New Schedule

I recently started a new job at work.  The job is a promotion but comes with some very different hours.  My new schedule means that I am going to get to spend more time with Madelyn because I will be home 3 mornings a week and every Friday.  But, it also means that  I am going to miss dinner and bedtime 3 nights a week.

Yesterday was our first day that I was home in the morning and not home for bedtime.  Madelyn was very confused about why Grandma wasn't there, and I am pretty sure that whatever I did for breakfast did not live up to the Grandma standard.  However, she was happy to have me home to play with her and it was nice to have a relatively relaxing morning split between trying to take care of things and playing.  However, bedtime was not so great.  Madelyn called me twice; the first time she was pretty happy to talk and tell me about her day and say goodnight.  But the second time she was crying for Mommy to come home.  That was pretty tough for me... Justin said she ended up crying herself to sleep after about a half an hour

I know we'll all get used to this new schedule but until Madelyn is ok with bedtime I have a feeling that I am going to have a rough time with it.  In the end it will be a good thing, but the short term is tough.

The Great Adventure

A few weeks ago Justin, Madelyn, and I all piled in the car and went on a road trip.  Crazy, you say?

Maybe a little crazy, but we wanted to go visit friends of ours who live outside Louisville, KY and with the current cost of airfare and the requirement to purchase 3 tickets instead of only 2, we decided that it made the most sense to drive.  Closer to the actual drive we started to have doubts, but by then it was really too late to fly.  So, we decided that driving through the night would be the easiest on Madelyn since hopefully she would sleep for most of it and the two of us could trade off driving.

Sidebar: Originally, we were going to drive halfway early Thursday, take a break in Chicago with Justin's brother and sister-in-law, and then arrive late Thursday/early Friday in Kentucky.  However, the more we thought about it, the more we thought that driving straight through would be better and that driving through the night would have the best chance for success.  We made the decision to change our plans on Monday (a few days before leaving), and we decided that we should leave Wednesday night, arriving in Kentucky at our friends' house a day earlier than we had initially told them.  Our friends graciously accommodated our last minute change of plans.

Justin's family has been known to make last minute changes of plans, or even plans mid travel, so this is pretty much par for the course for the Howard family.  Since our friends are not as used to the Howard family ways as we are, we are glad that they still invited us to come back.

We survived our drive to Louisville with only one meltdown in the middle of the night (it did last 2 hours, but out of the 13+ hours we were driving that is a a pretty small percentage of the time).  After lunch at a fabulous place called Lynn's Paradise Cafe where Justin, Madelyn, and I experienced our first ever 'Hot Brown" sandwiches, we crashed at our friends' place for the rest of the day and recovered from our drive.

Friday we took the kids to the Louisville Zoo (where our Minnesota Zoo membership got us 1/2 price admission).  It was beautiful sunny weather and the kids all had a great time seeing all the animals.

On Saturday our friends got a babysitter for the kids and we went to Keeneland, a horse race track in Lexington.  The big race of the day was the Bluegrass Stakes (with a $750, 000 purse to the winning horse) and is known as one of the lead up races for the Kentucky Derby.  It was all the more exciting because we had a horse to cheer for, Scatman.  The trainer for that horse is the father of a friend of our friends, so we practically knew the horse :)  Although we cheered, things did not come out well for Scatman, who finished near the bottom.  The winner of the race, Dullahan, will be running in the Derby this weekend.  He's not a favorite, but you never know.  The horse that came in second was Hansen, who is also racing in the Derby this weekend.   If either of them wins we could say "we saw him race..."

Sunday we kept things much more low key, and we all got in naps before we hit the road in the late afternoon to head home.  We made it home a little before 6 am on Monday and even got in a couple of hours of sleep before Madelyn decided it was really time to get up for the day.

We had so much fun we are thinking this is going to have to become an annual event for us.  Maybe some year we'll go to the Kentucky Derby, but we aren't ready for that yet!

She Makes Me Laugh

Madelyn has been developing her sense of humor, and with it her desire to make people laugh.  What she has been doing most recently is telling knock knock jokes.  I am really not sure where she discovered them, but she thinks that she is hilarious. 

She says "knock knock" and then we say "who's there" and then she laughs and either says "knock knock" again, or she decides that someone is at the door.  Most frequently if someone is there, it is Grandpa.  And she thinks it is the funniest thing ever.  She laughs, and we laugh, and then she laughs even harder.  A few nights ago in the car she was laughing so hard at her knock knock jokes she started snorting.  She clearly thinks she is telling a joke, although I think she may have missed the main general purpose of a knock knock joke...

She has also been pretending to talk on the phone a lot, whether with an actual cell phone, or a play phone, or most recently anything she can find.  She recently took her shoe off of her foot, held it up to her ear, and said "Hello!"  followed by "Bye!"  Maybe you had to be there, but we thought it was pretty hilarious.

Easter!

Evidently I should have indicated that an Easter post would make it's appearance eventually, not soon...

Although Easter weekend was not very warm we did have a good time with the neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt on Saturday and spending time at church and with family on Sunday.

Here's a video of Madelyn hunting for Easter eggs in the rain...she had a really good time, but she took the hunting very seriously.

We spent Sunday at my parent's house with family in the afternoon after church and we got a couple of pictures of Madelyn in her Easter outfit.

We had a very hard time convincing Madelyn that she should wear her Easter hat at all, but we did manage to keep it on her head long enough to quickly get this picture.

Family photo :)

Madelyn walked around taking pictures of the day with an old camera

So much fun to be had!

An Afternoon At The Park

Last week Justin's mom and sister were able to stay for a few days after Madelyn's birthday party and Justin's mom got this video at the park.

Madelyn is a big fan of the swings and we clearly think that she should be adventurous on the baby swing...what makes this more interesting is the other mom in the background talking to the child in the other swing.

An Easter post will make an appearance soon :)

Early October...

Happy Birthday Madelyn! (Part 2)

On Saturday, we celebrated Madelyn's birthday with a party with some friends and family.  We were really excited that Justin's mom, sister, and brother were all able to make the long trek to Minnesota to spend some time with us and to be a part of the birthday festivities.

Madelyn was much more excited about her birthday this year than she was last year.  I'm not convinced she really knew what was going on, but she liked the decorations and the cake, and having so many people that she loves all together at the same time.  She asked all week who she was going to see at her party and was thrilled when all of those people really came :)

Our theme was a little difficult to pinpoint, but after a suggestion from a friend that with Madelyn's love of tea parties that it would be a good theme for her party we loosely went with that as a theme.  We had multiple varieties of iced and hot tea and also a teapot shaped cake that I ordered from a local bakery called the Sweet Retreat (they mostly do cupcakes and were actually on "Cupcake Wars").

The Tea Spread -  the blue teapot in the middle is the cake

The Teapot Cake :)

Formal tea parties probably don't include pizza or iced tea, but since Madelyn is only 2 I figured we were ok to bend the rules a little bit and have as many as her favorite things as we could.

She also did well with opening presents and was very interested in everything she opened.  She did have a little bit of a hard time sharing after the present opening, but all in all she did a great job!

Diva?

Possibly letting Madelyn have cake and chocolate ice cream on her own without a full body smock/bib was not a great decision, but she had a good time.

so busy eating cake and ice cream that there wasn't time to talk to anyone...she was focused!

We have seen Madelyn change so much in the last year.  She is getting more and more verbal every day, adding new words to her vocabulary.  She has opinions about everything now, from the clothes she wears to the color of her plate or bowl.  She looks forward to seeing her friends at church.  She wants to know about EVERYTHING and it is amazing.  It has been a crazy and amazing adventure and we are really looking forward to seeing what the next year will bring.