March 30-April 6

March madness is happening, which means the Barhorsts (yes, all of us) filled out brackets.  The event was not as involved as last year, mainly because Olivia is old enough to talk and Gretchen is less methodical in her selection of Cheerios than Olivia was.  It took us several days, but the beauty of letting little kids fill out brackets is that they don't pay attention to the games, so you can spill over into the tournament a bit and it doesn't matter.  Bryan and I were very careful to let them choose whichever teams they wanted, even if those teams had already lost.  :-P

My mother tells stories of how I used to put plaid shirts with striped shorts and justify it by pointing out that "they both have pink."  Olivia did something similar the other day, except her justification was even more sketchy: she showed up in a shades-of-pink camo skirt and a long-sleeved, red and purple striped shirt, and said, "Look, this has buttons and this has a button."  We then had a talk about how having buttons in common didn't mean they matched.

Gretchen has reached the age where she travels around and looks for small things to pick up off the floor.  More often than not, her first instinct is to put said small things directly in her mouth.  If I'm paying attention, though, I can hold out my hand and she'll bring whatever she picks up over and give it to me.  When we're downstairs in the chapel, this second scenario happens more often.  In fact, Gretchen seems to have devised a game which consists of her crawling over to the corner, pretending to pick something up, crawling back, and depositing a small pinch of air into my waiting palm.  She also has moments when she enjoys pretending to pick something up and then looking at me as she puts her fingers in her mouth.  Most of the time her sleight of hand is indiscreet enough that I can tell she didn't even touch the ground when she "picked up" whatever it was she found.  :)

My mom makes blankets for all the grandbabies.  The blankets are colorful on one side and soft on the other, with little tufts of yarn poking up all over the place.  They're like the ones she made for Justine and me when we were small.  Back when Olivia was favoring snapkins and kleenex over blankets, mom made a small matching square of the same material for Olivia to carry around.  Since then, each baby gets a normal sized blanket and a travel sized blanket.  :)  Gretchen's blanket material was bought before mom made Olivia's little square, so she started with just a normal sized blanket.  Then, when mom went back to the store, it was discovered that Gretchen's material had been discontinued.  After much discussion, mom and I decided to get a similar material and just use that for Gretchen's square.  Of course, other things came up and the material sat around gathering dust...  So finally mom sent it home with me, in hopes that I'd finish the square before she would.  After three months of letting it gather MY dust, I finally made the square.  Mom, this project is complete (except for the yarn tuft in the middle of the square, which you'll have to add the next time we visit).  :)

Pictures:
Our brackets thus far (if you click on the pictures, you should be able to see larger versions):

Just a few pictures of Gretchen this week.  That's her blanket square on her head.