Mark & Mandy

I can’t wait for the arts and crafts phase!

Michael was in town for a visit a couple weeks ago and he was a big hit! Elsie instantly loved his glasses and enjoyed constantly playing with the case. Elsie wanted to show her papa all her cool stuff so she first took him to the Denver Zoo!

Elsie enjoyed a great view on Papa’s shoulders

then they had some fun on the train

And finally they HAD to ride he carousel because its her fav!

The next morning we headed out to Gymnastics. Elsie helped Papa get warmed up, making sure he knew how to wiggle his toes

and then she showed her stuff on the bars

After the gym, we headed to the Children’s Museum for Playgroup (our week to host). Papa read her some books

and shared some fun with Saffie

The next morning Papa took us out to breakfast in Boulder and we decided that a little walk in the hills would help work off our big meal and give us a chance to look at the changing leaves. Elsie happened upon a shelter that she and papa explored.

It was fun, but nothing was as fun as collecting rocks! (there are just sooo many rocks to find)

It was an action packed weekend – we had so much fun showing Papa Michael all of our hangouts! We can’t wait for the next visit.

Elsie went in for her 18 month check up and all is well. She is still in the 25th percentile for height and the 5-10 percentile for weight – she’s just a little one! We had another round of shots (but this was the final round until age 5!) – there were some tears, but all tears were gone with the simple taste of a sucker!

This year for halloween Elsie is going to be a baby chick, in case you wondered baby chicks say “Bock, Bock”.

I decided to test out my limited sewing skilz on white hat with a comb (that red thing on the top of the rooster) and an egg treat bag. I started with the egg bag and opted to first create a paper prototype with some limited user testing (opinions from oh so bossy mark)  …

here is the final bag, notice how I lined it with multiple colors of goldenrod … don’t notice how horrible my stitching is (although I justified this by saying it made the egg look more “cracked”)

After remembering how to use the sewing machine and completing the bag, I moved onto the hat with the red comby thing. Here I am with pieces of the fleece everywhere in my hair …

and modeling

The final steps were to dye a pair of white cotten tights with fabric dye, and safety pin on white feather boas to a white onsie and Voilla … we have a baby chick!

I can feel the candy rolling in already!

we headed up to Rob and Kieuly’s new house in the Boulder Foothills for Brunch a few Sunday’s ago – the house was amazing.

here are a few pics

my favorite part of the house was the master bathroom

hello infinity bath tub

But we had to admit the cutest part of the house … Elsie and Kai in the modern lounger!

Grandparents don’t really follow any rules … the day after Saffie’s birthday grampa allowed elsie to eat 4 cupcakes. Each time she would go to josh and amy’s house, she would some how hunt down the cupcakes and point to them – each time grampa couldn’t say no.

Even saffie loved them!

for Saffie’s first birthday, Grammie and Grampa got her a tunnel … Elsie and Kai gave it a test run at Saffie’s party – here a few of the tunnel shots.

I hope it wasn’t elsie that gave kai that bruise on his head!

I’m occasionally an early adopter – and with some products (Sony minidisc) I end up in a technology dead-end. But with the AppleTV I couldn’t be happier. It’s a great way to play music for my living room and as Apple has released software updates, it has gotten even better, with movie downloads, rentals, Flickr feeds, Apple Remote (the iphone or ipod touch can be a really fully featured remote control).

Now that Elsie is moving into the phase of loving baby einstein, elmo and pixar movies, the AppleTV gives us an instant way to play any of these, and download video podcasts rom sesame street, superwhy and a ton of other children’s programming. But as we bought the pixar DVD box set and ripped them with handbrake, I found my 40Gb capacity was not enough for all my music and videos. So I decided to try to upgrade my AppleTV hard drive to 250Gb to future proof it for a while. After a few mistaken orders, I got the hard drive for <$100 and followed the instructions online, had to dig up a workaround for an error I kept getting, and finally ended up with everything working with a 230Gb capacity instead of 30Gb! Sweet!

Last Saturday we started Gymnastics with Elsie. We have tried Gymboree and during the week Elsie goes to Kangaroo Kingdome which has lots of activities but we wanted to make sure we were giving Elsie the proper instruction on how to do a perfect somersault.

We found Little Gym and signed up for the Little Birds Class. This place was so cute – we arrived and met Miss Melissa (our teacher) and were amazed at the facility. Each week has a theme – and this week was backwards week. We worked on walking backwards and a backwards somersault as well as just exploring the different apparatuses. Little gym does a great job of providing lots of short little exercises/activities for the kids, but allowing them to participate when they want to. We found that any time music was on, Elsie would run to the red mat to show off her dancing moves.

Here she is practicing the beam with dad…

doing it on her own

Trying out the parallel bars

practicing on the bar with miss melissa

and now with dad

and her favorite activity, doing a backwards somersault!

If you are looking for a great gymnastics program – Little Gym is awesome!

. . . .

Favorite quotes of the day, both from mark…

before class: “from a dexterity point of view, Elsie is definitely above average”

after class: “she’s just like shawn johnson, only shorter!”