she wore a flower in her hair

In my current situation of being a stay at home mom, and everything that goes along with that (minus the minivan), I have been doing some different things with my time. For example my MOPs (Mothers of Preschoolers (and under)) group always does a craft when we meet. Originally I thought "eww!" because I am not a crafts girl. (cover your ears craft loving friends) The smelly glue that gives me a headache, the glitter that gets everywhere and lets not forget the knick-knacky finshed product are all the reasons I need to stay away! BUT the craft each week at MOPs (thanks to Amy) was always something cool and useful!

Which brings me to the nature of this post. This spring we made some vintage looking flowers that you could attach to pins (so you could where it on your sweater) or hair clips. And since then I have received nothing but compliments on mine. It is more fun than I expected to respond by saying "Thanks, I made it!". When I mentioned this to my sister and niece (whom the craft gene did not skip) they requested pictures...so this post is dedicated to them.

Directions for making silk flowers:

Step 1: Cut a piece of silky material (apparently you can buy a mixed bag of these scraps at your local craft store) into a variety of different sized circles. Material is shown below.

Step 2: light a candle (little tea candle works great) and hold the edges up to the flame to singe the edges...this make them curl up a bit giving each one a different personality.

Step 3: Take a metal brad and poke it through the center of all the different sized flower petals. Then take the hair clip (or pin) and pull the brad ends in separate directions over a hole in the clip (so the flower and clip are attached) . Cover with hot glue.

Be careful not to clamp down on the clip until the glue is semi-dry or it will glue the clip together!! (placing a piece of wax paper in between might help with this)

I promised a friend that I would make her one and I decided to attach hers to a sturdy bobby pin I had... I think it work out well!

Here are some of my finished products!

Cute huh?

Looking for a REAL craft blog? This gal came and spoke to our groups about her crafts and blogging (as a pastime and career).

http://homemadebyjill.blogspot.com/

She is pretty amazing...even I was impressed!

13 months now!

Well what can I say? My baby is growing up and might even be considered a toddler...yikes! She is "toddling"aka walking/running (I knew she would be running soon!) all over the place now. She uses her 4 favorite words all the time: hat, eat, dada, and hi. What could be more important than these things? I mean if a girl has a full tummy, friends to socialize with, a doting man in her life and something to hide her bad hair days she is pretty much set! No wonder those are her first words!

Yesterday we took her in for her one year check up and she is the picture of health (see picture above). She is a tall girl for her age (90th percentile) and since she has been busy busy all the time she has trimmed way down (50th percentile). Did I mention she has a big head (95th percentile)? Ha!

My favorite things S is doing right now are:

Running with both hands above her head and a big smile on her face (imagine Rocky after he climbed to the top of the steps!)

Giving kisses! (she likes to lean in nice and close, and sometimes she puts her lips together for a little smooch!) Ask her for one next time you see her :)

mothers & daughters

Last week I was up in Sacramento for Mothers Day. It was great to spend the day with my mom, my sister and my nieces. Girls rock!

And if that wasn't fun enough I also got to visit with one of my very best friends at her parents house. It was so fun to see our kids enjoy each other. (Eating chips and salsa while sipping margaritas by the pool wasn't too bad either!) I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship for these two.

I couldn't help but reflect on the mother daughter relationship a little bit after all this sweet girl time. It is slowly occurring to me all the things that I will be able to share with Sydney because she is a girl. What a life long blessing! I think this has been slow coming to me because I am one of 5 girls in my family... sooo since there were no boys my Dad did boy stuff with all of us girls. Which is why this whole time I was envisioning us enjoying together the things I enjoyed as a kid like hiking, bike rides, playing ball, climbing trees, body surfing, etc. But how sweet it will be to share in the other things too. As I was pondering all of this I was reminded of the Irish saying, "A son is a son till he takes him a wife, a daughter is a daughter all of her life." Amen!

"I have absolutely nothing to wear!"

It was quiet for far to long while Sydney was playing in her room yesterday. I walked in to find her like this with no clothes left in her closet cubbies.



But even when she is being bad she is still cute:)

And for her next trick she will be running!

It is crazy how fast her walking skills have developed. The first part of the video was 3 weeks ago and the last sequence was shot just yesterday!