Eating, eating, eating (and a little walking)

Our little greenie-beanie. Aleaha loved to slurp up noodles, and Miri goes one step further and slurps her beans.


Went with our friend Holly to Portland for a day, and we discovered how wonderfully kid-oriented the restaurant Claim Jumper is. They immediately brought a highchair, a table cover, and a fabulous plate of baby-friendly food (applesauce, turkey, mandarin oranges, and cheese sticks - they ROCK!). Miri loved it!


Princess Miri with her pink crown.


Mommy put in a few t-posts to create a nice grazing area on the hillside. Gotta get my brown and gray lawnmowers tuned up for their spring work!


Went for a short wagon ride to the mailbox. Miri wasn't so thrilled about this. Looking back, now I know why -- she ended up contracting RSV, which is a terrible respiratory virus. She was sick for a week. Missed school/work, had to use a nebulizer and have serious meds, the whole bit. It was awful. She's on the mend now, fortunately.


Aleaha volunteered to pull the wagon back to the house while Mommy carried Miri.


This is Aleaha creating a fun little treat for dessert one night -- chocolate frosting in tartlet shells. Aleaha added sprinkles too, naturally.


Miri gobbles one up.


Check out Miri enjoying her chocolate tart and showing off her new skill: The Wave! By the way, that's Aleaha's voice in the background at the end, saying "Yummy chocolate chip". Sounds sort of like something else with all that tart in her mouth.

Bathtime, Breakfast Out, Etc.

Miri-n-Mommy, the two-headed monster. Note the cute tuft of hair coming out of her hat. Remember the ditty "There was a little girl, who had a little curl...."? She epitomizes that!

Aleaha asked to make cupcakes on Saturday morning. I broke down and broke open the boxed mix and canned frosting. Even gilded the lily with sprinkles. We were eating cupcakes in about 25 minutes. Wow, I forgot how good immediate gratification can be. I don't really need to be such a baking snob. That simple little exercise made me a very popular mommy that day, and I'm good with that.

Daddy suggested breakfast out on Saturday morn, so we hit our local CD&J Cafe (from the outside, you might call it "Seedy and J"). It was a good time! The girls were well behaved and ate up their breakfast.


Miri starts with a fruit course. Not so cool to eat off the table, but we washed it well before and after. And left a stunningly big tip. Must do that when eating out with babes, you know.


Schnoogie-pie sleeping in one morning. Like that'll ever happen again.


Aleaha convinces me that she can give Miri her bath.


She even washed her hair, although Miri was not quite so confident everything would work out OK.


A little resemblance going' on here.


Cuties.

Wagon Ride

Her First Boyfriend

Aleaha has been bitten by the princess bug. She says when she grows up, she will be a mom, a grandma, a teacher, and a princess. She wants to watch all the princess movies. I shudder at this, because I'm concerned about the theme in those movies....Sleeping Beauty does nothing but lay there, and the Prince comes, kisses her, and they live happily ever after. Snow White too lays in a death-like slumber until (guess what?!) the Prince comes along, kisses her, and they live happily ever after. But life just isn't like that, and I don't want this early stage of fantasy to mess with her forming mind and make her think such things (like, just lay around and wait for the right guy). I really have a problem with this, but I also know I should stay cool and not make too big a deal of it, lest she grab onto it even more willfully. So, I try to allow the princess stuff, to some degree.


But thankfully there's something even better that I can facilitate. See, Aleaha loves our horse Jake. We are in the market for a good kid-safe horse, but she insists that when we get that horse, Mom can ride Chloe, she can ride Jake, and Daddy can ride the new horse.

She's pretty confident that Jake belongs to her and that's that. Next year for Round-Up, she is planning to ride Jake to Pendleton: "I won't take the pick-up and trailer, Mom. I will ride him there. And it's really OK Mom, because I know the way."

Her dad smartly countered, "Aleaha, it would take many, many days to get there. What would you do at night?"

Her retort: "Well, we can stop and lay down and I will put a blanket over us."

There is just no arguing logically or illogically with her. She wants what she wants. (And she tells us incessantly!)

The other day we were down at the barn, just the two of us, and I was grooming Chloe a bit to get rid of the mud stuck to her. Aleaha was grooming Jake, from the safety of the inside of the barn. And she gave him pellets and carrots and cool calorie and COB. He was lovin' her too, no doubt, with all that attention.

Later that night, she says, "Mom, Jake's my one true love."

Oh, do I know her feeling. My heart belonged to a horse for many years, but I was a little more toward the teen years. It probably delayed my maturation in some ways, because I wasn't interested in boys for a while. But now that I'm a mom, I can see how good that really was. And I'm ALL OVER that!

So as far as my worries about her princess fixation, I can proudly coach her to consider herself to be the "Princess on the White (or sorrel) Horse". And she can leave the Prince in her dust, thank-you-very-much. At least until she's about, say, 28.

Summer 2008, Aleaha on Jake in mountains. She takes it seriously!

Baby Giggles

These are the moments that refresh my soul.