finding a happy place

it's been a while since we blogged about life at the pike house.

in an effort to forget the craziness of dumping spices in a cup, unwinding a spool of thread and roll of toilet paper, knocking over a lamp and breaking it, along with screaming games of tag in the house and fights for toys -- and this is just this morning -- i decided to find a happy moment to remember.

this was one of those perfect days.  mr. pike and i took the kids up to lake erie at the end of august. the day was not too hot, but warm enough with a slight breeze.  the kids played in the sand and splashed in the water.  

little girl and little boy were delightful.  they often talk about going back to the beach, and i'm kicking myself why we didn't go up there earlier in the summer.  we could have had many weekends of sand, sunshine, and joy.  

now we have something to look forward to for next summer.  and a perfect memory to get me through the day -- or at least until nap time. 

family night

tonight during family night, we watched the scripture story the parable of the talents and talked to the kids (mainly little girl) about how each of us is given gifts or talents from our heavenly father.

mr. pike and i started listing some examples of talents -- like drawing or playing an instrument, being kind or patient.

little girl nodded and interjected, "or like being funny."

mr. pike and i agreed.

"or watching tv for a long time."

"sorry, that's not a talent.  that actually isn't even very good for our minds," said mr. pike.

then we began to talk about how we can practice and develop our talents.  i mentioned how we can practice dancing or gymnastics to get better.

"and we can watch more and more tv to get better," piped in little girl.

well, we definitely know what's on little girl's mind.  and since she got the application (maybe not the principle), i'm going to count this as a successful family night.  until next week.

too busy

mr. pike and i have two busy kids. they don't sit still for long. and neither do we. (how i long to sit down and eat lunch with a book!)

i can't even get my kids to stay still for a photo. baby boy loves climbing onto little girl's bed and they'll roll around laughing and smiling. i love catching the two of them together. i just wish my camera could catch them as quickly.

why is it that even a crawling baby can unroll half of your toilet paper onto the floor before you finish washing your hands at the sink? or your toddler can be singing and dancing in her room at 10 p.m. while you've been wasted for hours already.

if i had some of their busy genes, maybe my to-do list would be shorter. maybe i'd be burning more calories than i consume. maybe i could keep baby boy from unrolling the toilet paper.

thoughts from little girl

when you're two and a half, you say what you think. and so, we're always hearing about little girl's thoughts or opinions. here are a few of my favorite recent ramblings.

LG: "mom, you say my name starts with 'A,' but i say it starts with 'H'."

ME: "you do start with 'A.'"

LG: "i 2, mom, i start with 'H.'"

___

some nights mr. pike and i will hug little girl at the same time on either side of her. we like to call this a "sandwich hug." last week during a sandwich hug, little girl screamed out, "i the cheese!"

___

during lunch, i left little girl at the table to run upstairs. she met me on the stairs as i was coming back down. in a whisper, little girl said, "mom. i just saw a dinosaur. some parent dinosaurs. a girl dinosaur. and a baby dinosaur."

"are they nice dinosaurs?" i asked.

"they are t-rex dinosaurs. and they will eat us. let's stay here."

___

while the whole family was getting out of the car, i said, "boy, someone smells stinky!"

little girl replied, "it isn't me. i go to the bathroom on the toilet."

creativity

creativity comes in all forms. from constructing a bridge to composing music, cooking a meal to creating a quilt.

i have a strong desire to create -- through art, design, sewing, cooking. little girl also likes to create. she loves play-dough, painting, coloring, building.

sometimes as a mom, i have a hard time between creativity and mess. i know some mess will come with creative bursts. i create plenty of messes around here, but my messes are more controlled.

the struggle is when you discover "unstructured" creative time, like when i checked on little girl before heading to bed the other night.

four packages of wipes strewn around her room, even hanging strategically on the crib. that's over 350 wipes.

inspiration must have struck on her way to bed. and there's no stopping those creative bursts. it's just takes some time cleaning it up.

p.s. - when little girl woke up, she looked around her room and asked, "where are all my wipes?" my creative assignment this week, a new place to store our inventory of wipes that's not in little girl's closet.

working on resolutions

i really was excited for 2012 to begin. a new year. a new start to new behavior. on a long ride back from virginia on new year's day, mr. pike and i created five areas in our life and set goals for us individually and as a family.

yet, as january comes to a close, the kids -- little girl and baby boy -- are well on their way to accomplishing their resolutions. while mr. pike and i are struggling to even get started on most of ours.

little girl is successfully wearing underwear. (hooray!) and little boy is on his way to walking. he's already pulling up on everything and taking steps when you hold his hands. (and if you ask me, it's too early to be starting all this.)

now mr. pike and i are just trying to get the hang of one goal in particular -- early to bed, early to rise. we can count the number of times on one finger we've made it. pretty impressive, huh? but february's going to be the month.

we'll leave the overachieving to the kids. (we get some credit for their success, right?)

friends

i love listening to my kids laugh. baby boy loves laughing. i haven't know a baby before who laughs as much as him. and little girl is especially good at doing things that make her brother laugh. so we tend to have the giggles a lot around here.

i was so happy to see that mr. pike caught this moment. two happy kids. two happy parents.

from little girl

{little girl in her new favorite shark "jacket" towel, wearing it on a walk around the neighborhood.}

little girl has had some great moments lately, and i thought i should share some:

on the phone:

little girl likes to talk on the phone for real or pretend. the other day she was using my phone to talk. mr. pike said, "little girl, who are you talking to?"

little girl replied, "somebody." and then returned to her phone call where she said, "hello, somebody. what you do today?"

at the table:

mr. pike is very complimentary of my cooking. at almost every meal, he'll say how much he likes something or delicious it tastes. tonight he said to me, "this tastes delicious." then little girl chimed, "really delicious."

mr. pike said, "i think it's awesome." and little girl added, "really big awesome."

then mr. pike said, "this is so good." and little girl said, "this is so, so, really, really awesome good."

i thanked the two of them for such kind remarks and then we all gave high-twos to each other. (someone learned shortly after her birthday how to hold up two fingers and she really likes to show us two. so high-twos are our new favorite high-five.)

camera woes

i think our camera is broken. not even new batteries would make it work.

it's really so sad.

from scratch

i like food. i like to cook. i like to eat.

and i like to think that i cook and eat pretty healthy. (with the occasional indulgence here and there.)

recently my thinking has been shaken up a bit. i watched food, inc. and jamie oliver's food revolution. (both provide excellent insight on how americans eat.)

jamie mentioned in his show a 2005 study published in the new england journal of medicine that reported for the first time in two centuries, the current generation of children in america may have shorter life expectancies than their parents. horrifying, huh?

well, now i'm feeling a little more conscientious about the food we eat at the pike home. i want mr. pike and i to be healthy. and more importantly, i want baby girl to be healthy.

so what's changed around here? i'm more considerate about where and how my food is grown. i like to get local produce when i can -- that has more time to stay on the vine and be enriched with nutrients because it has less distance to get to me. this summer, mr. pike and i have joined a csa (community supported agriculture) farm -- where you buy into the farm and get some of its harvest. find a csa farm near you here. we're members of simply wisconsin -- a group of farms outside of madison about 2.5 hours from us. our membership is for nine deliveries, every other week from june through october. i'm excited for our first batch of produce -- coming june 16! (plus the bounty from our own little garden!)

i'm also more concerned about how animals are raised, fed, and processed. mr. pike, baby girl, and i like meat -- so we're not becoming vegetarians. but, we are eating less of it. (you learn some scary facts about meat in food, inc.) over the past few weeks, i've been incorporating other sources of protein into our diet. we've added fish, tofu, quinoa, barley, and beans into our meals and only eating meat/chicken 2-3 times a week. and this has led to a lot of experimenting with new recipes. (some good, some not worth repeating!)

i'm also trying to make more foods from scratch. so i can control the ingredients. (i'm even using less canned goods that sometimes have lots of sodium,sugar, and other preservatives added.)

i'm reading a lot more labels. and trying to give our family the best options that work in our food budget. (that's the hard part.) but i think my efforts will be well worth the future results.

good things

while baby girl and i were taking a walk in the park this afternoon, i was thinking about the abundance of good things in life. here are just a few that i'm grateful for today.

one baby girl who decided to sleep all the way through the night -- without waking up to let me and mr. pike know how sad she is about not getting a night feeding anymore. (and ps- look at all the sunshine in this shot! another thing that's wonderful about today is the sunshine and warmer weather.)


grandma richard's banana cake recipe. i made this cake last night, since i had a few bananas that were ready to move on. i noticed at lunch that we're out of clean knives. mr. pike and i have been taking skinny slices all night and morning. it's super moist and oh so, delicious! and to think, i was considering making a half recipe. that would have been a shame. (a whole 9x13 pan of yummy cake -- another thing to be grateful for!)


i shouldn't have looked at the grocery ads this week. it isn't my week to shop. (i'm trying to only go to the store every other week.) but right on the front page of the jewel-osco circular was buy one edy's get two free. that's right -- two free. so, baby girl and i had to go to the store today and stock up. what a deal! what a treat! i'm so happy when i can get something i love and save money! if only we had a big freezer . . . i would have bought a few more.

what a wonderful day over here at the pike house. we're hoping you're having a great day too.

tea time

in college i took a magazine design class. i taught myself how to use photoshop on the design computers at the daily universe in hopes of totally impressing my professor and acing the class. (which pretty much came true -- the acing part, not sure about the impressing part.) but, i ended up not pursuing magazine design or any designing when i entered the work force.

however, i continued to call upon these photoshop/design skills to make invites to social gathering over the years. it had been a while since i had made an invite, but was so excited when i came up with the above design for an upcoming tea party and etiquette night for the young women at our church. (i am just very excited about the whole idea of the tea party! i'll be posting about it soon.)

if the shoe fits . . .

last weekend, mr. pike asked me to run to blockbuster to pick up a movie for our enjoyment. he causally mentioned that he thought knowing looked good. and when i saw the cover and read the back of the DVD box, i was hardly impressed.

i was immediately drawn to confessions of a shopaholic, which my friend miss holbrook had recommended. but i knew mr. pike would prefer his choice over mine, so i brought home knowing.

well, mr. pike's choice ended up being a bad choice. what we thought might be a more suspenseful movie turned out to be really eerie. we didn't even finish it. we read the ending on wikipedia, and it ended pretty corny. so, take it from us, you don't need to check this one out.

i had mentioned to mr. pike that my choice would have been so much better. to make it up to me, mr. pike brought shopoholic home tuesday night. while i'm not a fashionista of gucci or prada proportions, ms. bloomwood did inspire me to also clean my closet.

when we moved into our current apartment, my shoe collection was divided among three closets (mine, mr. pike's, and the hall closet). it was a pretty beautiful collection. but, this week i gave away several pairs of shoes and brought my collection down to two closets.

mr. pike, thank you for loaning me some of your closet space. but, now i'm giving it back. it's all yours.

by the way, i thought confessions was a sweet movie. mr. pike and i are big fans of ms. bloomwood's fan dance.

strange new habit

now that i'm a mom, i've noticed i have developed the habit of referring to myself in third person - especially when talking to baby girl. i repeatedly call myself "mommy" instead of saying "i." i wonder sometimes if baby girl knows that i am her mommy, or if she's wondering who this mysterious "mommy" is that i always refer to.

so, i've been trying to change my ways and talk about myself in the first person - as most people do. it usually sounds something like - "mommy thinks, i mean, i think . . . ." the self-correction makes mr. pike laugh; he doesn't seem to mind the third person references i make.

my new super power

growing up, i loved watching the tv show out of this world -- the show about a girl, evie, who finds out she's half human, half alien. and because of her alien heritage, evie can freeze time. i thought that was so cool; i still do.

there have been many times i would have loved to have had that super power. a little extra time to finish an assignment for school. a little more time to sleep. and whenever someone asked that theoretical question, "if you could have one super power, what would it be?" -- i'd choose evie's special power. so, freezing time isn't my new super power. (but, it would be so awesome if it was, especially on those sleep deprived nights.)

no, my super power is my new super sonic hearing. mr. pike has always been the light sleeper and me the heavy sleeper. that is -- until baby girl came into our lives. now he is a heavy sleeper, and i -- i have super sonic hearing.

baby girl sleeps in her crib in her room across the hall from our room. even with a window air conditioning unit humming just behind where i sleep, i awake to baby girl's faintest moan or cry. the one caveot to my new super power is that it only works for baby girl -- which is actually a good thing. i hear her plenty throughout the night, that it's nice that nothing else is waking me up.

baby girl slumbering away -- she always manages to get her hands free from our tight wraps

while we wait

i've been a slow poster the past week or so - and i thought i'd better say a few words or people might think baby girl had actually arrived. she hasn't.

i'm anxiously awaiting her arrival - every day i wonder, "could this be the day?" and then i fall asleep to the thought, "maybe tomorrow." i'm trying to be patient, but it's hard to be when i feel so anxious to move on and meet our little girl.

i've been trying to stay busy to keep my mind off the waiting game. so over the past week, mr. pike and i planted part of our garden. i've been putting together a family newsletter - although i'm still waiting on my front page article from dad lau. i cleaned the bathroom last night. i read parenting books - mostly the sections on how to get babies to sleep! mr. pike and i go to the gym regularly. and i've been indulging in a bowl or bite of ice cream almost nightly. (at this point, i feel i've earned every calorie!)

i'm sure you're all wondering when the big news will be posted on the blog - i do too! hopefully, it will be soon. i walked over 2.5 miles tonight at the gym - so that's got to do something, right?

what's in a name

the countdown is on - technically i have three weeks to go. but, if baby girl's late, my doctor said they'd only let her go an extra week. so, four weeks left at the most. and that seems very doable. (especially, since baby girl's been treating me very well.)

as time whittles down, there are just a few things left on our to-do list. the most important - coming up with a name.

before we knew baby girl was a girl - it seemed like we had plenty of ideas. but, since then mr. pike and i've been on a brainstorming dryspell.

we did have a short list - mainly the name lucy. the other day, mr. pike overheard me talking to my sister. i was telling her how much mr. pike liked the name lucy, but that i was still deciding about it. he came in after our call and said that he was just talking to mom pike. and during their conversation told mom that i really liked the name lucy, but that he was still thinking about it.

"so, neither of us are completely sold on lucy? then why is it on the top of our list?" i asked mr. pike.

and with that, we were back to square one on the name. so, mr. pike suggested we each put together a list on names on our own, and then compare. but, i'm having a hard time even creating a list. we'll see how mr. pike's doing. maybe he'll have enough for the both of us. . . .

happy easter

i love the easter season, because it signifies a renewal of life. how glorious it is to know that the Savior of mankind rose on the third day. he overcame death, so that we too might live again. an excerpt from elder holland's recent confernce talk shares the beautiful message of our Savior's great love for us. i feel renewed hope and peace when i heard his words again.

as i celebrate this good news -- there are certain things that make me happy, that i like to have at easter time. here are a few of those good things:

DAFFODILS - i couldn't help myself when i saw these daffodils at the store; i had to bring them home. they are so bright and cheery. i can't help but smile when i see them.


ORANGE ROLLS - this is a family tradition that is too yummy to give up. and this year, i actually made a great batch of roll dough that rose and tasted good! mr. pike helped me twist and tie our dough. he faithfully watched the oven to make sure we didn't overcook them -- he likes his rolls a little gooey. it was a good thing that i made so many, because mr. pike snuck four before we headed to our friends' home for dinner.


CONFETTI EGGS - when i lived in houston, my friends the torres family introduced me to the gift of confetti eggs. i think they are so fun! i buy them year after year. (or have my sister send some to me!) hollowed eggs filled with confetti that you crack on people's heads. so fun!

the coming of spring

growing up outside of washington dc, i always new spring as coming when the crocuses began to peek out of the dirt around our patio. the crocuses always came before the tuplips and daffodils. the first flower to brave the transition from winter to spring. i would get so excited to see flowers blooming again after months of snow and cold.

while we've had a few warmer days here and there, we still haven't been able to completely shake the midwest winter. many people say that we won't see spring until may - but as i was driving to work this week, i saw something amazing. crocuses in bloom along the side of the road.

even though we may have had snow here on sunday, i'm hopefully optimistic that spring is on its way here. and as i observed as a girl, the crocuses always seem to know.

our afternoon walk

it felt like spring this weekend. i know it's just mother nature teasing us a bit -- there always seems to be a week or two of incredibly enjoyable weather at the tail end of winter. where the sun comes out, the grass starts turning green again, and you don't have to don a jacket when you head outside. that was this weekend.

but, i also know winter isn't quite over yet. we'll have at least another month of colder weather before it really turns spring around here. so knowing that this was just a little taste of spring, mr. pike and i were determined to enjoy as much of it as we could. mr. pike took a bike ride through town. and then in the afternoon, we went to one of our favorite places on the lake -- ft. sheridan.

this lakefront community use to be an army base. about 10 years ago, developers bought the base from the army and refurbished all of the buildings into housing -- the old generals' houses are family homes, the old stables and carriage houses are townhomes, and the hospital is now condos. it's a beautiful community overlooking the lake on the east, and backing up against a forest preserve on the north. big oak trees line the streets. and a huge parade grounds -- where the soldiers use to have drills -- provides a large park in the center of it all.

mr. pike asked me yesterday if i could live anywhere in the area where would i choose. one of my top choices would definitely be ft. sheridan. i love the old architecture. and the idea of preserving part of the past. i love the beauty of the lake and being able to wander the trails through the forest perserve. it is one of my favorite places to visit.

here's a shot of baby girl and me at the lake. she likes ft. sheridan too.