Having a Bad Day? Watch a Baby Laugh Hysterically

My little girl loves cats. LOVES them. She sleeps with no less than two stuffed kitties each night (named Seamus and Two Seamus, a story I'll get to in a second), frequently meows at them, and gets visibly excited when she sees a cat (real, stuffed, or on TV). If I let her pick out her clothes in the morning, she will for sure select a shirt with a cat on it.

My brother and sister-in-law have three cats, so when she goes over there to visit she's pretty much in heaven. One of their cats is named Seamus and he's usually the most visible and active of the three when guests are over. For some reason, saying the name "Seamus" came easily for her so she was saying it over and over again one day when we were visiting. Another one of the cats (Rupert) looks sort of like Seamus, so when she was running around looking for him she stumbled upon both cats in one spot and it blew her mind. So she gets all excited and says "Hi Seamus!" and "Hi...Two Seamus!". So now Rupert is known as "Two Seamus" and ever since that day Charlotte refers to her two favorite stuffed kitties as Seamus and Two Seamus. The other ones are simply "Kitty" or "Baby" or "Meow."

On to the point of this post. Today I needed a few minutes to get some work emails sent out. She was running around like crazy and I knew it was going to be necessary to find something to totally distract her. So I went to YouTube and looked up "cute kittens" and found this video. As I'm typing my emails I hear her start to giggle a little. Then a few moments later I hear the giggles get harder, until the room was overcome with belly laughs at the cats on the video. It was hilarious and distracting, and I had to watch it unfold. I don't have many videos of her cracking up like that, so I tried replaying it to see if I could strike gold twice. She laughed harder the second time:

And the third:

The video quality isn't great, sorry about that. But really all that matters is the audio :) And the bread and cheese she's holding in the video? It's part of her pretend food set that she's currently obsessed with. We went out for lunch today and she insisted on holding the cheese slice for the entire car ride.

It's been kind of a rough week. The sound of my girl laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes made me forget about the stress, worries, and frustrations of the week and enjoy the moment. If you've had less of an All Star week yourself, watch the videos. I guarantee that it is impossible to walk away after watching a baby lose her mind laughing with the same levels of stress and frustration that you started with. Try it. :)

~Stacy

Same Day, Different Year

So in looking back through photos from the past year, I noticed how many ones from this time last March that looked like they were taken in July. I stopped when I got to them, convinced that the date must have been set incorrectly in my camera because almost all of them showed blue and sunny skies, green grass, buds and flowers, and a baby outside with a sunhat and no socks. Nope, the dates were right. Last March was unseasonably warm and beautiful. My grandma's birthday is on Thursday, and I remember for her party last year we ended up bringing her patio furniture out of storage and sitting outside on her porch in the bright warm sun. On March 7th.

Here's what last year looked like:

Aaaand here we are today:

We went to the nature center and walked around outside as long as we could stand it in the 30 degree cold. Despite the chill, it was still a beautiful day. We at least replicated the sunny blue skies from last year :)

And before we left, Little Miss had some fun trying on my hat and gloves. The hat actually fit her quite well so it stayed on for our nature center trip. Silly girl:

Happy Monday.

~Stacy

Orchid Mania

Today we went to the Botanical Gardens (again) to check out their new display called Orchid Mania. It's only on display for another week and I really wanted to check it out. I think orchids are beautiful (I had one once. I killed it. Not surprising, I'm a terrible flower and plant caretaker). I wanted to be able to walk around in an environment full of color that could temporarily trick me into believing I was outside. And the sweet orchid fragrance is delicious, so that was a bonus.

Of course I ended up taking about a million photos...it was just too pretty, and it gave me some great camera practice. This is a very photo heavy post.

I told you it was a lot :)

I hope you had a great weekend, and I forgot to say it yesterday but Happy March! February is OVER! Yes!

~Stacy

A Day Away

Today I spent the day in Amish Country--which means about a two hour drive from my house to Holmes County, which has a population of about 50% Amish residents (around 19,000). I went with my mom and we spent the day shopping at at various gift and home decor shops, markets, a fabulous quilt shop, and eating delicious Amish food and desserts. I was responsible for nothing and nobody, and it was a nice, relaxing day off :)

There's a tiny village there called Charm (can you believe that? It's actually called Charm, and yes, it's quite charming. Har har). Anyhow, Charm is home to possibly my favorite quilt shop ever: Miller's Dry Goods. This place is the best. They are packed to bursting with bolts of fabric--good fabric, too, like Amy Butler, Moda, Michael Miller, Heather Bailey, etc. They also have tons of precuts and patterns and a pretty fantastic clearance section with discontinued styles that are hard to find. 

I didn't buy the whole store, but I came close. Here's my loot:

I had such a great day, but I was ready to get home to this:

She's a big fan of Chipotle. Can you tell?

Have a great weekend.

~Stacy

A Sun Sighting in February

The end of February is finally here. As if to remind me, today was beautiful and sunny. Not warm (at all), but still. I'll take it. We spent as much time as we could outside soaking up the blue skies and sunlight. The next five days are supposed to be some variation of completely cloudy and/or rainy, windy or snowy/rainy. I yearn for the days when sunlight is the norm and I can stop popping vitamin D pills like Smarties.

Oh February. You stupid, stupid month. You're even spelled stupidly. Go away and let winter release its grip on us. I know March isn't exactly a month of warmth and sunshine either, but it's a heck of a lot closer to getting us there than February.

See that bright colored spot in the middle of this photo? It's the sun. I know, I couldn't believe it either!

What's that? The sky is blue? I thought it was a shade of bleak gray!

The sight of these little babies almost made me weep with joy:

Same with these--and bonus that they were on clearance and in my size. Thanks, Old Navy:

Charlotte likes them too. In fact, as soon as they were out of the bag she dropped what she was doing and scampered over saying "oooh, mommy's shoes? I see mommy's shoes? Shoes on?". That's my girl; she loves a cute pair of shoes just as much as she loves jumping in puddles and picking up sticks :)

Three more days until March is here and we can put this long and dreary month to rest for another year!

~Stacy

The Boat Tent

We got home late last night from our day trip to Pittsburgh. We had a blast visiting our friend Adam. We started out at Ikea, which was my first time going. I wasn't prepared for how enormous that place is! Whew. It was really fun, a little overwhelming, and we found a bunch of neat things...including this tent:

So we saw this tent on display and thought it was the coolest thing and had to bring it home for Charlotte. Turns out the display tent in the store was a smaller version, which we did not realize until we got it home and set it up last night. It's spacious, but it's also very bendy (real word. Bendy.) so we can easily take it upstairs for her to play with in her room or if we need to get it out of the living room.

When she got home today she immediately ran inside it and spent the majority of the day in and out of it. She loves it and refers to it as a "boat." Why boat? I have no idea, but she insists that it's a boat.

I expect many more fun days "boating." :)

~Stacy