June 15-22

It didn't feel right to lump Casey into a regular weekly update, so I published a special post that went up just before this one did.

Two Saturdays ago we went to the parish picnic and Bryan's old parish.  The girls played games and won junk.  :/  They also got to ride ponies and bounce in a bounce house.  The prizes of the night were two giant inflatable crayons, which the girls proudly hugged the whole walk back to Grandma and Grandpa's house.

On Tuesday afternoon, Bryan and I went to Lima to look at houses.  We discovered that we want incompatible things in a house.  I like defined rooms with specific purposes (think a floor plan from the 1900s).  Bryan likes defined rooms, too, but not as much as he likes the idea of a house built in the last 15 years.  Unfortunately, newer houses have something called an open floor plan, which essentially means they are one big room.  The living room runs into the eat-in kitchen which overlaps the family room and dining rooms (and walls, apparently) are a thing of the past.  Judging from the houses we saw, this shift began gradually in the '60s or '70s and continued steadfastly until at least 2006 (the newest house we saw).  Anything new enough to make Bryan happy is also new enough to be missing, at the very least, a dining room.  :(

Olivia's favorite thing right now is numbers.  She counts everything and points out all the numbers she sees on signs.  She's also been composing songs about numbers lately, which inspired me to start singing number solfege to her.  I prefer do-re-mi to 1-2-3, but she's singing numbers, so I used 1-2-3.  Her favorite song right now is typed out below.

On Saturday, Steph and I participated in a craft fair.  Shortly after our Etsy site went live, we got an invitation to apply to be vendors at a semi-local craft fair.  We decided to give it a try.  The turnout was lighter than we'd expected, but we didn't feel out of our league and we did make enough to still make a small profit above and beyond covering the cost of the table space.  We also got news about another craft fair later in the year, so we're going to work on building (and expanding) our inventory so that we can go there as well.

Bedtime is going better.  Every night we "break" Olivia's light, removing the light bulb so that she can't flip the light on and wake Gretchen up.  As a compromise, we leave the hall light on.  The last three nights, Gretchen has been asleep when Olivia goes in to go to bed, which cuts down on over-tired talking/whining as they keep each other awake.  Olivia is pretty lousy at being quiet.  She doesn't yell, but she makes a lot of unnecessary nonsense noises to see what she can get away with.  We're working on that.  One night Gretchen woke up while Olivia was jabbering.  I'm hoping it was a turning point (and not just a fluke) that caused Gretchen to put her head down and go back to sleep, even after Olivia had been chastising her for being awake.

Olivia's favorite song (substitute "do, re, mi..." for "1, 2, 3..." and you have the tune):

1

1 2 1

1 2 3 2 1

1 2 3 4 3 2 1

1 2 3 4 5 4 3 2 1

1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Pictures:Gretchen, stuck in a teeny, tiny chair:

Enjoying the trampoline and the picnic table at Grandma and Grandpa's:

Gretchen watching TV (and grabbing the camera):

Two girls in my stroller:

Too many people in the crib:

My exploding garden (every time we pull into the driveway, Olivia says, "Uh-oh, look at Mommy's garden!"):

The craft fair: