Big News At Home

We survived!
This past week I embarked on my new job… a Stay-At-Home-Mom!  We have decided that for at least the near term I will stay at home with the kids and Kevin will bring home the bacon.  He is now finished with structured classes and is onto reading and writing and researching for his dissertation.  The result will, I’m sure, us both being extremely busy.

Here are some picture highlights from our first week at home.

Dance Party-  It has been yucky outside and I felt bad having Rayleigh cooped up in the house all day.  We had a dance party to get the ‘wiggles out’.  She doesn’t usually sing but is a big fan of participatory songs, “If you are happy and you know it” etc.  But she will sing E-I-E-I-O!   Periodically she would go try to help Dillon “dance” too.

She has also been working on dressing/undressing herself.  She’s doing well but as you can see her bubble butt sometimes gets in the way.

This week the skill she chose to tackle was snaps.  After unsnapping her brother’s outfit I decided we needed a new Dummy… Welcome Baby Stella.  A Christmas gift from Mimi & PopPop Dillon’s premie clothes were a perfect fit!

Rayleigh is great about entertaining herself when I need to take care of Dillon or start on dinner.  She often chooses and art activity- stickers or coloring books.  A fan of arty projects myself I wanted to help foster this interest.  So we painted!  I made paint from evaporated milk and food coloring (it is thicker and dries shiny).  Then I repurposed her magnet board as a painter’s mat and let her go to town.  Fun for both of us.

I did have to run some errands mid-week.  Along the way I needed gas- a simple and quick stop right?  Wrong!  The credit card system was down which meant after pumping gas I needed to unload both kids- which included redressing Rayleigh since her favorite car ride activity is to undress herself- in the below freezing temperatures to go into the Stewart’s Shop to stand in line while everyone paid for their items using a “chu-chunk machine”.  Why tell you this story, because Rayleigh was a great sport all morning during our in and out of the car a dozen times.  She was rewarded with a St. Patrick’s Day donut while I fed Dillon.

On Wednesday it started to snow it was finally starting to look and feel like winter so we baked cookies.  Rayleigh and I wore our aprons from Aunt Nicki & Uncle Flip and baked sugar cookies.  She helped measure (Kevin will tell you the flour to sugar ratio was perhaps a bit in favor of sugar!)…

Roll them into balls….

She got the sprinkles out of the drawer which is what started the whole process.  I’m not sure what we would have made had she brought me the vinegar!

By Thursday morning we had a wonderful covering of excellent packing snow.  Since it has been such a terrible winter snow wise i definitely wanted Rayleigh to go out and enjoy it. She went out to try out her snow legs while Kevin snowblowed the sidewalks in the morning.

Later in the day I took her out while Dillon took a nap (I had the monitor on me!).  We built a snowman.

Professor snowman was a big hit!  She helped roll the body and continued to make lots of “heads” which she lifted “up, up, up”.

Upon coming in from playing in the snow and getting undressed she promptly walked to the counter and clearly said “cookie”.  So of course she had a post snow playing cookie with *gasp* hot chocolate milk.

As for Dillon his activities are fairly limited to eating, sleeping, and pooping.  And since two of those activities require a fair amount of my attention I have a collection of pictures of Dillon sleeping.  Enjoy!