While daddy's away, the babies will play

Eric is spending the week in working in LA, some extreme silliness was captured on film in his absence. Lillian put on her tutu and her cowboy hat, then garbed a laundry basket put it up onto the couch climbed into the basket and then demanded that Grammy read her stories. Very, cute and extremely silly!

Lillian's Second Birthday

Today we held Lillian's second annual birthday extravaganza and it quite the scene. All of Lillian's friends were there to celebrate at Fairmont Park.

The food was Indian themed. We picked up a tray of samosa from the Passage to India Bakery right near our house. Eric also made some lemon rice that we learned to make in our Indian cooking class all those years ago. We also had fresh veggies from our CSA along with some dips, and fruit salad. And of course it wouldn't be a proper birthday party without cupcakes. Lillian has known all about the relationship between birthday parties and cupcakes for a while. For the past month, every time the subject of her birthday came up she immediately responded with, "Cupcakes!" This year we made carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and decorated them with dried fruit. Lillian ate two of them (that we know about).

Apart from general good times in the park, we also held an egg hunt for the kids. We filled the eggs with animal crackers and Mardi Gras beads, and turned the kids loose. It was a big hit.

Here are some pictures and videos of the fun. More pictures can be found in our webalbum.

Cupcakes!

Lillian blowing out the candles, while Jessie supervises.

The kids hunting for eggs.

All the kids hunt for eggs.



Lillian and Peter running in circles after eating too much sugar.



A very, very short video of Lillian and Jessie being very, very cute.

Potty Humor

We started introducing Lillian to the potty early with the hope that it would make it easier to potty train her early. We hadn't thought much about actually trying to get her to use the potty all the time until her daycare provider noticed that she wanted to go potty every time the older kids went. So we started putting Lillian in Pull-ups instead of diapers and taking her to the potty more frequently, in a month or so she was keeping her Pull-ups dry most days and we transitioned her to wearing cotton training underpants. We had a few accidents the first few weeks in underpants but for the most part she is now fully potty trained. Lillian loves using the potty and always gets a big smile whenever she hears her poop go plop into the potty, we are very happy to not be changing dirty diapers anymore and are also glad that we are no longer sending so much garbage to our landfill. It's a win for her, for us and for the environment.

Lillian has also developed a taste for potty humor as you can see in this video of she and Eric reading the book Zoo Poo.

A Very Good Friday Indeed

Eric had the day off work for Good Friday, which took us by surprise as it has every year since no one else out here seems to recognize it as a holiday. Anyway, it turned out that this Friday was our turn to host our weekly mom and baby lunch. Eric was a great help, holding fussing kids, helping cook the Gai Tom Ka and Pad Thai for lunch and most importantly taking pictures of all the cuteness and chaos.

Delinquent Parents

We have been totally delinquent in taking pictures of Lillian recently, our last few blog posts revolve around photos taken by other people. Thankfully we have friends who always cray their cameras to capture cute moments like this.

More Birthday Parties

We've been going to even more birthday parties recently. Unfortunately the last birthday party we went to was also a going away party for Lillian's friend Emma. Emma and her sister baby Maggie were moving to Chicago the very next day. It was a bitter-sweet birthday party but Lillian didn't seem to mind. As you can see, she was very excited about the chocolate cupcakes. She and her little friend Peter also had fun with the party favors.