Sisterly Love

Before we left for preschool this morning, I put Olive in the car, ran back into the kitchen and told Lila to run down to the car.  As she went down the stairs, I heard Lila say, "Oh hi Olive! Oh haha dat's not Olive; dat's Baby Chloey!"

Should I be concerned that Lila was not at all concerned about the position the baby doll was in when she thought it was her baby sister?

Happy Halloween!

I've decided that Halloween is much more stressful as a parent than as a kid.  You plan your kids costumes for months until they decide right before Halloween that they want something different.  And then the costume is WHITE so you have to be worried all day that they're going to poop on it, and they don't fit as well in their carseats when they have tutus on, and they don't want to wear their tutus because they are scary, and talking all week about being a zebra is apparently much more fun than actually being a zebra, and then when you finally get them to trick or treat they don't understand what's going on and they try to go inside the houses of the people that are giving them hand-fulls of candy.

But they look cute, darn it.

Happy (late) Halloween from our little bunch! 

Mike, Sheriff Callie, zebra one, Spiderman, a witch, zebra two, and the Hulk.

Lila Gets Her Hair Cut

I've been putting this off for months.  I have envisioned putting Lila in the hair cutting chair only to have her collapse into extreme meltdown, totally terrified of scissors cutting off her hair.  But her hair finally got to such an unruly point that I either needed to get it cut or start saying she was the neighbor's kid.

So I took her to Beckie at Hair Lovin' in downtown Overland Park, she's amazing, by the way, if you're looking for a new stylist.  Though she says she doesn't know why anyone listens to me and comes to her because I get my hair cut about two times a year.  Anyway, Lila sauntered right in there, waved to everyone, and scurried up into the chair.

Notice the macaron bribe on the counter.

For the most part Lila did a great job...until Beckie wanted her to keep her head straight, and the tears started flowing.  Lila is apparently more of a cocked head kind of gal, and would NOT keep her head straight.  But I quickly morphed into the kind of mom that I vowed I would never be and turned on Netflix.  While Lila's eye glazed over, I grabbed her head with my hands and held it straight for the rest of the cut.  Problem solved!

Success!

Right around the end of the haircut, I thought about how you're supposed to save a lock of your child's hair during their first haircut, but then I thought about how we were recently looking through my grandmother's photo albums and my dad found Olive chewing on and swallowing a large chunk of blonde hair, presumably my mother's or my aunt's.  Soooo I'm gonna go with no hair saving in our house.

I told Lila that after the haircut she could go get a cupcake at Small Cakes in honor of Aunt Jessie's birthday and for doing a good job, but they were sold out! So I had the brilliant idea of getting her one at Wal-Mart and letting her eat it in the car.

"Mommy, it's yike soap."

Mmhmm.

What's New Pussy Cat?

So we have a bit of a feral cat problem in our neighborhood.  Scratch that, not our neighborhood, but a chunk of about nine houses with ours in the middle.  We were really upset with these kitties a few months ago because the dad was swaggering around with a big oozing sore on his neck, crawling all over Lila's toys in the backyard.  Lovely.

So we called animal control, and did you know that they do NOTHING for feral cats?  The only thing that we could do would be to somehow trap them ourselves and then animal control would spay and neuter them for the low low price of $25 a pop.  Then they would give them back to us so that we could set them free back in our yard. Tempting.

We now have another problem:

 the mommy had kittens and they are soooooo cute!!!

And they play inside of Lila's barn!  Awwwwwwwwwwwwww!

We also seem to have another problem with the person who cleans the windows.

And it's also a little scary to be sitting at the dining room table and look over to see five cats staring at you.

The Hutsons Go Apple Picking

I haven't been posting lately because I try to post interesting things.  Our days at the moment go like this: wake up, Lila says something about Daniel Tiger, I feed everyone, Lila watches Daniel Tiger, I make macarons, Olive eats like five things off the floor that she isn't supposed to, Lila plays pretend about Daniel Tiger, Olive gets stuck under the dining room table, we go to bed.  I might feed them at other points throughout the day, but this is a basic summation.  Not very interesting. 

But today, we mixed it up and went apple picking with the Reids and the Kidds!  Apple picking has always been special to me because my family would go when we were little, and Johnny and I went every year together in college and in Philadelphia.

And now we get to bring the wee ones.

Olive got to ride in style the whole morning.  She had a strap to chew on...she was in heaven.

The orchard that we went to was called Cider Hill Family Orchard up North.  It was super cute, but I will say that it was a little picked over.  Lila did find a few trees that had apples low enough for her.  "The apples on the ground are for the animals," she continued to remind herself.

I wish I had gotten a better picture of Lila and her buddy "Cahhhter," but this picture of Carter being nice and sweet while Lila spins in front of him pretty much sums up their relationship.

And I can't wait until these two get a little bit older and can really play together.  Lila loves her cousin Chloey, and between the two of them I think they bit into about 15 apples.

And thanks to Danielle for understanding that when you take a family photo, you need to press the button about 7 times to get a halfway decent picture.

  Umm sorry Olive.

I'd say a very successful apple picking extravaganza.

And hey, it's just across the highway from a great strip club called Whispers, so it's got that going for it.

Eight Years

Eight years ago today, Johnny and I went on our first date...so did five of our closest friends.

Lila and Olive's Shared Room

Hooray! It's finally done! Well, not so much "done" as I'm just tired of doing anything in there.

When I was pregnant with Lila, we painted this room green (Koi Pond by Sherwin Williams) in hopes that it would stay a gender neutral nursery. (The original before and after post is here.)  The color served us well starting originally with Lila, and then Little Guy, and then both Lila and Little Sister, and then just Olive, and now both Olive and Lila.

We're lucky to have a house that has three fairly large bedrooms, so I tried to split up the space into a few smaller spaces.  Here's the girls' little hand me down kitchen from the girls I used to babysit.

The dish towel was one of Johnny's grandma's, and the tiny little rug was supposed to be a giant rug that I was latch-hooking out of jersey sheets.  This tiny rug is as far as I got.

The bunk beds are the biggest addition to the room.  We bought beds that could come apart and be used as two twin beds, which came in handy when we had both Lila and Little Sister sleeping in here.  Now that we bunked the beds, Lila loves to climb the ladder and tell everyone that you "just need a yiddle courage!"

The duvets I made myself with fabric from Jo-Ann's.  The top one is backed with light pink, and the bottom one has dark pink.  The fabric at the end of the beds is left over from the valances.  Eventually they will be blankets...probably in about four years when I get around to it.

So no one in my family has supported these little poofs; we'll see if you jump on their bandwagon as well.  I saw this on Pinterest and tried to recreate it.  I like mine, but they are not as cute as the ones in the picture.  They must have used something other than tulle...ideas?  And I tried cutting them with curved edges, but they don't look any different.  I'm pretty sure Johnny still thinks I just threw tutus on the beds.

The chair was a Craigslist find back when we were pregnant with Lila, and the cute flower table was my sister's.  My aunt crocheted the gorgeous pink blanket for Olive.

I planned to do more tissue paper flowers, but that never happened either. Almost as cute as what my cousin did in her daughter's room.

Still using the same teeth marked crib that was a fabulous Craigslist find.  Lila has figured out how to climb into it, so she likes to climb in and bounce Olive.

The Boo Boo likes it too.

The girls' dress up collection is quite extensive.  They're using my old dress up box that my grandmother got me as well as all my old dance recital costumes because I was such an amazing dancer.

We took the doors off of the closet so that we could fit a dresser in there, and I am still happy that we did it.  I'm not sure how long we will be able to fit both girls' clothes in there, though.

The girls also have all of my old Madame Alexander dolls on display.  I once caught Johnny explaining to Lila that the ones on the left were wearing such weird dresses because they were from another country.  They are Little Women dolls.

And here's my favorite part of the girls' room, their little book nook.  The only problem is that now Lila is starting to try to climb up the shelves to get to books she wants on the top.  I wrote in an older post how to do the gutter shelves.  It's super easy, and they hold a lot, but I think you could do something similar with baskets or Ikea shelves for a little bit cheaper.  Gutters ain't cheap, yo.

So in the end, I'm happy with how the girls' room turned out.  Johnny couldn't understand why I was doing a post on it because he said I just rearranged stuff.  But I'm pleased with my rearranging, and I hope that eventually we'll get both girls to actually sleep in there together without waking each other and subsequently us up.

Happy Weekend!