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I’m starting to love Pinterest. When Lauren first told me to join, I didn’t find it that appealing. I was looking at the wrong stuff! My wall feed when I first log in of the stuff my friends had pinned was just not stuff I was interested in. Homemade house cleaners? I can’t even bring myself to CLEAN my house…you really think I’m going to take the time to make my own cleaners for it? Cooking recipes? Yeah, right.

Well a Facebook feed of something caught my attention and I went by my account to give it a look. And discovered the Kid’s Stuff. Now I can’t stop looking at activities to do with my kids. As usual, a lot of stuff mine are still too young to do (but I’m saving the ideas anyway for later), but there is tons of great stuff I’m finding we *can* do. And hey, I’m even saving some of those recipes onto my own board, titled “Food I’ll Never Actually Cook.”

Tonight I tried my first Pinterest inspired idea. The frozen yogurt dots. Prep time took literally 5 minutes and now they are in the freezer to harden. Mine don’t look as nice as in their picture…more like yogurt blobs than dots. Update: they took about 25-30 mins to freeze and are pretty good. I’m going to experiment with mixing them with other ingredients b4 freezing.

Another project I did today was one I made up on my own. Lucas helped every step of the way as we made a weather folder. First he used a hole punch and punched the holes alone the sides of a file folder. Then with yellow yarn he sewed the two sides together to make it into a folder pocket. Next he used my paper cutter to cut paper cards. I drew different weather pictures on each one: a sun, a rain cloud, wind, etc and he colored them in. Finally I cut the letters for “weather” out on my cricut and he glued them onto the front of the folder. The last step is I will take the cards to be laminated and then have him attach Velcro to the back of the cards and front of the envelope. We then take the folder outside and he looks at the sky and chooses the cards that match the weather for that day and attaches those cards to the front of the folder pocket with the Velcro. Today he chose blue skies and windy. He said it wasn’t sunny because he couldn’t see the sun (which was on the other side of the house).

On Thursday, Lucas and Arianna and I had a birthday lunch at the Rib Ranch with Dad and Grandmother Stone. After lunch, I got Lucas a brownie sundae, which turned out to be both huge and delicious. Afterwards, we went back to Dad’s house and I showed them pictures and we looked at some genealogy stuff. I got some stuff from Grandmother’s side to add to my ancestry.com tree. Dad gave some Lucas some Cars Lego sets for his birthday. Lucas is a little young to put them together since they have lots of little pieces, but Paul put it together for him and Lucas had fun making the Cars race. Lucas always has fun at his Grandpa’s house and talks about Grandpa for several days after.

DSC06849, a photo by Paul Beechner on Flickr.

Splashing in the Touch Pool. I just got lucky with the shot coming out all cool like that.

“No to the power of No” – Nikita

“some family members are like cigarettes. You convince yourself you need them and then all they end up doing is taking years off your life and stinking up your house.” – The Firm

Leo:You think I’m going to talk to you about my boss because you bought me tacos?
Ben: They’re good tacos
…
Leo: You have a lot of questions….I’m starting to feel used and violated
Ben: I will buy you a sundae
Leo: Well now I feel like a dessert-stitute
- Fairly Legal

i was eating the bottom layer of a biscuit and lucas asked if it was a pancake. i said no, it’s a biscuit. he said, “kinda like a pancake. it’s a circle.” observant of him.

i went to start lucas’s bath and he said “what’s that?” pointing to the bath mat in the tub basin. I said it was the bath mat, that I never took it out last night. He continued saying what’s that, so I paid more attention and saw a creepy unknown bug on top of the mat. no idea what it was. after i got done being creeped out, i washed it down the drain. lucas had some reservations about it crawling back up, but i told him it was quite washed away, plus the plug was inserted. i came downstairs to find out what my unknown bug was. i typed into google, “creepy bug with lots of legs,” expecting to have to wade through a bunch of google images to identify the right one, because let’s face it, there are a LOT of creepy looking bugs out there. so this bug must really creep out a lot of people, because both the top web result and the top row of google images were all of my bug, now known to be a house centipede. google it and be afraid. or at least mildly disgusted.

me: it happened again…it just keeps happening!!!
steph: wat
me: mornings
steph: every day of your life

the current going ons in the beechner household:

paul is boring. i have nothing to say on his behalf.

arianna is still a baby. she started sleeping at night at 7 weeks, sleeping from about 9pm until 5am on average. she and i have scintillating conversations that consist of “ohh” and “ahh”.

lucas’s gymboree school class is changing starting in May so that it will be from 3pm-6pm Tues/Thurs. I think they are adding the sports class type activities to the end of his school day activities, but he still has his regular sports class on Thursdays. I guess i’ll find out more in May or when I bother to ask. he really is enjoying going, though.

as for me, not much going on. taking care of kids, lots of scrapbooking, trying to make it through my backed up list of DVRed shows, etc. i start back at girl scouts tomorrow and i have no idea what we are going to do.

i know lucas understands numbers because i told him he could have one cookie. he took a second one from the wrapper and said “two.” so i let him have two and he said, “have 3″ and took a third one. paul said, “way to be a disciplinarian.” and i replied, “it’s teaching him to count.” 

Lauren and Jenn and I were trying to figure out Arianna’s eye color at the hospital. b/c i’m neurotic like that i wanted to know what color her eyes are. with the computer era, you can now find out exactly that. I took a close up photo of her eyes in the daylight and loaded it into photoshop. Then I used the color grabber tool and used it to pick out the colors in her eyes — both the lighter and darker areas of her irises. I’ve been calling them steel blue but didn’t think they really looked very blue and they aren’t really.  they’re like really grey. slate grey. that blows away the whole “all babies are born with blue eyes” theory.

i’m scrolling through the baby announcements for my Feb Baby Board to see what the Feb moms ended up naming their kids (mostly looking for any odd ones). So far I’ve found:

- 2 little girls with the middle name London

- some cool ones: Kai x2, Declan x3, Rowan x4, Everley, Avaleigh, Emerlee, Vienna as a middle name, Jace Donovan, Trevin, Drake, Roman, Asher, Brynleigh, Irelyn, Rylan, Kylon, Aubrianna, Trace

- an Alexandria,  Damon x2, a Hunter, an Ethan, Lucas x 2

- Aidan x 4, Eliana x 4, Sera x 2, Landon x 4, a bunch of Reeses, 2 Paisleys, 2 Willows

- Albert the 3rd, Larry, and Maximus

- the odd ones: Logan Viking, Thatcher, Briar,  Giovanni Valentin (this baby is destined to be an Italian clothing designer or something), Zakk, Ma’Riyah Zyerria, Stanislaw, Billie Jean (a boy), Balthazar, Atlas, Journey Raine, Zyaire, Breslynn, Dorian Gray

how come every girly teen movie requires a fashion montage of the main character trying on a bunch of different clothes at a store to music? is it part of the costume designer’s contract to have her wearing a set number of outfits in a movie so they just throw ten in at once?

how come in the movies/tv, when someone’s get-together gets crashed by being turned into a raging party, 100 people show up *all at once* and they come bringing kegs, cups, and stereos for the music? i have never brought my own stereo system to a party.

i don’t care if “the script called for it,” Mr D, it’s just stupid