General Cuteness

 Just look at those big eyes

Thanks for the new jammies, Aunt Liz!

Fire is just getting big enough to use his boucy chair

Sky thinks his baby chair makes a great hat

Fire napping in the sun

Sky reading to her kitty

Packed Lunches

  For the last five weeks, I've been packing Sky's lunches and it's worked out pretty well.  I packed my last lunch for her last night and I can't say that I'll mind being done with it.  I like the idea of it and it was fun to try and make creative and healthy lunches but there were a lot of evenings when it felt like "just one more thing to do".   I wrote about what I made for her for the first two weeks in this post: Lunches and here are the last three weeks. 
  For the most part, these are cold lunches that Florina could just grab out of the fridge.  I also tried not to buy anything out of the ordinary for them, the exceptions being the summer sausage I used for her sausage and cheese skewers and the sandwhich thins I bought to make her "flatbread" pizzas.  I hope some of these lunches can be helpful to anyone else out there struggling to keep their toddler interested and eating healthy!

Tuesday:
Sausage and cheese skewers
Banana muffin
Apple slices with peanut butter

Wednesday:
Cheese tortellini with spaghetti sauce
Applesauce
TLC crackers

Thursday:
Turkey cups with peas and mac and cheese (I originally found this recipe on Bon Appetit's website but I can't find it now.  Spray muffin cups with cooking spray and put in two pieces of deli turkey to make a bowl.  You can fill it with anything you want but I used leftover peas and mac and cheese, with a slice of american cheese mixed in to help hold it all together.  Sky loved these and I think I'm going to make them for dinner sometime)
Carrot sticks with dressing
Apple Sauce

Friday:
"Flatbread" pizza (spaghetti sauce and cheese on a sandwhich thin)
Yogurt
Mango

Saturday:
Lunchable (they were on sale at the store and Sky asked very nicely)
Hard boiled egg
Apple sauce


Tuesday:
Chicken fingers with cheese-y salsa for dipping
Grapes
TLC crackers

Wednesday:
Peanut butter and jelly sandwhich
String cheese
Annie's bunny crackers

Thursday:
Sausage and cheese skewers
Carrot sticks
Banana muffin

Friday:
Waffle sandwhich with peanut butter, honey, and raisins
Edamame
Mango

Saturday:
"Flatbread" pizza
Apple slices with peanut butter


Tuesday:
Meat and cheese skewers
Edamame
Mommy cupcake (you can find the recipe here.  Because we didn't have the coconut and almonds, I put in white chocolate chips (not a lot) and pumpkin seeds.  These are so yummy that we've had them for desert a few times- you can't even tell they have veggies in them!)

Wednesday:
No packed lunch.  Florina was sick so we ate lunch as a family while doing the kid-hand-off

Thursday:
Turkey and cheese sandwhich
Carrot sticks
Apple slices
Edamame

Friday:
Peanut butter and jelly sandwhich on whole wheat tortilla
Apple sauce
String Cheese

Saturday:
Turkey and cheese roll-ups
Mommy cupcake
Apple

Just What We Needed

   I just want to give a big shout-out to our friend Karen.  We had plans to have dinner at our house this week and I was really looking forward to catching up but it was starting to look like things wouldn't work out.  David and I were both really tired (Fire hasn't been sleeping well) and were working long days.  When I emailed Karen about a change of plans, she said that she would be over around 5 to make us dinner.  Oh, how wonderful to have someone else cook for you!  She brought a bottle of red wine and had dinner ready when we got home.  We spent the evening just hanging out with a good friend, just talking about our lives.  We really needed that.

Fire started the evening off right by rolling over!

 You read that right- he rolled over!  See, I caught him in the act:

 Me with my big boy

 Karen taught Sky how to lick her fingers

Sky's scooter/skateboard came in that day and we spent most of the evening out on the porch while Sky played with her new toy

Karen and Fire

Awww, he's started sucking his thumb!

Picture Post

   We're just living our lives here these days so I don't have too much to post about but I thought I'd put up some pictures, since I know that's what you all come here for!  Enjoy!

Fire had his first playdate last week:

Yup, that's pretty much how it went!

I somehow managed to get myself and the kids dressed in three different,

non-coordinating patterns last Sunday:

Our good friend Kerri is PCSing (leaving Kwaj) so there was a fiesta-themed party for her last weekend

Josh brought the class:

Anne and Laura organized the party

Some of the decorations (those are tacos by the way!):

Every fiest-themed party needs a pinata...

 ...and a two-year-old trying to hit it!

Since we were all looking pretty nice, I thought we could finally try to get a new family picture. 

 Okay, here goes:



 I was looking the wrong way

 Sky's making a funny face and Fire's tummy is showing

 Sky's making an even funnier face and Fire is looking the wrong way

 There we go!  No one is looking but we're all laughing!

Sky has found the buttons on the bottom of the TV and our new kitten, Escher, has started climbing the speakers underneath it.  To fix both of these problems, D came up with this solution:

 We're nothing if not stylish here.

Me, with two sleeping babies

Sky rubbed her eye red last night and was demanding a band-aid, so I turned her into a pirate:

How does D relax after a stressful day parenting two small children? 

By building a lego R2-D2! 

Two babies + footy jammies+ our bed=  very cute

Escher slipped in to nap with Sky- that kitten loves her so much!

Getting This Train Back on Track

D has always called me "the cruise director" because I was the one that made all our plans. I would arrange our dinners with friends and our days out on boats, and make sure we weren't double booked. When Fire came along, that didn't change much but these days, I feel more like a train conductor, keeping my family train chugging along. It's a lot less glamorous and a lot more work. Maybe when things settle down a bit, we'll get back to cruising...
   In this post, I talked about the let-down after Fire's adoption and how I felt the need to change EVERYTHING in our lives because I was unhappy and needed an outlet for all the stress I couldn't put into the adoption any more. Since it's been a few weeks, I thought I would give you an update on the things I said I would try to change to deal with all that stress.

Packing Lunches for a Two-Year-Old

  Two weeks ago, I decided to start packing my daughter's lunches.  I had two reasons for it:  I wanted to make sure she was eating healthy and I wanted to take any stress off our nanny in regards to making her lunch (Sky is hungry and tired when she gets home from school and it can be her worst time of day, behavior-wise). 
 Since other folks might be interested in what a two-year-old will eat for lunch, here is a day-by-day list of what I've left for her, with notes are in parenthesis 

Wednesday (the first week was a four-day week for us)
-Turkey and mayo on a cheese and green onion biscuit (she just ate the turkey)
-carrot sticks
-string cheese
-fruit leather

Thursday
-banana muffin
-hard-boiled egg
-summer sausage and cheese skewers (little kebabs on toothpicks)
-fruit leather

In Case You Were Wondering What We Do Here

  This is the information page for something coming up: http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/

Something Interesting

  D and I noticed something interesting the other day:  I can't ignore Fire easily when he cries but D can.  When we were sleep-training CSky, D hated to hear her sob and actually went to work at 4am one morning because of it while I could put up with it. 
  Are we going to have a Daddy's girl and a Mommy's boy?  Maybe.

Sleep

  It always comes down to sleep, doesn't it?  If the kids don't sleep well,  you don't sleep well.  If they don't get enough sleep, nothing goes well.  I've already posted some on getting Sky's sleep figured out ( read here, here, and here) but now we're trying to get Fire's sleep sorted.
  Fire's daytime schedule is just fine.  He wakes up around 6 am, takes a few short naps and few long naps during the day and is ready for bed at 8pm.  It's the after 8pm part that we're hoping to make a little more family friendly.  When Fire joined our family,we weren't co-sleeping and he was waking up four times a night, at 10:30, 1:30, 3:30 and 5:30.  Because we didn't know any differently, we tried to feed him each time.  At 10:30 and 3:30 he would only drink about 2 ounces and then fall back asleep but at 1:30 and 5:30, he would drink six ounces (each time!).  On the advice of my wonderful sister-in-law, we had been taking shifts throughout the night so that each of us got a solid block of sleep.  I was "on" from 10 to 2 and D took 2 to 6.

An Afternoon at the Beach

   Last weekend we took the kids to the beach after nap time.  We hadn't been since we got back from Majuro and we had a great time.  As far as D or I know, this was Fire's first time in the water and he loved it!  Sky had a fun time playing in the water and with her sand toys.  She's getting more comfortable with being in the lagoon but still clings to us when the water gets deep.  Because it was Memorial weekend, the beach was full of families and we saw lots of our friends.  It was a really good time and we really need to get out there more often.  Here's a slice of our afternoon:

 I think we're going to see that look again when he's a teenager...