Easter Craft Party

Today we had an Easter-themed playdate with our neighborhood friends. Thanks to a google search of "toddler Easter crafts" and Hobby Lobby, we even had some fun crafts for the kids to do. Here are some fun pictures of our get-together.
This is Molly and her daughter, Mari, working on their picture frame...
Jennifer and her son, Will, making their handprint Easter bunny...
The tissue-paper egg station...
Some of the cute photo frames...


The closest we could get to a whole group shot - some of the kids were okay sitting still, others were not :) It was pretty entertaining to watch...
Abby modeling the Easter Bunny headband...
Katy was a master story-teller with Abby, George, and James listening to the story...
George's frame...
Showing you his Easter Bunny... We had so much fun! I'm so glad we have so many friends in the neighborhood, for both George and me :)

George's New Bike

I bought this tricycle for George at Christmas time because someone had it for a great deal online. Today we decided to put it together, get George a helmet, and give it a try. As you can see, the trike is a big hit!I love that the helmet says, "I love my brain." The trike has a bar for an adult to push and steer until he learns to pedal (a long way off...)We took the trike over to Broadway where they are doing some major road work. It is one of George's favorite places on Earth because there are so many busy trucks digging, dumping, scooping, beeping, rolling, breaking, and lifting. If he could eat on the sidewalk, he might never leave.

Just for Fun

We had a pretty low-key week around here. Denver got a giant spring storm so we've been sticking close to home and not doing a whole lot of blog-worthy activites. But I did manage to take a few pictures to share with you...
Here's a picture of our backyard Wednesday morning...
By Wednesday afternoon, the snow was already melting and the sun was shining. We walked around the corner to say hello to our friends Debbie and Abby. George and Abby have become good friends - they both love to get dirty and stomp through puddles. The next day at the park they were running under a leaking gutter getting soaked! Debbie says that Abby even asks for George and will pretend to kiss him when he's not around :) She's pretty cute, George should treat her right!
My parents brought over an old desk that Laura and I used when we were little for a craft table for G. The chairs are way too big, but he loves coloring at the table. My project for the weekend is to refinish the wood and spray paint the legs so it looks new again.

Isabelle was here Friday and she got to try out the booster seat we got her from Craigslist. At first, they loved sitting next to each other (especially when they each got a monkey)...

By snacktime, they were over them and much preferred sitting in big kid chairs! George wanted every single thing that Isabelle played with, so when I gave her a purse to carry around while George carried around his Easter basket, he freaked out and walked around with the purse for a while. Isabelle is so easy-going - she just takes whatever she can get and literally never complains about it. Pretty soon I'll be saying to George, "Why can't you be more like Isabelle?"
Sean took all of next week off from work. He's been working so hard and deserves a nice break. We'll be at home the whole week enjoying the predicted 70 degree weather and getting some projects done on the house (he's working on the laundry chute as I type).

Have a great weekend!

18 Months Old!

Today our George is one and a half years old! Every day there seems to be less and less baby left in him, and he is a big time toddler now. Here are some current updates on how George's personality is developing as he cruises through his second year of life:
* He is afraid of nothing. He'll climb anything, jump on anything, go down any slide by himself at the playground, stand on top of tables, and find pretty much any other way to freak me out during any given day.

* He LOVES to read! He loves sitting in someone's lap to listen to his books over and over and over and over. He will also sit by himself and flip through his books, making the sounds of a fire truck or monkey that he sees. He is definitely a fan of non-fiction books, especially those with trucks, cars, bikes, animals, or anything else with real photographs.

* He loves to play outside as much as possible. Some of his favorite activities are digging in the mulch of our garden, wiping snow off outdoor furniture, and searching for cats or dogs or trucks on our street.

* We spend a lot of time during the week with our neighborhood friends who are all the same age, and George is by far the grabbiest kid in the bunch. He has absolutely no desire to share with any of them most of the time and whatever toy his friends have is the one he wants. There have been many meltd0wns over trucks and sand shovels lately. I know it is pretty typical behavior of one year olds, but George is so much worse than his friends that it can be embarrassing (sorry, George).

* He has started doing the cutest little head tilt when you ask him a question. He looks just like Leo did and I really wish I could have gotten a picture of the two of them with their confused little head tilts.

* When the two of us are driving around, anytime he sees a red car and/or a jeep he says "Dada" and anytime he sees a truck, he makes the sign for "grandpa."

* Watching school buses drive by are the highlight of everyday.

* He is starting to play pretend more and more. He pretends to eat the food he makes in his kitchen and he'll put a stuffed animal in his booster seat and pretend to feed it with a spoon.

Yesterday we had a pretty big spring snowstorm and today is nice and sunny. So we decided to get out and help George make his first snowman.

He was over the snowman-building pretty quickly, and discovered that it was way more fun to stomp in the puddle and throw snow into it...The finished product...This is a button of Sean from his high school basketball team , how awesome is that?

Getting His Point Across

Note: This post is a little long, but it's for my sake as much as for our loyal readers :) I want to make sure I remember all these fun details about George.

Our otherwise very loud boy has still not picked up any new words. He uses mama and dada dozens of times a day, usually calling for whoever is not there to join in on the fun. If I get him from his crib in the morning, his first word of the day is Dada. If Sean gets him, he says Mama. Whenever I pick up the phone, George tilts his head to the side and says, "Dada?" And once Sean is home, everything from that point on must involve all three of us. If Sean does something fun with G once, he'll call for me to come watch before he'll do it again and vice versa. It's pretty darn cute.

While he keeps his verbalized words locked up, his signing has really taken off. It's pretty amazing how much he communicates with his signs everyday. He can now sign more, please, hurt, where, cat, dog, fish, bird, shoes, hat, eat/food, drink/water, hot, ball, flower, and phone. It's pretty amazing how much he can tell me during a day that these several signs cover. He can combine two signs together (like "where" and "fish" when he wants some goldfish for a snack) and can talk about the past using the signs as well (remembering something he saw somewhere before and wonders where it is now). He has also made up a couple of his own signs for airplane, bus, stir (he loves to stir dry food in a bowl while I make dinner), twinkle twinkle little star, Elmo (he dances around like Elmo does on TV), and grandpa (my personal favorite). One day while looking at pictures of family, George looked at a picture of my dad and made a fist and rolled it over his top lip back and forth to say grandpa (my dad has a thick, dark mustache). He will now make that sign anytime Grandpa is mentioned and I think it's the cutest thing ever.

Hopefully when we go to the doctor in a couple weeks for his 18 month check-up, she won't be too worried about his lack of speech. Last time, we were told he should have 6 words by 18 months, and he only has two (I was so excited the day I posted G saying "ball" outloud. He hasn't said it since that day). But if you count all his signs, he's okay, I just don't know if they'll be worried or not. I'm not. I think he's brilliant :)

Here is a video I tried to make to show some of G's signing skills.

George and Sean were very good to me on my birthday on Monday. George made me a beautiful card (with help from my mom) and Sean got me an iPhone - yippee! It was a very laid-back birthday, but very nice. I got some great gift cards to buy myself some new work clothes for when I sub and when I go back to work in the fall. When I sub, I look in my closet and honestly have no idea what I used to wear to work!