lately

this week has been a good week for us.

here's some stuff i thought i'd share:

big girl under pants

on sunday bryan stayed home with a sick penelope. he made her play dough and of course he made her a pair of play dough shoes. cute.




dora the explorer may teach a thing or 2. a few days ago. penelope discovered that one of her pet rocks was under the tv stand. she grunted and strained to get the rock and then she said, "i can't reach! i need a rope!" what? we figured that it may be something that she picked up on dora the explorer. the last couple of weeks there's been a bit more tv watching in the sparks household. we've been mainly hanging out at home with the potty training thing going on, so i definitely give in to the tv requests more than usual.

we tried an outing to the playground, but we were only there 15 min. when she peed her pants. sweet. i felt so bad as i dragged my daughter away kicking and screaming. there was another little girl there, they were playing dolls together and it was almost too cute to bare.

tira came over and i taught her how to granny square. she was a great student...even though i am not the best teacher. seriously.

penelope is ubber obsessed with rice. she asks for rice like 3 times a day and i rarely have rice on hand. i am not sure what she sees in the stuff. BUT it does make me think of this "I like rice. Rice is great when you're hungry and you want 2000 of something." -demitri martin.

i also tried to help a deaf girl from my young women's church group how to sew. it was hard and thier wasn't a whole lot of communication. she was SUCH a trooper and put up with a great deal of finger spelling. i was humbled and wished that i'd retained more from my 3 years of sign language classes in high school. we were making modest skirts for the girls to wear to church. i think next week will go better.

the new issue of lmnop is out and is really cute.

we had a lot of fun playing with my brother, sis-in-law and their kiddos yesterday. they are going through some sad stuff and penelope and i thought they might like some company.

here's a run down of that trip:

we went to mcdonald's for lunch. joshua REALLY wanted to play in their play place. i must admit this was penelope's first experience at a mcdonald's play place... and she loved it.

i TOTALLY dropped the ball on potty training. i brought pen's potty up with us, so we could keep on keeping on, but we didn't do it. i hang my head in shame.

i bought a lava cake mix, which is a little silly because i have an amazing and very easy lava cake recipe already, but it looked so yummy i couldn't pass it up. i do so love lava cakes. now i am thinking i might want to make the mix up...like now.

this kids found a very cool preying mantis in the front yard.

the adults found that the neighbor's sewer had backed up and was all kinds of nasty.

i made them a really yum chicken and bowtie pasta in creamy pesto sauce with mini heirloom tomatoes. i kinda loved it and was glad to make it for people who enjoy italian fare... bryan won't touch anything pasta.

have a great weekend.