Random Pictures of Little L

Here are some random pictures of Little L from the last few weeks!

Dairy Queen Ice Cream Cone!  Yum!

Sitting on the cat...she thinks its hilarious and he isn't usually too amused!

Notice all the stickers on her shirt?  She LOVES stickers and tends to stick them all on top of each other!

This was my first time attempting full pigtails.  Her hair is so fine that some of it fell out but I think they are cute!

Too Sweet to Not Share!

While my mom was here a few weeks ago, she snapped these photos of the hubby playing with Little L in her room.  My favorite is the second one where they are cuddling!  LOVE daddy/daughter moments!

Hi Moon!

The other night while we were playing Little L looked out the window and saw the moon.  It was so great because while we have identified moons in books and pictures she hadn't ever seen the actual moon and called it by its name!  She was so proud of herself for figuring it out and for the next few nights she would go look out the window to try and find the moon!

Here is a pic and a video of her looking at the moon!

Its kind of hard to tell, but that little white thing Little L is pointing at is the moon!  It looks so much smaller in the picture than it did out the window!

Pretending

Little L is getting to such a fun stage where she has actually started to pretend!  There are lots of different things she pretends to do...eat, drink, act like a puppy, and ride a horse along with some other things.

Just the other night I was able to get a quick video of her pretending to be asleep!  If you listen you can hear snoring and that is actually coming from Little L!  It's too funny!  Then she "woke up" but as soon as she saw the camera it was all over.  ("mine" she says...thinking the camera should be hers!)

Enjoy!

A Beautiful Fall Day at Como Zoo

A week ago Monday we woke up and kind of last minute, decided to take Little L on a trip to Como Zoo!  We know that the hubby's schedule will be changing soon so we want to take advantage of his time at home with us as much as we can!  

This trip to Como turned out to be such a blessing to our family!  The day started off a little chilly but by the time we got to the zoo it was sunny and warm!  Plus, there was hardly anyone at the zoo which made it easier to let Little L run around a bit and check things out "on her own".  On top of all that, the animals were out in full swing!  We were able to see so many running around and playing that are often sleeping or hiding out.  The gorillas were chasing each other and the big cats were up and about pacing back and forth.  The absolute best for the hubby was when he was looking in on the sleeping lions and the female lion woke up and looked him straight in the eye!  It was so exciting!  

Going to the zoo always reminds me of how awesome God's creation truly is!

Here are our pictures!

The gorillas...they ended up chasing each other around shortly after this!

An Ostrich...for all the times I've been to Como Zoo this summer this was the first time I had seen an ostrich!

Zebra!

Little L and the hubby watching the snow leopard pace

Can you just tell the hubby loves big cats!

Up close!

Its kind of hard to see but way in the back by the fence is a Tiger!

Up close with the mountain lion

Saying hi to the penguins!  We got to watch them swim through the water later!

Walking with Daddy!

Running around outside the zoo (notice its another picture of the back of her head...she's hard to keep up with!)

Catching Up With Friends

This last Sunday we were totally blessed to be able to catch up with some friends we hadn't seen in a while, Mr. D.Y. (who was one of the hubby's best men) and Mrs. N.W. (wife of one of the hubby's groomsmen and now friend of mine!)  Both came over to our place to do some late season grilling and enjoy the fabulously warm fall weather!  Mr. S.W. (hubby to Mrs. N.W.) was supposed to join us as well but unfortunately he wasn't feeling the best so Mrs. N.W. flew solo!

The Ws had told us they would provide the steaks and did they go overboard!  Mrs. N.W. showed up with some BEA-U-TI-FUL looking steaks for the hubby to grill!  He did a fabulous job and they turned out super yummy (and this is coming from a non-steak-lovin girl!)  We also had sliced red potatoes with olive oil and salt that were grilled as well as some sliced zucchini.  The potatoes turned out super yummy but we hadn't ever grilled zucchini in slices and we left it on the grill to long which made it really mushy and not too yummy.  So that was a bit of a bummer but thankfully everything else tasted great!

My other "not perfect turnout" was with dessert.  I had wanted to make rice krispie treats since we had an open box but I didn't want to just make plain rice krispie treats since I thought that would be boring!  So I searched the web and found a fun little recipe to make rice krispie treats shaped like caramel apples.  Basically it is just a ball of rice krispie treats with a stick in the top that is then dipped in chocolate and rolled in sprinkles.  Since I didn't have any marshmallows I ended up making the treats the day they were coming over which meant they didn't have a lot of time to set up.  So the "apple" shaped rice krispie treats ended up a little mis-shapen.  Then I melted the chocolate and dipped the "apples" while the steaks were grilling which meant that didn't have time to set up either.  Let me tell you...they were EXTREMELY pathetic looking but I figured "Oh, Well"!  They were still sugar dipped in chocolate so I they couldn't be too bad tasting and served them anyway!  Even though they were super messy (and pretty ridiculous looking) they were super yummy!  I even made a little one for Little L and you will be able to see in the pictures below how much she enjoyed it!

All in all we had such a great time catching up and we are looking forward to planning some more get togethers soon!

Here are the pictures:

The Hubby grilling with Mr. D cheering him on!

Little L LOVES to push her baby stroller around!

Running through the yard!

Here is what dessert did to my daughter's face!

The joy of chocolate!

The hubby enjoying the rice krispie treat kinda shaped like a caramel apple!

The hubby took a picture of the rest of us but let's just say it wasn't flattering...to any of us...so it will not go posted!  :)

A Good Day

A week ago Saturday I had a good day!  It had it's ups and downs but all in all it was really good!

We started off with a mini girls trip!  Little L and I had a date for the newest Veggie Tales movie release at LifeWay Christian Book Store.  (Side note...our Northwestern Bookstores just turned into LifeWays and while there were definitely things I loved about Northwestern I am thinking there might be some better deals to be had now that they are LifeWays!)

To celebrate the release of VeggieTales latest "It's a Meaningful Life", LarryBoy and Hermie the Caterpillar were on hand to greet us at the door!  I wasn't quite sure how Little L would react to the sight of a HUGE Larry but she was so excited!  She gave them both high fives and was more than happy to get her picture taken with them!  Once we went inside she saw them through the window and just sat and stared for a few more minutes.  Inside the store they had some snacks and crafts.  Little L picked a cookie with M&M's and then preceded to try and just eat the M&Ms!  Then Little L I made a little foam picture frame with the sticky foam shapes and after that we just roamed through the store and took a few minutes to watch some scenes from the movie.

Not the best picture since we are staring into the sun but still fun!

Little L spots Veggies!

Watching the new Veggies!  So exciting!

After our trip to LifeWay, I wanted to stop at some garage sales.  While I love a good garage sale, I have been to only a few this summer and since fall is upon us the garage sale season will soon be over!  :(  I had a map with 4 or 5 garage sales mapped out (thanks to craigslist and google!)  We started off and stopped at each sale one by one.  And one by one each sale was a bust!  There just wasn't much good stuff out there (at least not anything that we actually "needed").  With only 1 sale left on the list I drove past a sale that I hadn't found online.  I figured, what the heck, and stopped to see if they had anything of interest. It was a pretty big, multi-family sale with LOTS of stuff and the best part is they had everything 50% off the marked price!  That definitely caught my attention so I started to shop.  Thankfully one of the woman that was running the sale was a nice grandma that was willing to watch Little L while she played with the toys so I could do some focused rummaging.  She was so sweet and at the end she even let Little L take a Winnie the Pooh bear home with her.  (I wasn't planning on buying it since Little L has PLENTY of stuffed animals but she had gotten super attached to it and was carrying it all over the sale so it was really nice of the woman to let her take it!)

When I was driving home I definitely had one of those moments of just KNOWING that Jesus had worked out my entire trip just so I would drive past that one sale!  He knew it would be a blessing to us and it is just so amazing to remember that He even cares about us getting great deals!

Now, I am sure you are all out there on the edge of your seat just wondering what fabulous finds I found and what great deals I got!  Well, I only spent $8 and got 2 pairs of pjs for Little L (one was a 3T but I couldn't pass it up because it was Gap footed pjs in leopard print!  Too cute!), a pair of 2T jeans, an Old Navy 2T long sleeve shirt, 2 books for Little L, a Fisher Price Piggy Bank (not on the recall list of course!), and the best deal of all...a ladybug container filled with building blocks!  (Not to mention the Winnie the Pooh Little L walked away with for being such a charmer!)  It is so cool to think that had I gone there the day before it would have all cost $16!  Timing is everything as "they" say!

Pics of some of my finds:

Here's the Fisher Price piggy bank...Little L usually fights with Mr. E over one of these when we go visit my girlfriend at her place so I figured she would like to have her own!

Here's the Lady Bug hamper closed up

It's full of building blocks!  And it was only $2.50 since it was half off!  Thank God for His favor!

Here's the Pooh Little L was given by the lady at the sale.  You can see that her Veggie Tales sticker found a new home! 

To top off the day we went to church and it was such a great message on fasting since our church is encouraging a fast during the month of October!  (More on that and what we are fasting in a future post) Little L insisted on bringing Pooh with her so he was the topic of conversation with all of the greeters when she walked by!  All in all it was a very good day!

A Little Crafty - Hair Bow Holder

Recently I may have been bit by the crafty bug...I have really had the itch to "make" stuff (as long as it isn't too complicated of course!)  After Little L had gotten some super cute bows from Princess Couture Designs I really wanted a way to display them!  It's no fun having super cute bows that just sit in a drawer! While I was doing some browsing on etsy, I saw some super cute bow holders and I thought "Hey, that's something even I can do!"  So I picked up a few things at Michael's and used some stuff I had on hand and away I went!  (probably only spent $3 for each bow holder!) And here's where I ended up:

(Please excuse the bad quality of the pictures...I didn't want to take them down and the lighting wasn't very good in Little L's room!)

Butterfly

Close Up

Flower

Close Up (It's hard to tell but the L is made out of 2 colors of felt with a running stitch around the edge)

Hanging on her closet door

This is what the butterfly looked like when I bought it

After the paint but before the glitter (oh, and I decided I didn't really like the brown so I painted over it with white!)

I was going to do some more "in process" pictures but that just didn't happen!  I basically just painted the wood pieces, added glitter to the butterfly and the felt letter L to the flower for more decoration.  Then I used a hot glue gun to add the ribbons to hang the bows on and another piece of ribbon to hang the whole thing up.  It was really simple and fun to make and now Little L has a place to display her pretty bows!  (The crafty bug is making me want to make more bows for her but I just haven't done it yet so for now there are mostly store bought bows on the butterfly but that will hopefully change soon!)

A Visit with Aunt A and Uncle L

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we went up to the hubby's parents a few weekends ago to visit with them and my hubby's sister and her husband.  After we spent sometime hanging outside (see the "beautiful" pictures I took here) we went into escape the chilly night air and the mosquitos!  It had been awhile since Little L had seen her aunt and uncle so it was nice that they got some quality time together and  Little L had no problem playing with them!

Here are the pictures!

Showing Auntie A one of her FAVORITE books to look at!

Trying to put on Auntie's shoes!

Little L LOVES doggies but she was a little nervous when they really wanted to play with her!

She was just in awe of all the tricks the doggies could do!

Auntie A having the doggies roll over, shake hands, etc.

Little L with Auntie A

Little L just climbed right into Uncle L's lap!  (I don't think he was expecting that but he took it like a pro!)

Little L with Grandma 

Little L with Auntie A

She was ok with petting the doggies when Uncle L was holding them still!

Auntie A, Uncle L and Little L!