Do you know what I just realized??? After going through the whole “what happened at the doctor’s” portion of yesterday’s entry I realized I did NOT share her weight… well when she went to see her other doctor they weighed her in at 11lbs… when we weighed her last week we got 11 1/2… now… deep breath… as of yesterday at the doctor’s she weighed in at TWELVE POUNDS!!! That’s right, a half a pound in a week!!! Well done our bitty Echo, well done!

Our Pixie

Today we lucked out and Nathan, Ada and Anna had enough time to drop by and pick up a bag of stuff we had set aside for them. Anna turns 1 next month if you can believe it! She is such a sweet girl. I lucked out and when we woke up Echo from her nap she was in a great mood so the two got in their first play time! I am hoping once we are settled in a new place we can have them over for a day, or head back into the city and visit with Anna at her home.

Sharing

Girls together

The kids were absolutely over the moon that they got to help Daddy mow the lawn. We have a push mower so it is safe enough for Ken to let them get a little hands on. All 4 of them took turns in a pretty organized fashion.

One of Daddy's helpers

OH did I mention that last night we had a video playdate with Bree and Quinn? Quinn was born before midnight on the 25th and Trinity after midnight on the 26th so they are basically birthday buddies! Trinity and Quinn had a nice chat and showed off some of their favourite toys. Hopefully we can line more of these up and I want these two to have a great friendship even with the distance.

Quinn!!!! Giggles and all

I have a membership with BigFish games. I purchase a token every month and this month I had extras. It is a really nice and affordable way to get to play different styles of games. This month I picked out TWO games. One for the kids – a match crystals sort of game and one for myself called The Tiny Bang Story. I have to admit I mainly got it for the beautiful backgrounds and graphics, but it is rather soothing as there is no time limit.

With it being the long weekend and no Sunday School (the final party is next Sunday), we have made the executive decision to stay close to home. With the van limping and the need to make it to Tuesday’s tests we figured it best to park the vehicle. That leaves us time to get stuff out of the basement, packing of other odd items and of course completing unfinished projects.

We have started a rather aggressive campaign to “get things done” in the house. Which so far, has the boys interested and willing to ACTIVELY help out. There is something rather cute about watching our twins trucking these large boxes out of the house with their serious helping faces on. AND the added bonus of wearing them out in a helpful manner.

"Helping"

I am finally finding the time to complete my little stitch AND have the pattern partially printed out and colours chosen to start the stocking for this year! I am going to do basically the outline of everything, and the toe and heel now and then fill in the detail work as Ken can get it to me.

Almost done I swear

Gavin offered to feed Echo her late lunch today. She loves it when he does. They were both VERY patient and did a rather tidy job at it, once I wiped the chin and reminded Gavin SMALL bites.

Yum!

Sadly Zander has had a huge attitude all day, nothing keeps his attention long enough, nothing is fun enough… BUT I am working on my patience with him and trying to convince him that working on his own to find something to do is not a bad thing. There is still the occasional – I don’t want to move – but it is less frequent thankfully. It is funny how differently the kids are reacting to this whole move idea. I am hoping that once we are moved we can start off with a fresh. new attitude.

Thankfully today life has given me some sweet moments… Echo tried Trinity’s little baby sit and ride toy… I didn’t get the best picture but she was TRYING to help Ken along with her right foot and everything! We will try again tomorrow for a better picture.

Vroom Vroom

We had our visit with our Anna, Fydo and Kristen went and saw a place for us today… oh I hadn’t mentioned that yet had I? The place is big enough and in rather good repair… they sent us pictures and Ken emailed the agent… now we wait… with baited breath, oh and continue looking as of course you do NOT depend on anything.

We heard from Ken’s dad who recently had a kidney removed and he is already back to work a week earlier than projected! We wanted to update them on our Echo’s health which if you missed is blogged about here. As well as our rental hunt. It will still be a while before they can come up here to visit sadly, but he is healing well.

For supper we had donairs… from the place that Chris and Chris showed us. Yum!

So while nothing is concrete and nothing completed and tons of grumpy people and work in progress are in this home we have had a lovely day!!!!

One more of the girls

I am FREAKING OUT… ok so maybe that is a little strong, but the whole “no rental secured thing” is driving me BONKERS. Being second in line is NOT close enough, though this morning Ken emailed two more places and left a phone message on a third. He is still SURE we will find a place in time… I am in need of the address secured to feel the warm fuzzies of true optimism. I still stand by my usual statement – I trust Ken whole heartedly, it is the rest of the world I am not so sure of! Ken always comes through for me and our family.

Well besides the worry today is STILL a pretty big day – Echo is 9 months old today on one of our luckiest days of all – Friday the 13th! I made her a tutu last night and took pictures of her in it today. I am hoping to make her a matching tulle bow to do more pictures next week. This onesie was another of my mom’s gifts at the baby shower.

Finished tutu

9 months old today

The onesie

What with the stress of packing, the windy weather yesterday and everyone’s grumps about being stuck relatively close to home due to the limping van we made the decision to go this morning (to miss ALL rush hours) to The Mall with the provision that we HAD TO stay there a minimum of an hour and a half. Hmm not exactly a HORRIBLE and impossible goal. We had a few errands that had to be accomplished… I stopped at Sephora to do some information gathering on brands of hypo-allergenic lipsticks, as I need one for the wedding in August (everything I have tried to date has caused my lips to burn for some unknown reason). Then we wandered through a few clothing stores until I found some lovely tank tops at Garage Co. priced at 2 for 20.00.

Tank tops

Seeing how tall they are at Old Navy

We went down to the main foodcourt for lunch as usual. The kids had Taco Bell, Ken something from one of the pasta places and myself – a yummy burger from Harvey’s (I have been having some anaemic episodes lately sadly… nothing to extreme just shaky, tired and a few tunnel vision moments.) . They did a great job of sharing.

Lunch

Oh we stopped at H&M to peek in at the Hello Kitty gear and pick up new dress socks for Trinity. somehow her only pair that remotely fit got horribly stained.

New pretty socks

The kids had to stop in at one of the fish tank areas to see the fish.

Fishy

And we took a peek in at the Sea Lion.

Swimming by

We even ran into Nathan and Anna! Ada was at a different store shopping and set to meet up with these two at the food court we just left on the lower level so we missed seeing her BUT I got a cute picture of our sweet (almost 1 yr old) god-daughter.

Miss Anna

With a lengthy mall visit we came home without the urge to do any organized schooling, instead the kids watched some educational telvision… played with Emanuel’s robot bug set (with new batteries), Sorted through our plastic containers (and threw out all the lidless containers and containerless lids) and played with Echo. I have gotten in some more stitching on the mini project.. it is coming along nicely!

A little further along

So beyond the freaking out on my part, the kids feeding on that and being bratty and Echo deciding to spit up a nice mouthful of her new mixed grain and fruit cereal as soon as I had put on her clean pants… the cookies that we need to bake… the packing that needs to be done… well life is certainly full even though I don’t have much of a life outside of this house. BUT I am finding things I forgot we had… which I will blog about tomorrow.

One more of our 9 month old pixie!

We fulfilled our birthday girl’s wishes with her PINK KITTY PARTY quite well I think, we had pink… well everything we could… and the kitties hanging from the ceiling, on the cake, on the table, on printed colouring pages AND in the presents! We are officially a Hello Kitty house!

Amazingly enough these were sold in packages of 2, and 2 different people bought the sets... and NO duplicates!

We had a nice group of friends and family here to celebrate. Grandma and Grandpa Mike brought Phoebe along with a few new toys for the boys as well.

Grandma and all 5 kids

We had Esther come late (but not too late) bearing DRESSES for Trinity (talk about a score – now I don’t have to find a new Easter dress for her!).

Ted and the Esther

We had 3 little kids, well 4 if you count baby Izaac who slept through the majority of the party. Alexander, Isabella and Anna. So we had little ones everywhere playing and having a blast. With our pink clothed Hello Kitty themed birthday girl in the thick of it.

Chowing down

Wee Izaac

Our Anna

The cake that Karyn and I baked and decorated turned out PERFECT! We flavoured our icing mint and had two flavours of cake – vanilla and chocolate.

Cake and cupcakes

The two layers

Along with our themed cake we had our rainbow cupcakes. The recipe with the colour ratios can be found here. Topped with our 7 minute frosting. We had over 2 dozen of those. Though our single batch of the frosting was possibly THREE times as much as we needed! The consensus was it tasted much like marshmallow fluff and was perfect as clouds on top of our rainbows.

Birthday girl and her cupcake

Although Trinity LOVED the cake and couldn’t wait to get her hands on a cupcake, once the plastic shapes were removed and she saw that candles and was told to blow them out she was absolutely NOT having any of that! I am not sure if the candles scared her or everyone wanting her to blow them out but she was NOT impressed.

Birthday girl (note the eying of the cupcakes instead of the camera)

The presents were soooo exciting. She got a variety of Hello Kitty items as well as some Barbies, and clothing. So the evening and most of today was spent packing up, unpacking and playing with said new toys. I am going to have to crawl around on my hands and knees looking under EVERYTHING when we go to vacuum next!!

Opening presents

We had Kathy, Esther, Ted and Sean stay the night so while Ken took the boys and Emanuel to Sunday School I got in some quality visiting time. The boys apparently had a BLAST at Sunday School today and next week are a part of the palm procession for Palm Sunday. So, most likely that means taking the whole family next week or at the very least Ken video taping it for us.

Handprint sheep magnets

Emanuel and his binoculars (post Church clothes)

I honestly can say I have had one of my best weekend for the year 2011 to date. We saw friends we had not seen in quite some time… had some great food, the kids had friends to play with, Trinity was a wonderful and pretty birthday girl, and in the end on Sunday afternoon I got a nap! Kathy spoiled the boys with a new cash register. We have one already but it is much more the calculator, serious thing and not nearly as grocery store fun for ALL the kids sort of thing as this one! I think tomorrow we will start our day with playing around with the money and cards and just seeing how it works, then talking about money and how the different coins and bills work. We have collected 400 shiny pennies thanks to Ted and Karyn to show the kids how much a dollar really is.

Note the CANADIAN currency!

Echo is a lot happier now that we are back to basically immediate family. Though I was AMAZED at how well she went from person to person and dealt with the noise and chaos. We’ve had a couple decent naps today already and she is a chattering, smiling baby today. We had our very first Mum Mum cookies yesterday and she LOVED it. So far she has not had the reaction to the sugar content that Trinity had.

First cookie

Add to the excitement the fact that we are going to move in June and the kids are on one great big rollercoaster. Zander is STILL sure he DOESN’T want to move – doesn’t want to leave our church… Trinity doesn’t want ANYONE touching HER stuff (which makes packing it an adventure) and Gavin and Emanuel are VERY concerned we don’t move TOO far from GRANDMA. That last one is actually not a worry – we will not be all that much further from her, just in a different direction. I think I am the most excited about the whole thing. (well along with Karyn)

OH – Fat Sheep was in the thick of things at the party as well! She is now back at her home with Karyn, the kids are already missing her BUT we DO have Petite Sheepette to adventure with in her place. It has been fun having here her to play with and blog about. I am sure her adventures will continue now that she is home safe and sound.

Fat Sheep checking out the presents

Now if we could just get the kids down off their post party, cake and company high and back to the reality that is Monday. And of course there is the removal of all the balloons, collection of the kitties and general cleaning to do.

Colouring Kitties with Aunty Kathy