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Perfection – 2 years later (happy birthday sweet sweet Ella girl)
Perfection Originally uploaded by happykatie. Ella turns 2 years...
Happy One Week Birthday, munchkin
One week ago today, Adam was timing contraction lengths and I...Ella as a small almost-walking Bunn
Here’s Ella back a few months ago as a very small, open-mouthed...Because she is our Joy…
Our little one finally has a name! Actually, she probably...Beautiful world, beautiful girl
Saw you standing there Originally uploaded by happykatie. Life...
Dream dollhouse for a modern family
We are ridiculously in love with this gorgeous mid-century dollhouse from Brinca Dada called Emerson. Because every awesome house should be named, you know.
A second bit of coolness is their gorgeously designed modern furniture that perfectly complements each of the house’s 7 rooms. Oh mah gah. If we were ever hit by a shrink ray, we would totally live in this place. Home sweet home, much?
Flowers from daddy
The girls in our house are spoiled by our main squeeze, Adam / daddy. This year’s Valentine’s Day brought special flowers for both of us – hand selected and put together just for us.
Ella was clearly as enamored as I was 
Love seeing that chica enjoy her toddler Fisher-Price digital camera, especially when she has snapshots to share with us of her own mini adventures around the house. Funny how amazing it is to see the world through her eyes.
The wolf pack heads to Great Wolf Lodge
We spent last weekend at Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park in the lovely Grapevine, TX. The lodge’s PR team invited us out to check out their digs – which was pretty swell as we certainly didn’t have this on our weekend adventure list as of yet.
Ella had a great time – even as a shortie toddler (they are very strict on height requirements for their slides) there were moooore than enough things to do. In fact, with the exception of the 3 giant adult slides that were open, Ella did everything!
The weekend was a bit eye opening from a mommy perspective – watching her climbing, jumping and exploring, all things I’m used to her doing at the playground on any given weekend. But watching homeslice stand in line on her own for a (really quite large) water slide – and then slide down all by herself… holy cow.
We had a fun time, it’s something we’ve never experienced before and we loved watching Ella in the water. Our stay lasted less than 24 hours and I don’t know how much longer we could have lasted – we were all pooped by the end of 2 rounds of swimming and playing – kudos to the GWL warriors who stay a week
Rawkiddo? Uncooking for healthy shorties
We’ve been getting excited about raw foods and ‘un-cooking’ for a while now, but have yet to master it period… let alone for Ella’s diet. Un-cooking is one of those kitchen mindsets that has taken me a while to conquer, so I soak up every single bit of inspiration and recipe that I can get.
To that end, this new kiddo-focused un-cookbook from Raw Mom looks very promising. I’ve been a longtime reader of the Raw Mom Blog, which is inspiring in its stories of actual families with actual kids growing and loving the raw food way of life.
I’m not sure that our family will ever be 100% raw, but I’d like to shoot for at least 40 – 50% — especially during the weekdays when we need all the (healthy) energy we can get. The day that Ella starts obsessing over cookbooks and savors her time in the kitchen like we do will be a pretty rocking one – sooo happy to have already started her on that journey.
Ella’s runway debut :)
A few weeks ago, Ella and I were in a Sama Baby Organics fashion show at New Living here in Houston for the Sprout Day event.
We had fun, Ella was a champ and wore a cute outfit, we drank AMAZING Italian Wedding Cake soda from the always-hip OpMom and then went and ate blood orange chocolate ice cream at The Chocolate Bar.
We even saw our pal Ruthie belly dancing!!
Photos by Sara Catherine Photography – check out the whole set on Flickr and on her site. She’s great!
Is Ella a wood nymph?
Although certainly too dark and mature to collect for the Bunn, Mark Ryden's work is devastatingly haunting and beautiful. This image of his Maple Tree Nymph painting reminds me so much of the shortie (see here — and here).
If his work looks familiar to you, that's because you've probably already seen it in the Summer 2009 edition of Hi-Fructose magazine this month. I love seeing even the tiniest glimpses of Ella in unexpected places.
Hydraheart shoes – handmade loving for your shortie’s toes
Loving these handmade keyhole flats for the kiddos – sweet and simple design and all Vegan to boot. Best of all (and yes, you can totally roll your eyes on this one), you can get matching shoes for Mama too. I'm totally down.
Coupon time! Mom Made Meals from Target
It's nice to have healthy meals/snacks in the freezer for those 'argh, do I REALLY have to cook tonight??' evenings — and Mom Made Meals is the perfect organic answer to that question. Organic vegetarian awesomeness for your hungry kiddo's tummy in less time than it takes to zip through a drive thru.
Better still, when you buy any 4 Mom Made Meals before January 18th they'll send you a coupon for $9 (in celebration of 2009) to Target. A match made in consuming Mommy heaven.
Embroidered happiness
Here’s a sweet little girlie embroidery pattern from ninimakes to make a pillow out of or adorn a summer-y onesie. Leave a comment about how you would use this pattern and Nini will email you a PDF pattern.
I’ve been excited about embroidery projects (with many thanks to the fabulous Sarah at Sew Crafty!) lately – still working on a mini series of Dia de los Muertos sugar skulls patterns to hang in the dining/craft room.
I bought a super cheap package of 3 small-ish glass frames from Ikea (yay Ikea!) to stretch the fabric and look pretty against our wild colored walls. I already have used embroidery hoops to stretch funky fabric in Ella’s room, so I’ll be adding some funky details to those as well.
Fun, crafty times with needle, thread and red wine. Seriously.
Essentials for veggie kids and their familias
tomato family
Originally uploaded by herr_hartmann.
Holy Moses… for once there’s actually a useful and non ‘you really need to feed your kid milk’ article on a mainstream site for parents raising veggie kids. Check out this Pampers vegetarian kiddo nutrition page – it’s really quite good.
Okay, I know there *are* others out there but honestly they are pretty far and few between. Even the most promising of MS resources seems to eventually throw in a sly reference about adding a little cheese or yogurt to a short one’s diet — because, you know, apparently no one can trust that nature will take care of us the best as it has for thousands of years before Yoplait and string cheese.
It gets a little old after a while, and this is coming from a serious cheese addict here. I’m working hard to stay off the stuff but having the Bunn to look out for has opened my eyes wider to a lot of things I already knew.
