Cassidy in Charcoal, 3.5 years

A new portrait for our living room!

April Weekends

Our weekends this month have been busy!  We've been doing more home improvement work including building a new shed. 

I had grown tired of the collection of Cassidy's outside toys accumulating on our playroom floor;  not only because it was a pain to clean around, but also because we have to keep them babygated off to prevent Baxter from "claiming" them as his own.  So now we have some outdoor storage space for Cassidy's things conveniently located next to the back patio and easily accessible!

We also continued on our landscape improvements.  This change was motivated again by the dogs, who habitually jumped over or through the small fence we had surrounding this area to dig up the mulch and weed barrier in search of lizards, bugs, or imaginary bones they had left there on a previous day. 

So we've replaced mulch with rocks and hopefully the digging will stop.

We've also entered the "birthday party" phase.  It seems that just about every weekend we have a birthday party to attend for one of Cassidy's classmates.  This is usually great fun because of the new trend of celebrating preschoolers birthdays at various places like bounce houses.  The last one was at a place called the Monkey Room, an indoor playground with slides AND a bounce house for the private parties.

I'm not sure which Cassidy enjoys more... the playtime or the junk food which we never have in the house.  She's recently discovered Cheetos, which are defintely her favorite (although "Chippies"- any type of potato chip, etc) are also right up there).  In fact, she spotted a bag of Cheetos at the snack shop following her swim lesson and would hear of nothing else as a possibility for snack. 

More birthdays coming up in the next few weeks ... this time at Storyland in City Park! 

We've also been watching Daddy play soccer in two leagues, and Daddy's done some spectacular cooking! 

Lamb with Rosemary, Lemon, and Wine sauce.  YUM!

Swim Lessons

Cassidy started swim lessons this month! 

It's a toddler class where she is in the water with the teachers and other kids... NO MOMMY OR DADDY!  We thought this would be best since she's pretty comfortable in the water but doesn't like us to let go of her at all unless her feet are firmly planted on the bottom. 

Just before her first lesson begins!  Looking a little nervous...

After a quick dunking!

blowing bubbles to get started on putting her face in the water.

Concentrating on kicking and peaking to see how to do it "perfectly".... she's definitely a virgo like her mama.



Cassidy is the only new kid in class.  And with some of them it's obvious!  A couple of them just pitch themselves into the water in a "ready or not, here I come" fashion.  Several times the teachers were making  quick dashes to pull the little rogues out!

ready to go underwater!

All of these pictures were taken at her first lesson.  She did GREAT!  She even willingly floated on her back for the teacher!  She had a blast and was VERY excited to go again the following week.  The class is only 30 minutes each saturday.  The second week mommy and daddy went swimming after class to extend her pool time.  (And admittedly to get some time in the hot tub!)  She's still showing some hesitancy about putting her head under water, but she no longer wipes furiously at her eyes afterward. 

We're planning to sign up for another month of classes so Cassidy can continue growing comfortable in the water and learn to swim on her own!

Easter Weekend

We colored eggs.

The Easter Bunny delivered the basket.



We had brunch at Cheesecake Bistro.



We rode the carousel at La Freniere.

We made Easter Basket Cupcakes!

We celebrated a friends birthday with a petting zoo at her house!

With Cassidy off of school on Monday,  Cassidy and I spent the day together.   We cleaned the house, did some laundry, stopped at work to get an experiment started, visited Daddy at work for a lunch date, took a long nap (during which I decorated the cupcakes), and then swam in the pool in the backyard.  We finished up the night with our usual bike ride to the library for story and craft time! 

  I had so much fun with my girl!

What a perfect day to end a great weekend!

Tile

I just realized that I had forgotten to post pictures of our exciting addition to our kitchen! 

We tiled the backsplash!

We are fairly pleased with the results, but we had some problems with the grouting step.  The grout dried faster than we expected ... unfortunately before we wiped all of it off.  This was made more problematic by the tile we chose which is heavily textured.  While this looks really cool, it provides about a million little grooves for the grout to settle into ... and dry.  So I spent about 8 hours scraping grout off of the textured tiles with a chopstick over the two days following our tile installation. 

While there is still quite a bit of grout left on the tile, it's not really visible also because of the textured tile.  We de-hazed twice and haven't sealed it yet, but it's complete for now. 

Next up:  painting the kitchen yet again.  The tile doesn't match the green but we decided to buy the tile we really liked and change the wall color.  I'm sure I'll get around to painting sometime soon ...

Cassidy Said...

Papa was putting Cassidy to bed the other night. 

He read her a book or two, and then was telling her a made up story. 

Apparently Cassidy was ready to go to bed because as Papa rambled on and on in the telling of his story, Cassidy said,

"Papa ... Get to the end."