Happy Birthday!

Our girl is TWO today! Happy Birthday, Helen!!

Halloween at Music

Helen can't stop talking about how she's going trick-or-treating at Nana's this weekend. When I tell her we are leaving on Thursday, she says, "but I want to go to Nana's NOW." We'll be sure to post lots of photos of Halloween in Wisconsin. She is so excited!

When she woke up this morning, she asked for her tutu because she knew that it was time to preview her costume at music class.

Special thanks for all the help from my brother Jim (custom knit hat from baby llama wool), and my dad (wing structure), and Gogo/my mom (tutu and wings). We couldn't have pulled off this ladybug girl costume without them.

Helen wore the costume throughout the entire music class and didn't want to take it off when we got home.
A quick shot of the big kids, Kai and Helen (in music together since they were babies).

Here's the inspiration for the costume. It's one of Helen's favorite books:
Looking forward to more Halloween fun this weekend!

Play your Guitar

We've been away at my sister Jessica's while having some work done on our house. Now that we're back and everything is almost back in order, it's time to start uploading all these photos and videos. Jessica has a guitar, a piano, a cello and lots of kids' instruments. Helen had so much fun playing them all.
Here she is putting on a show for us. She really is becoming quite the performer. Tonight she found a juggling pin and used it as a microphone while she danced on the "stage" (bed) and sang.

Apple Picking

On Sunday, our friends Angie and Peter invited us to Peter's parents' orchard to pick apples with friends and family. This lovely little place overlooking Lake Pepin is just an hour and a half away, but it felt like a completely different world. Helen and Evelyn ran around and played among the trees and spun around in circles until they were dizzy. Helen took her apple picking job very seriously. Now when we take out one of the fresh apples and slice it up, she says that it came from the "oh-chud" and that she picked it from the tree. So cool! So lucky! So delicious!

Take This Job and Love It

I haven't been posting much lately, but I thought I'd share a couple photos of Helen doing one of her jobs - putting silverware away when it comes out of the dishwasher. Under her breath, she is repeating "Helen's job...Helen's job...fork...spoon..." She takes her work very seriously and doesn't like to be interrupted. Among her other tasks: scrubbing the toilet and making all the beds. Just kidding. Silverware is about as complicated as it gets - we'll see what we can add on as she gets older.

Summer 2009

It doesn't feel like it yet, but summer is officially over. The past three months FLEW by! I got behind on the blog, so here are a few highlights of our summer adventures (prepare for photo overload):

Many sunny days at Brackett Park swimming in the wading pool and playing in the park.

Lots of time hanging out in the backyard. Here are Helen and Eric lying on the deck finding shapes in the clouds.

Dancing on the hopscotch towel after a refreshing dip in the backyard pool.

Art Day on the deck with Tatiana and Sayen.

Helen focuses on her artwork.


Sayen REALLY focuses on getting every speck of the paper covered in paint.


We went to the Pearl Park neighborhood festival and found a "bouncing castle" that Helen could not resist. When there was finally a lull and it wasn't packed with big kids, we let her enter. This little 4 year old named Eliana befriended Helen and the two of them sat in the middle holding hands and laughing until we had to drag them out when it got too wild. Helen cried until Eliana came and found her and they hugged and jumped around and danced to the music. When it was time to leave, Helen called into the crowd, "Eliana! Eliana!" Who knew a little summer park festival could be so fun? Our little social girl makes even the simplest occasions exciting.


We love the park just 2 blocks from our house and so we spent many summer mornings having picnics in the grass...
and one afternoon stomping in the mud.

Helen got a taste for riding scooters at Sayen's. She should be ready for her own next summer.

She also loved riding in the Burley with Jade - another thing that will be fun for Summer '10.

We spent less time visiting farmer's markets than we did last year - can you guess why?

Here's a rare moment when she was sitting still at the Mill City Farmer's Market, content to observe the crowd.

Helen had so much fun in Owatonna at my aunt and uncle's farm pulling around the riding horse.

And visiting the loud sheep who called out to Helen, "MAAAA-MAAAAAAA!"

Since we can't go to the farm every day, we went to the zoo a lot and she became an old pro on the monorail.

One of her favorite places is the Children's Museum, so we visited on some rainy days. Here she is waving to Clifford who has now packed his things and gone on to another city.

Helen and Evelyn are one day apart - born at the same hospital and everything. We met her and her mother at art class and then again at music class and so we became friends and spent many summer days together. Here are the girls in their "parallel play" stance.

Here's a typical day at the park with Helen's darling friend Iris.

And no summer could be complete without lots of play time with dear Neave. She and Bryn often come over at 7:30am after dropping off Daniel downtown. When they see each other, the girls run around screaming with excitement. I love how they have the same crazy energy.

Labor Day weekend marked the end of summer, but the weather was still gorgeous. Nana and Grandpa B came along with Uncle Adam for an awesome weekend visit. Helen learned how to shout, "Go, Bucky Badger!!" while watching the football game and wearing her adorable new pink slippers from Nana and Grandpa B. We visited the Rose Garden at Lake Harriet.

Helen and Adam explored the fountain together. Then we went for lunch at The Tin Fish. She is still asking for Nana, Grandpa B and Adam, so we can't wait to go to Wisconsin for Halloween. It will be here before we know it.

Here we are on Labor Day, lounging in Aunt Jessie's pool.

Helen and Jess took their matching monkeys for a stroll. I love how Helen's triceratops boots are flying in this picture. She was so excited to be there.

And here's the final summer shot to show how much our girl has grown in the past 3 months. Luckily, it still feels like summer outside, so we hope to continue doing most of the above for a while.
Here's to a happy fall!

He Needs His Mama (and other Helen quotes)

Excuse the location here (bathroom at the Whites' cabin), but I wanted to share this video of Helen using one of her favorite phrases: "He needs his mama." Very often these days, she talks about how much people need their mamas: crying kids in stores, characters in books, giant beetles crawling through the grass in the back yard. You name it, they're looking for their mamas because once they find them, the mamas will "pick 'em up... and hold 'em tight."

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She's become quite a talker lately and I've started to write down some of her funnier quotes. Driving in the car the other day:

HELEN: Going Daddy's house.
ME: Where does Daddy live?
HELEN: Minneapolis
ME: Where do you live?
HELEN: Minnesota
ME: Where do I live?
HELEN: In the kitchen!

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This next quote is a little difficult to explain. Helen likes to pretend to be other people - either characters from books (Ladybug Girl, Sal from Blueberries for Sal, Trixie from Knuffle Bunny) or other kids she meets (usually big kids like Sully, Alexis, Mallory, etc.) Also, Eric introduced her to Harry Potter last month by showing her a few minutes of one of the movies. Now she runs around with her arms behind her (as an imaginary cape) and says, "whoa, Harry Potter." You'd kind of have to see it to appreciate how funny it is - I'll try to capture a video sometime. She often turns into Harry Potter when she's doing something especially adventurous like going down her little slide head first on her tummy. She sometimes needs the extra courage of wizardry, I guess. If she wants to be in character, she'll come up to us and say, "Hi, Mallory" or "Hi, Trixie" and we have to start calling her that name. The other day, she was trying to put on some shoes and she hollered, "Mama! Help Sully! He's fust-ated!"

And so the kid quotes begin...

Tornado

We had quite an interesting afternoon yesterday when a tornado hit our street. It had been raining and cool all day and there were no sirens until about 40 minutes after the tornado passed - apparently it took everyone by surprise.

Helen was asleep upstairs and two guys had just finished working on our kitchen. The power went out, but it just seemed like an ordinary storm, so they packed up their things and left. A minute later, they came running back into the house hollering, "there's a tornado!" so I ran/flew up the stairs to grab my sleeping Helen and we all headed to the basement. They said they went out to their truck and looked up to see giant tree branches swirling 50 feet in the air and coming toward us. Our neighbor looked out his window when he heard the wind and saw the swirling debris and tree limbs come to our corner, take a left and head up the next block. Can you believe our luck?
The streets south and west of us were pretty devastated, but luckily it seems that no one was hurt.
Mobile Command set up on our corner, so after Helen finally woke up (she stayed sleeping in my arms in the basement for a while), we went out to observe. Actually, we waited quite a while to be certain things had calmed down:
She loved the excitement of the lights, sirens and diggers.
This uprooted tree (below) was the only significant visible damage on our street, so we went out later in the evening to inspect. The only inconvenience for us was that our power was out until around 10pm. Helen kept wanting us to turn on the lights, but we told her the power lines fell down. That's when she said, with her huge eyes as wide as they could be, "trees fall down! on somebody's house! crash!" and we realized that she had taken in a lot. We talked about it for a while and assured her that all the people are fine. This morning she told the story again and added, "people OK."

It's really unfortunate for all our neighbors who are dealing with some serious clean-up and reconstruction issues. Thankfully, city workers and the power company jumped right in to get things running rather quickly. Today was an odd day at home because the street is still blocked off, so instead of the usual sound of traffic zooming by, all we heard were chainsaws and the "beep...beep...beep" of big trucks backing in to do their work.