The End of an Era

Today we took down the baby gate, the end of an era.  After noticing that the only thing we'd been doing with it for weeks was accidentally walking in to it, we knew it was time to take it down.  Baby Muffin is quite comfortable on the stairs now. 

Her favorite way to get down is scooting down facing forward, like so:

Brother Muffin is as busy as ever, he's reading new words each day and is so interested in learning how everything works.  Just about every day, when we take the kitchen scraps to the compost bin (we just started composting), he says, "I'm so excited to see it turn in to compost!"

Milestones!

Oh my, little N had a busy week last week.  She started doing three new things, all in the span of a few days - waving, climbing up the stairs, and walking all by herself!  After months of no new teeth, she also has four in the front popping through all at the same time, poor thing.

BroBro, i.e. big brother, has taken an interest in jokes and puns recently and come up with some cute ones!

Happy Easter

Happy Easter! This was our first year coloring Easter eggs. I found some pretty easy natural recipes online: water, vinegar, red cabbage (to make blue) and water, vinegar, tumeric (to make yellow). Bonus green - mixing the blue and yellow :)

We cooked up the dye the day before Easter and then let the eggs steep in the dye in the fridge overnight.

Six happy eggs, sitting in their jars:

Tada!  An Easter surprise:

The colors came out quite vibrantly, since they sat in the dye so long.  E checked them periodically on Saturday, and they weren't nearly as saturated.

Blue was his favorite.

Look, no hands!  Miss Muffin has been balancing herself without holding on to anything for a couple of weeks now.  I've seen her consider walking once, but decide against it.  She's quite proficient at squatting from standing down to crawling now.  And she's started putting things in to containers, instead of just taking them out!

9 months

Happy 9 months, little one.

Flipper of light switches.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year, just a little bit late.  We visited the in-laws to celebrate with a hot pot lunch.  Hot pot is one of my favorite Chinese meals.  In hubby's family, it consists of various veggies, tofu, and thinly sliced meat cooked right at the table in a pot of simmering stock.  It's all cooked on an as-needed basis, a little of this, a little of that, put this in, take that out.  Pretty fun!

A happy baby

Hm, what is she looking at?

Yep.

A few weeks ago, Baby Muffin became mobile!  She is crawling quite a bit now, although she'd still rather have someone hold her hands so she can walk.  She can also pull herself up to standing but gets frustrated when she wants to cross space where there's nothing to hold on to.

Progress is being made on E's quilt.  The pieces have been cut and E and I are laying out the design now.

Rainbow Patch

Hello blog!  We have been sewing here chez Muffins for the first time in a long time!  This week, we went to a sewing meetup with our favorite (only) mom & kids Meetup group.  Not much sewing happened there, but since then, I've found ways to make it happen in bits and pieces at home.

One of E's staple pairs of pants was developing a hole in the knee, and after (repeated) comments like, "Mommy, there's a hole in my pants!  I need a patch for my pants, Mom," we fixed 'em up.  I asked him what kind of patch he wanted, and he said, "Rainbow."  I had this striped knit fabric at home already, close enough in my book. 

Getting the picture of the patch was quite challenging, there are a lot of pictures like this:

And also, running all around the room saying, "Take my picture here.  Now here.  Now here..."

The littlest muffin was just hanging out in her gym, watching the going-ons.

We are also making progress on E's quilt.  Fabric has been pressed, and cutting has begun!

Winter Activities

E has been up to some fun new activities now that it's gotten cold outside.  He likes to use the baby monitor as a scanner.  It helps that the receiver beeps ("scans") periodically when the transmitter is off.  It also has a pretty bright red light, just like the scanner at the library or grocery store self-checkout.

He has started "writing" sometimes when he's drawing.  Check out the grocery list!

Scissors have also been discovered.  E uses both hands on the scissors while Mom or Dad holds the paper.

Some new favorite sayings: "Own go Ikea, library, and home!"  These are E's favorite places, although he has only been to Ikea twice, and one of those trips was well over a year ago.  The elevator is the main attraction at Ikea and the library, and home is just great!

"Mommy, see!" i.e. Mommy watch what I'm about to do.

"Mommy favorite button own belly button, own favorite button shutdown button on Daddy's comput-um"  That's a long one!