Happy Birthday Maggie!

What a birthday! Both girls were sick. Nina was worse off, she ran a fever of over 102 last night plus had a sore throat, runny nose, and cough. Maggie's just got the runny nose and cough, so she's doing a bit better. Regardless, both girls stayed home today.

But that's ok, we got to kick off the day with a fantastic breakfast!

 Pancakes with strawberries, maple syrup, sprinkles, and cool whip!

 Maggie opened the presents Nina got her first. Here's mermaid with a cool whip beard.

 Later we baked cupcakes. More cool whip and sprinkles. What great food (product?) that cool whip is. You can do anything with it!

 The girls started to tank in the afternoon so it was sick beds on the couch and Uno for a while. Poor little dears. Nina's fever started to rise again and her throat was making her miserable, but I gave her some DayQuil, which seemed to help/

 Did you know strawberries are very high in vitamin C? She looks like Cindy Lou Who with this giant one.

 Then we played a game we invented in Austria. You stick the Uno card on your forehead and ask your fellow players questions until you guess what card you have.

 Usually Maggie just shouts out what everyone has and Nina starts crying because she's ruined the game, but this time she played properly! Is there some magic in turning 5? Here's to hoping!

 I took this selfie and then checked to see how it came out. I'm so brilliant that I didn't realize that'd give away my card, so this has become a photo of me unintentionally cheating.

 Last night, the girls stickered and enveloped all of Maggie's birthday party invitations. It was adorable.

All the while Maggie was wearing fairy wings. And no pants. What kind of fairy wears pants though? None.

All in all, a great day! Nina's still not feeling good and battling that fever so I'm sure she'll be home tomorrow too. And on top of all that, the poor girl has a very loose tooth! Not too loose for birthday cupcakes, at least.

Maggie is so excited for her birthday tomorrow!

She was lamenting yesterday that birthdays are so far apart. "It's been eight years since I had a birthday!" she wailed.

Ha!

Poor Nina is currently running a temp of 101.5. What a horrid way to spend your little sis' birthday. :-(

Memorial weekend fun

What a fantastic weekend we had. Newburyport was wonderful and is SO CLOSE to Boothbay! The girls couldn't believe how fast we got home. Then we went straight to a BBQ at a friend's house and had some great chicken and pie. Plus lots of fun time with friends.

Afterwards the girls helped Nick paint the house for a bit, then collapsed on the couch for some SpongeBob. Poor kids were pooped.

Both girls are still coughing and sniffly, and Nina had the slightest temperature at bedtime (99.0), and they both have slightly upset tummies (a nice way of saying stinky farts. There, I said it. Sorry Erik!). Knock on wood though, it doesn't seem to be developing into anything worse, so hopefully this is the worst of it. Cross your fingers!

So much fun with Aunt and Unk!!

The have a giant basement and a ton of boxes. Behold the combination:

Look at Nina's legs sticking out and Maggie's little (jammied) butt on the other end. Oh, excuse me, buttocks. She prefers the term buttocks.

Here's more for mom:

They're so happy.

And it's so fast to get here!

Nina's been singing this song all day:

Click here for the video

We have the same taste in music! I think I've fallen in love with her all over again.

Other mutual favorites include "I don't like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats and "Common People" by Pulp. I think her crush on Jarvis Cocker might even be bigger than mine.

Can you blame us?

(I accidentally dragged up a current picture of him while searching the web for this. Wow, the fantasy shattered.)

Nina's first non-family sleepover...

... was a smashing success! She stayed over at her friend Hannah's house along with another girl Ava. According to Hannah's mom, the girls didn't fall asleep until almost 1 am! But they had a blast, and no middle-of-the-night phone call to go get her either.

Today we met her at the Gray Wildlife Park, where we had cupcakes with the birthday girl and some more party guests, then saw the animals. There happened to be a Norwegian festival going on, put on by a local "Sons of Norway" chapter, so we got to try some neat Norwegian food too. Turns out Norwegian the language is Germanic, so it was fun for the girls to see some of the similarities. Like, their traditional flower paintings are called "rosemalen," which means "flower painting." The German word for painting is mahlen, and is pronounced the same. Also the traditional dresses are very similar to  dirndls (but way more expensive! A nice dirndl starts at about 300 Euros and can go who knows how high, but a nice bunad starts at about three thousand dollars. Holy moly!) But they do the same thing with their bunads that Austrians do with a nice dirndl--they have a huge seam allowance, plus laces, so you can pretty much wear the same one your whole life.

We stopped at Dairy Queen on our way home, have you been to one of those lately? It's now our fast food place of choice. For $4.79, you can get a kid's meal including: a choice of 5 entrees, choice of fries, salad, or something else... I stopped reading at fries, choice of beverage including a smoothie, AND a choice of dilly bar, DQ sandwich, or cone. Wow. I got myself a kids' meal and could barely finish it even though I was starving. Well, I also helped Maggie and Nina finish their ice cream, but still. It was a ton of food. I went with the turkey wrap for my entree. Delicious. Happy meal, you have some catching up to do!

Now we're exhausted. Maggie is writing a book called "The Truth of Dead," which I don't know, I'll probably be discussing with the school psychologist on Monday. Nina is drawing cheerful pictures of our smiling family.

The hills are alive...

The girls have been watching The Sound of Music non-stop. (Thank you for the boxed set Tante Vanessa!)

Nina keeps forgetting Captain von Trapp's first name (Georg) and calling him Gay-wog. Gay-wog! It's the funniest thing. Maggie said, "I like Captain better than Gay-wog."

Like, she thought it was "captain" in English and "Gay-wog" in German. Ha!

Happy Mother's Day to me!

Look at my lovely gifts!

 This is our family, in snowmen

 Nina made them. Adorable! That is, from left to right: Maggie, Nina, Me, and Nick

 Plus Maggie made one

 Maggie made this in pre-K. The photo's a bit washed out, but her face is in the middle of a flower. Aw!

 And here's a poem Nina wrote me. I love it!!

Plus, the girls and I made mom two dozen hand-dipped, hand-sprinkled strawberries. Of course, we gave her a lot of help eating them too.

Yesterday we had breakfast at church and then a late lunch/early dinner at Sarah's Pizza. I didn't touch a dish all day!

Last post for today, I promise.

But my amazing mini-golf score deserves its own post. Behold:

Click to enlarge if you can't see the scores, but I'll cut right to the chase. I scored a 42; eight below par and a personal record. Woo hoo!!

It was the first day that they opened, and ice cream and mini golf were free. Free! I'm trying to use fewer exclamation points, but I needed that one there. Mom, the girls, and I ate ice cream and then played an entire 18 holes without anyone sending a ball into the street. It was a perfect afternoon.

New stairs reveal!

For safety reasons, we've decided to carpet the stairs. I wasn't expecting to love the look, softness, and reduced stair creakiness so much!

Behold, my new stairs!

 They really brighten up the space!

 Also, I might have told you (or even posted photos already? Who can remember...) about Maggie's new jammie-jeans that I made her for school. Well, here's a front/side view. You can see the pocket and side-seam detailing. Note that they're also hemmed with yellow thread, and that there's a mock "fly" in the front.

And here's the back. Faux pockets! She loves them. Everyone loves them! Sweatpants that look like jeans, it's utterly brilliant. I want some!

More pictures!

Here are some more Plum Island pics from my camera (the others were from Erik's):

 All of us, crowded in the car. We weren't being so lazy as to drive the 500 feet to the beach here--we
were going the 2500 feet to the playground and other side of the island. That's so not lazy.

This was back at the beach closest to Erik's. I love how the girls are sitting in the exact same way in this photo.

Nina with her most favorite things in the world: Chester, the beach, and a piece of string.

Maggie, livin' life, beach-bum style.

Good thing it's a rainy weekend, or else we might have gone back already!

This is the living life!

That's what the girls say whenever they experience luxury. And our new mattress pad is absolute luxury! My bed is now officially called "the living life bed." Used in a sentence: "Kids, we can't all sleep in the living life bed." Sounds vaguely Christian, doesn't it?

I think I'll be back in Kohl's to get two twin-sized mattress pads, or else the girls will never want to sleep in their own beds again! As it is, Nina plans to spend the entire weekend lying in my bed. Can't say that I blame her!

Our mattress in Austria was so hard that it made my arms numb if I laid on my stomach and my legs numb if I laid on my back. Any my hip numb if I laid on my side! There was no winning. But now, oh sweet memory foam and pillow top on top of that... It's so comfy I don't even want to fall alseep.

That's been the highlight of our week. The weather's been lovely, except today it's raining (even harder to get out of bed.)

Plum Island!!

Nina was in utter heaven this weekend. Plum Island with Aunt, Unk, and Chester!

Nina spent hours in the surf. She got soaked all the way up to the tops of her thighs, and the water was freezing, but she didn't care. She was the happiest kid in the world. Even though Nick, Maggie, and I were there too!!

Maggie had fun at the beach too. Not as much fun as Nina, and she was ready to go back to Aunt and Unk's after an hour or two, but she enjoyed herself. It was chilly down by the water (and the ocean temp couldn't have been higher than the low 40s), but the sun was nice and warm.

We also had a lovely (lovely!) time visiting furniture shops. Erik tried to pressure us into buying a whole house's worth of furniture, but I managed to resist. Still, expenditures for the weekend were well over a thousand dollars. Ok, ok, that include pre-paying Erik for a year of cell phone usage, but still. Quite the sticker-shock for me and Nick.

On the plus side, I have a lovely new mattress pad that I bought from Kohl's for 65% off. I'd talked with Erik about the mattress situation at Bob's and briefly entertained the idea of going ahead and buying a new mattress. But I told Erik that I didn't really see the point of a whole new mattress when our mattress was really fine, just not cushy enough. All I really needed, I said, was a gel-type mattress pad. Surely that makes more sense.

Then, lo and behold, my brother finds me one at Kohl's that's 50% off! And a vacuum! We went there for pants for Nina, but we went with Erik, so you know how that goes. I'd almost backed out of the mattress pad (origionally $500 but it was still $250 after the sale), but THEN the woman at checkout said we could get an additional 30% off the entire purchase if we opened a Kohl's card, and I couldn't resist. We got it all, plus a dress for me and a birthday present for Maggie. All together we saved almost $500 on the purchase. Mom, you must be so proud!

Also at Bob's I picked up two waterproof, hypoallergenic mattress pads for the girls, plus pillow covers. Nina's been sneezing at night, or waking up at night in the middle of the night with a stuffy nose, and this is supposed to provide a barrier against allergens and dust mites. So, hopefully that helps the poor kid out at night. Plus they needed waterproof mattress pads anyway, so I was extra exited to get those.

I also got myself some new sunglasses in downtown Newburyport and we all got ice cream and played at some playgrounds. It was a sunny, fun, economy-stimulating weekend!!

Book fair last week

Maggie and I spent a lot of time volunteering at the book fair this week. Fun fun fun! She thinks of it as more of a library and reads through the books one by one (she's not reading yet, I read them aloud to her). This week she also helped me by scanning the books the kids bought. I made the mistake of referring to this as "lasering" the books. When Maggie held the little lasering gun up to her eyeball, I said, "Maggie, don't laser your eyeball. You could hurt it."

So Maggie is helping me with a book sale to a teacher, lasering the books, when she looked up with her adorable little face and asked in her sweetest voice, "Would you like me to laser your eyeball?"

A teacher! I don't know which one... not someone who was there when I was a kid, thankfully. She was very nice and said, "No thank you!" and headed up the stairs, which were right behind her.

Maggie twisted around in her chair, laser gun in hand, and called up to the woman, "Ok, maybe tomorrow then!"

Free lasik with book purchase! We should advertise that next year!

Another time some junior high kids were browsing the books and Maggie said to me, "I'll be right back. I have a little work to do."

I was ringing up sales so I wasn't paying too much attention to her, then I heard her tiny little voice coming up from the back. I always get nervous when I see her talking to people but can't make out the words, because there's just no telling what she might be saying, but I was too busy to go over and check. Stressful!!

Finally I got to her and asked what she was talking with the girls about. She was trying to sell them a book called "Itty Bitty Animals" that we'd just been reading. Adorable! One girl had told her she didn't have enough money today to buy it, and Maggie had said, "Ok, well maybe you can buy it tomorrow."

So, there you go. One post about possible demonic possession, one about infinite cuteness. Maggie's quite the unpredictable little girl.