WordPress weekly photo challenge: Blue

Living in San Diego, CA, I get to enjoy beautiful blue skies the majority of the year. I’m not sure what makes the sky so blue here, but I’m guessing it has to do with our latitude and the ways the sun rays light up the sky. It really does help when taking photos of various subjects, and using the blue sky as a nice, contrasted background.

I took this photo in our backyard a few weeks ago, after what will probably be our last rain for the next six months.

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Blue

I also can’t help thinking about my boys when I hear the word blue. My whole world is blue because of them. They avoid the aisles of girl toys, calling them “the pink aisles”. They both have beautiful blue eyes and look great with blue tops, so I buy a lot of those. We also have a blue couch at our house, courtesy of IKEA. With a removable cover you can throw in the washer, this is one of the best furniture investments I’ve made with two kids. Here’s my four-year old when he was just a baby, sitting on the blue couch in his blue footsy pajamas, with his beautiful blue eyes (which you really can’t see well on this picture). 

And here’s a photo of his brother when he wasn’t even two years old, sitting on our blue couch in my blue T-shirt, using my Boppy pillow and a burpcloth to breastfeed his lovey. How cute is that? I also have a photo of him using my breastpump but you’ll have to wait for the color “yellow” to be the theme of the photo challenge!

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Indulge

My youngest turned four this past weekend. He’s officially a little man who can “do it all by himself,” as he likes to say. As for me, I feel the past four years just ran by me like a bullet train. Fortunately I have a good memory and lots of digital photos to go with it. Watching another being grow up day by day into a wonderful little person is one of my most fulfilling rewards as a parent.

I knew this weekend would be one of indulgence. Birthday presents, birthday party, birthday cake… But I think the picture below captures what indulgence is to little children. My son got a few new Playmobil toys (his older brother was very eager to try them out) and inside the box was a small flyer of more Playmobil toys.

It took my kids just a few minutes to drop all of the new birthday toys and contemplate together what new Playmobil toys they’d like to get. Children really know how to indulge!

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Indulge

 How do your kids like to indulge?

WordPress weekly photo challenge: Ready

As soon as I read this week’s WordPress photo challenge theme, I knew what my picture would be. “Ready” is a challenge I face at our house every school day. Managing to get my kindergartener on time at school every morning is a feat requiring to move mountains. Well, maybe not, but I feel exhausted after I drop him off. He doesn’t start school until 8:15am (his little brother starts preschool 30 minutes later) so you’d think we have plenty of time to get ready by waking up at 6:45am. But that would mean forgetting his son is a master procrastinator with no sense of urgency.

We keep getting nasty letters from the school, listing the days he’s been tardy. And by “tardy”, they mean the days I get him in the line in the courtyard barely one minute after the bell rings. Give me a break! Well, apparently they don’t want to give me one. All he may miss is the beginning of the pledge of allegiance one or two days a week. Boo-hoo.

So every morning we follow the same routine, which the kids always seem to forget from one day to the next:
- Wake up at 6:45am
- Get out of bed / get pulled out of bed
- Pee
- Get dressed / have Mama dress you
- Go downstairs
- Sit down at the dining table
- Stay seated long enough to eat breakfast
- Only play with toys if there’s extra time (I said, only it’s there’s time!)
- Brush teeth
- Put shoes on
- Put suncreen on
- Put jackets on
- Go in the car and get strapped in

Of course this is only their part, not everything I have to do on my end to make it all happen. If you’re a parent, you know exactly what I go through in the morning. How did we do today? The boys were in the car at 8am sharp and we had plenty of time to make it to school. Ta-da!

Wordpress weekly photo challenge: Ready

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I love you, WordPress

Don’t you love how efficient WordPress is, with its big Publish button staring at you from the right sidebar? So I just pressed the Publish button on my WWW Wednesdays weekly update way too soon and now it won’t let me resend the post notification.

So if you’d like to see what books we’ve been reading this past week, you can view my WWW Wednesdays update here.

I’m also working on a post to finally answer the ”50 Questions That Will Free Your Mind.” I’ve been wanting to do this exercise  for a while and the beginning of the new year seems like the right opportunity to do so.

Happy new year!

Our favorite adult literature and children’s books of 2011

You may have noticed I didn’t post a WWW Wednesdays update yesterday. I simply ran out of time. It was my mom’s last vacation day with us and I couldn’t find enough time in front of the computer to write up my weekly update.

Between shades of gray by Ruta Sepetys

I did want to share with you a wonderful book I just finished a few days ago called Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys. What an amazing book to learn about this less often told part of history, i.e. Stalin’s own ethnic cleansing of large parts of Eastern Europe that killed 20 million people (he sure got bragging rights over Hitler in the genocide category). Sepetys based her book on her own family’s experiences as well as testimonies from many Lithuanian families. This gives her story a very real feeling when you understand this type of events really happened to millions of uprooted families sent to Siberian forced labor camps. This is a poignant, personal first novel I highly recommend.

Now, instead of doing my weekly WWW Wednesdays update, I thought I’d make a list of our favorite books we read in 2011 and I encourage you to read them too.

My best adult literature book picks of 2011

A dog's purpose by W. Bruce Cameron

A Dog’s Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron. By far the best book I’ve read this year. It made me laugh, it made me cry and made me enjoy a story about dogs when I’m a cat person. Great storytelling.

The Lying Game by Sara Shepard. Such a great premise and angle for this murder mystery book. I couldn’t put it down and went on to read book #2 in the series, Never Have I Ever. Read it, you won’t regret it.

Room by Emma Donoghue. The first third of this book (the captivity part) kept me on the edge. The rest of it sucked me right in and surprised me several times on the way. This is a wonderful book on a very painful subject.

My best children’s book picks of 2011

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child by Julia Donaldson. Rhyming stories of a tiny mouse outsmarting a terrifying larger than life gruffalo.

 The Mr Putter & Tabby book series by Cynthia Rylant. These are wonderful, funny, kind and sweet stories about Mr Putter, his cat Tabby, his neighbor Mrs Teaberry and her dog Zeke. Our very favorite are Mr Putter & Tabby Paint the Porch, Mr Putter & Tabby Pick the Pears (zing!) and Mr Putter & Tabby Feed the Fish (bat bat bat…).

There Are Cats in This Book and its sequel There Are No Cats in This Book by Viviane Schwarz. These are interactive, hilarious books to read over and over with the kids, even if you’re not a cat person. Kids love to memorize all the lines and read the story on their own, laughing out loud.

What are your favorite book picks for 2011?

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