Winter Fun

Here are some activities we've done in the past few weeks to beat the winter blues!

Making Valentine Day cookies:


Going to the Ice Carving Festival in St. Joe, MI






At Healthworks Museum with a friend


Bowling with friends in IL


Sisters!

Experiment

Lilly is very into experimenting lately, so I pulled out vinegar, food coloring and baking soda last week and she had a blast. We went through a huge container of vinegar in about 1/2 hour and almost an entire box of baking soda. Lilly liked to add food coloring herself, which resulted in this horrible color because she added every color to every container, but it was fun!

Bowling

Here's Lilly's debut as a professional bowler. Her form could use some work and she definitely is not going to win anything for speed, but she looks cute in those shoes!

Art!

Lilly LOVES to do art projects so I am trying to think of new ones each week for her. This week, instead of a real easel, we made one with a huge piece of cardboard that I found in our basement (it came from her crib box...we really need to clean out our storage area!). Here's Lilly and her first masterpiece.

Becca

Here are some pictures of Lilly and her baby cousin, Becca:

gingerbread house and santa

Here are some more Christmas type activities that we've done recently:

decorating the gingerbread house (Lilly didn't eat any of the candy!! Pete has eaten quite a bit, though)


Here's the half eaten Santa candy that Lilly put on top:


Downtown South Bend has a really cool Santa's workshop on the weekends during December. We went today and did all the activities:

Decorating a cookie and coloring at the college football hall of fame:


Taking a trolley ride:


Visiting with Santa (this is the first year we've taken Lilly to see Santa and he was surprised that all she wanted was a pink guitar- he even asked, what else and she said nothing! Super easy christmas for us this year! :) )


Another activity Lilly did was to paint her own pottery ornament. Pete, not having done this very often, let Lilly choose black as one of her colors and now the ornament is completely black. It's pretty funny! Anyway, I was SO excited about this activity. For those of you who don't know, I was a little obsessed with pottery painting when we lived in MI and a group of friends and I used to go every Wednesday to paint pottery. The woman who did the ornaments today runs a "mobile pottery painting" business that comes to you. I'm so excited to do this for parties and playgroups!

sprinkles!

I love to bake and I am constantly making cookies. Lilly's contribution is usually eating the chocolate chips or playing with the dough, so I wasn't expecting much when I told her we were going to make Christmas cookies today. I had the dough ready, so we just had to cut out the cookies, bake them, and decorate them. This lasted almost 2 hours!! I couldn't believe how into the cookie making Lilly was! She did think that sprinkles were meant to cover the entire cookie and be an inch thick, but oh well.

Oh- Lilly has decided that she now smiles for pictures with her eyes closed, so it's really hard to get any regular pictures of her!

yea for sugar!!


rolling the dough....I didn't think of aprons until 3/4 of the way through and her black jumper was covered in flour!