"I want to do it"

I wonder if I'm the only mom with a two year old that fixes her own scrambled eggs? Lyla is in the stage of wanting to do EVERYTHING by herself. Grace went through this too. It is good for them but frustrating for me sometimes. She has a complete fit if I walk through a door without letting her open it herself for example. She wants to turn the faucets on by herself, push every button in sight by herself, pick out her clothes, pick out her books, buckle her carseat, and cook her own food! Lyla likes eggs for breakfast and she always wants to do it herself. Well, it's not the safest thing to let an almost 3 year old do. I have to let her try though. She does a pretty good job and we haven't had any major burns yet. Notice she's naked! That's our Lyla!

It's always time to dress up!

A friend of ours from church recently gave me some hand-me-down clothes for Grace. In the bag were the shoes shown above. Grace was so excited about the shoes, and the clothes, that she insisted on wearing them to bed! She was sure it would be fine so who was I to stop her? She slept all night with those things on! The pajamas she is wearing were also in the "new" bag of clothes.

The other day Joni asked Grace what she would do with a million dollars. Grace said, "buy some new clothes". She's barely 5 years old! I think we're in trouble!

Boo-boos

I think most little kids make a big deal about boo-boos and ours are no exception. At the very hint of blood they freak out. One time Grace got hit on the forehead with a garden hoe and it put a little gash on her forehead but it bled pretty quickly. I will never forget it because she kept yelling "Am I going to die?" over and over again. The pictures above are from a couple weeks ago when Eric had the girls out riding bikes. I was at the grocery store and he called to tell me what Grace had just done and said. I said, get the camera so I can put it on the blog. Grace fell on her bike (while wearing some kind of dress-up clothes!) and scraped her knee. There was a little blood even though the scrape turned out to be minuscule. Eric said was very concerned, to say the least, about the blood and in the middle of the moment said, "Am I going blind or is it getting worse?". I think she meant that she couldn't tell if it was bad or not. We thought that was so funny. Lyla was right there to help fix Grace up!

'Cooby Dooby

Lyla loves Scooby Doo right now. Grace does too, actually. It's nice that they can at least agree on what cartoon to watch in the afternoon. Anyway, I am posting these pictures because a week or so ago Lyla fell asleep on the family room floor while watching 'Cooby Dooby, as she calls it, and I was amazed and had to take a picture. Lyla has completely given up naps. It is a very sad transition for me. I occasionally still try to make her but it usually takes at least an hour of fighting with her before she will give it up. She usually falls asleep at preschool during nap time though, which tells me she still needs it. I know she still needs it based on the way she acts by dinnertime too! This particular afternoon proves that if she would just let herself be still, she would be out. I was upstairs doing something and realized it had been a while since I had heard her, which is unusual. When I went to check on her the back door was standing wide open and she was not in the backyard! I freaked out for about 2 minutes until I saw her on the floor fast asleep! I had to get the camera to remember the peaceful afternoon. One side note...Lyla's birthday is in May and it will definitely be a 'Cooby Dooby party!

Lyla

Lyla has one phrase that melts my heart. She will be 3 in less than a month and she still says her "r" sound kind of like a "w". It's so cute. My favorite thing she says though is "Yarw da bess mommy in da hole wide wold". Translation: You're the best mommy in the whole wide world. She started telling me this a few months ago and it has stuck. This is the one phrase she says to me every day and I hope I never forget it (and she continues to think it!). It's amazing how little kids will love their parents unconditionally no matter what kind of day we have had. If only we all could love like this.

Swings and Popsicles

So, we had another deep conversation today while at the playground. This is almost a daily occurrence for us. But today I thought I'd try to record some of it. It started with Grace asking about the sun. We were at one of the little parks in our subdivision and it was a perfect day, 70 degrees and bright blue sky. Grace started asking science questions about the sun. She doesn't understand how you can see the same sun from anywhere. She wanted to know if it was dark at the beach while it was light here, because if the sun is here with us then it wouldn't be at the beach too. We've tried to explain how the earth rotates and causes night and day and how the sun is so big you can see it from anywhere on the earth. She keeps asking the same questions though, just in different ways. Eric loves to get our kid science books out and go through all of that stuff with them. But, that lead to questions about heaven. I think it was because Lyla asked if God was in the clouds. Then Grace always goes into the talk about why people die and go to heaven. She asked if mommies die before their kids and if I would die before her. It sounds very morbid, but she is really just very curious and intrigued by heaven and the whole subject. We have a family friend that died a couple years ago from muscular dystrophy and she still talks about him all the time. Today she was wondering why God made Joseph have the disease that caused him to die. She made the connection that God makes all of us and that Joseph was born with the disease that ultimately caused him to die. So, the question came of why did God make Joseph have that disease. So, I tried to talk about how God sees things differently than we do. How God knows how much better heaven is than what we have here on Earth and that He knows it's better to be in heaven than Earth. So He doesn't see death as a bad thing like we do. So then she asked what is heaven like. I told her that we don't know exactly but we do know that we'll be able to recognize each other. So then her response was, and this is the line I wanted to remember, "Maybe heaven will have swings and popsicles". Grace is so good at recognizing a beautiful day. She always acknowledges the beautiful weather and sky. She's great at reminding me to stop and "smell the roses". I can't believe she's going to school in the fall!!!!

A Trip to Rockport

Last weekend I had a women's retreat at church and Eric had originally planned to be out of town for work. So, I called my mom to keep the girls for the weekend. Well, Eric's plans fell through but the girls still went to Rockport. My sister, Joni, went up on Friday and brought them all back on Sunday and brought these pictures back with her. The girls had a great time. They love being on "Papoo's Farm" b/c there are so many things to do. My mom has a ton of our toys from when we were little so the girls love to play with them. Plus, Papoo has a very nice, two-seater dune buggy that he rides them all over the fields in and in the woods. They have regular swings, a tire swing, woods to go exploring in and the newest addition of a golden retriever puppy (Sophie). So, needless to say, they stay quite busy on the farm while they're there. Grace was telling me a story of something that happened on Sunday before they left to come home and she referred to it as "Sunday, you know, the sad day we had to leave". She also informed me that she wants to live there this summer because she needs to stay "ten days" next time. I told her I didn't know if Mimi and Papoo could handle all three girls for that long!