Parent Backpack and 46 pages. Both are fantastic reads, especially the latter one). We've been playing with our doll house. We've finished several puzzles. We've been playing Rainbow Brite. Daisy and Lily have been wearing their rainbow brite belts and sprinkle star dust on Violet in hopes she'll feel better. We color. We paint. We snuggle. This morning we ventured out to the backyard for some much needed vitamin D to make chalk pictures and blow bubbles.
While I feel pretty miserable, and I hate when my babies are miserable, I have enjoyed all the snuggles and down-time that comes with sick days. These days we don't have much time to lie around and read story after story, and I rarely have a chance to watch a whole entire movie with the girls snuggled on my lap, and a baby sleeping in my arms. So, while we're snotty and coughy and generally gross we're not so miserable after all.