My Little Monkey

So, Maira really likes to look at books. And for the past few months, whenever I go into her room in the morning or after she was supposed to be taking a nap, I usually find her sitting in her bed, surrounded by books. So many books that it must have taken her numerous trips from her bed to her bookshelf and back. Often I can tell she didn't sleep at all because she was too busy hauling books into her bed and then sitting there looking at them. She often tells me that she's playing school with her books when I ask her about it.
This is what her bed usually looks like in the morning: she was sitting on her pillow, surrounded by books.

Well, I'm really happy she loves her books but I'm not happy with her lack of sleep. I do read her several bedtime stories, it's not like she's book deprived. I keep telling her, please go to sleep, don't look at books. And she agrees and then proceeds to climb out of bed as soon as I leave. Well, the other day, I went into her room and found the entire contents of her lowest shelf spread all over her floor, you literally couldn't see her floor. And that was the last straw. I pulled all of the books from her lowest three shelves out of her room, figuring that she couldn't reach the top two shelves. Then I took the stool and the laundry basket that I've seen her turn upside and use as a stool, out of her room so she wouldn't be able to reach those upper two shelves. Thinking I had outsmarted her.

Well, I went into her room the next morning and here is what I saw:


Those are the books from her 2nd highest shelf, the one I didn't think she could reach, in a pile on the floor, with a yellow bag of doll clothes added to the pile, in an effort to make a tower high enough that she could reach the very highest shelf on her bookshelf! I was mystified - how did she reach those books to build the tower in the first place?? A few hours later, I heard her crying from her room because she was stuck in her doll crib: The doll crib that is right beside her bookshelf:

So, I moved the doll crib and a few minutes later, I heard a crash from her room: She had taken her flimsy plastic Barbie airplane and placed it on top of her little book tower and tried climbing her tower. Of course, the whole tower had come tumbling down. So, the airplane is gone too and I think maybe, just maybe, she'll stay in bed tonight.

Snowy Halloween?

Our neighboorhood has a few houses that go all out when it's time to decorate for Halloween. Here are a couple of my favourites that are on the same street as us:



Unfortunately, the snow kind of takes away from the Halloween effect! But the weather forecast is for the snow to melt by tomorrow and be fairly warm in the afternoon so it sounds like it will be nice trick-or-treating weather after all.

But, in the attitude of making lemonade when life throws you lemons, I took Maira outside this morning and we decided to make a snowman/snowghost to add to our own Halloween decorations. I told Maira to pretend she was scared of the snowghost when I took this picture but she thought I was crazy.

"School" Pictures

So, every year, I send Shae off to school dressed her best for school picture day, and every time, she brings home the proof of the shot they got and I wonder why the photographer took a picture of her half-smiling or with a bunch of hair out of place, etc.

So, I decided this year that instead of ordering school pictures for Shae and Connor, I would take all 4 kids to WalMart and get matching portraits of each of them while I'm there to make sure I get the shot I want (OK, so I have control issues...). Turns out that even though it's $10 for 50+ pictures of the first kid, getting portraits of the other kids at the same time brings the total cost closer to $80. I thought that with all of Jess' fancy lighting and photography equipment, we should try doing our own pictures at home. That way, besides saving money, I could photoshop the pictures to my heart's content, which I enjoy doing. I had a hard time narrowing down all of Jess's pictures down to just one of each kid so here's what I ended up doing:


...and wouldn't you know it, this is the one year that Shae's school pictures turned out really cute and I didn't order any! Oh, well.

Soggy Ghosts

So, I saw the idea to use cheesecloth soaked in watered down glue and then draped over a mold to make really cool ghosts on the Martha Stewart website. And I made them and they looked great:And then I never got around to moving them further under the roof overhang to protect them from the rain...and then it rained:
My poor soggy ghosts...