Life on Old Quarry ~ June Edition

Since life is just moving along way too fast for individual posts...here is a review of the Month in general!

Daddy and I celebrated 10 years of being together and 4 years being married!

Work on the basement is moving along...slowly but surely...all the walls and ceiling are up on Grandma's side and the floor is in in the bathroom

Pappy V stopped by for a surprise visit!! It was so awesome to get to see him and Gramy Becky! it was great to see them get to meet the Littlest Miss and visit and interact with the Little Miss, Pappy even got to help put together Daddy's Father's Day/Anniversary present (a great new telescope!).

The Little Miss is into (and climbing) EVERYTHING and starting to actually talk! (Nothing slow about this!) She has her own sweet rendition of bird, kitty, dog, want some, ball, nose, toes, eye, Hi, Bye, night night, what's that, Gi Gi, etc. etc.

She can point to her nose, toes and mouth. Ask her where her eyes or ears are though and she starts pulling her hair...ah well, it's a start!

She also is getting pretty good at following directions/helping... tasks like "go get the book" or "put the book away" or "bring {x} to mommy" or "time to go night night" (after this she gets her cup of milk and goes down to her bed room, as long as we are following her, its just adorable)

Her hair is coming in faster now, she still doesn't have enough for a pony tail or pig tails, but she's not looking quite so bald :) still not sure if it's going to go curly or straight, it looks massively curly in the back but the top is all straight so we will just have to keep waiting and seeing.

What she's not so great at doing is sleeping in her toddler bed. She usually wakes up once a night and we usually go ahead and give in and put her in her crib and let her cry herself back to sleep...not sure what we are going to do once we need the crib for Alli, *or* what we are going to do when we go camping at Pappy's down in TN...

***ETA We actually ended up purchasing another crib and giving up on getting the little miss to sleep in her bed for now since she has been consecutively sleeping through the night in her crib for the first time...ever...***

The Littlest Miss is doing great now, she seems to be getting over what ever it was that made her so sick earlier in the month.

She is growing like a weed, she is out of NB sizes and now in 0-3 month sizes. Not sure how long that is going to last though, she is starting to get in those pudgy baby rolls on her arms and legs and get those pudgy cheeks that everyone just wants to squeeze :)

She can hold her head up really well now and can sit assisted!

During tummy time she can hold her shoulders up off the floor and rests there on her elbows looking around...until she realizes she is doing tummy time and then all bets are off and the kicking and screaming starts...ahhhh just love this stage...

She is cooing like crazy, it's just so adorable! I don't remember the little miss ever cooing per se so it's pretty neat to just listen to her.

She usually gets up once a night around 4ish to feed, so it's not too, too bad but still can't wait till that middle night feeding is over though!

And that's about it till I get around to doing the July version!

Berkshire Bird Paradise Sanctuary

One of the Little Miss's new favorite words is Bird...everytime she sees something flying it's a bird...so Father's day we took a family outing and went to this place. The Berkshire Bird Paradise Sanctuary. It was an absolutely awesome and we all loved it.

I don't know exactly what they were, but this place really exceeded all my expectations.

We were welcomed by the goose family...which the Little Miss was very much upset when we wouldn't let her go play with them...

We started out in the little indoor structure with what I called the talking birds :) Cassie didn't really like the noise, heat or the fans in there, but there was one bird she found rather entertaining. Lulu who laughed back at her when she laughed :)

Once we got outside she really warmed up, she liked "talking" to the ducks, geese and swans.

Littlest Miss really didn't care either way...

Walking around it's easy to see why this place is a Sanctuary for the birds, it was so nice and peaceful.

They had birds of all shapes and sizes from all over the world. I was very impressed by the variety.

My favorites were the owls...I just loved how big and fluffy they were! And I had never seen one before so this was a first for me.

Another first for me was getting to see an Eagle! Not sure exactly which one he is, but this cage contains Mitch who was rescued by Navy Seals over in Afghanistan, such a cool story which you can read Here.

And the Bald Eagles...so awesome...couldn't get very close to them... but...

If you look very very close you can see one here. (Lower level middle) still very impressive for someone who has never seen an Eagle before let alone our national emblem.

They even had creatures of the non-bird variety... here some deer, some squirrels (or Kitties as the Little Miss called them when she saw them) and even a tortoise!

Again...the Littlest Miss was not impressed...we will bring her back once she can get more involved :)

Cassie had a blast once she warmed up and woke up a bit...she was always holding on to daddy's hand leading him around.

Her favorites seemed to be the smaller birds (more her size?) she loved the ducks and geese and pigeons and doves.

She found one duck wandering around and wanted very much to go and play with it...

Once we got to the pigeons and doves she just stood there watching them, waving at them, chatting with them. There was a bench next to the cage so she climbed up and just sat there watching and listening to them, so nice and peaceful, very relaxing, such a nice change of pace for her :)

Also an unexpected plus...there were alot of these concrete balls around...Ball being the Little Miss's other favorite word she was in chatty heaven.

We ended up wrapping up the adventure with pizza at Papa John's. It was a great day :)

We will absolutely be going back to this Sanctuary. It is really very close to Grafton Lake State Park so we will plan a bit better next time and pack our swim suits and a picnic lunch and stop there on the way back!

Father's Day Crafting

For Father's Day we decided to make Grandpa (Pop-Pop...Pops...G-Pa-V...who knows what the girls will end up calling him...) a "hug" from the Little Misses since he lives so far away and can't get them in person...

We got the girl's hand prints (or most of them) on a sweatshirt (a VERY difficult task...)

Then Cassie made a card :) I tried putting the paint on a card in a ziploc baggie due to the Little Miss's desire to NOT get any sort of paint on her hands. Finger painting definitely not an option right now so I figured she could use the trucks tires to make a design on the card...

It did NOT work inside the baggie so I took it out and she went to town

and got a little piant on the tires :)

Then we gave her a pen and let her "sign" the inside

And the finished result was this! Perfectly imperfect. Hope you love it Grandpa!

Reader Mommy

1. Awakened (House of Night book 8) ~ PC and Kristen Cast

2. Storm Front (The Dresden Files Book 1) ~ Jim Butcher

3. My Fair Lazy: One Reality Television Addict's Attempt to Discover if Not Being a Dumb Ass is the New Black, or, a Culture-Up Manifesto ~ Jen Lancaster

4. Songs of Love and Death - Various Short Stories

5. A Game of Thrones (A song of Ice and Fire Book 1) ~ George R. R. Martin

6. Queen of Babble - Meg Cabbot

7. Bloodfever - Karen Marie Moning

8. Faefever - Karen Marie Moning

9. Black Heels to Tractor Wheels - Ree Drummund

10. The Twilight Saga (counting all 4 as 1 since I read them so many times :) and it was all considered one book borrowed...)

11. Wicked Lovely - Melissa Marr

12. Dreamfeaver - Karen Marie Moning

13. The Host - Stephenie Myer

14. My Horizontal Life - Chelsea Handler

15. Shadowfever - Karen Marie Moning

16. I am America and So Can You - Stephen Colbert

17. 13 Little Blue Envelopes - Maureen Johnson

18. Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen

19. A Clash of Kings (Song of Ice and Fire book 2) ~ George R. R. Martin

Currently Reading

An Echo in the Bone ~ Diana Gabaldon

PIP's (a/k/a Projects in Progress)

Some updates on the basement and a couple of other projects I have in the works :)

Sheet rock in Mom's apartment is up! *Just* need to tape/spackle prime and paint...

Also got the floor down in the bathroom

And my grandpa started to finish the windows... he is making them go from something like this...

To this...

The cats are going to love having those window sills!

Another project I have going on are some art holder/displays and chalk boards for the girls' craft area

LOVE that I found the spray paint primer and I just can't wait to see how the chalkboard actually turns out!

And just a father's day present that popped into my head this morning...hopefully it turns out cool :) (either way I'll post pics after father's day!)

Almost Artsy

So lately in addition to not really having a chance to log on and blog I also haven't had a chance to do any crafting, or really do any crafty goodness with Cassie either, but hopefully that will change soon since it seems (*knock on wood*) that everyone in the house is getting better.

But we did get out to enjoy some sunshine with some sidewalk chalk...the Little Miss is still a bit too young for the drawing, but it's fun to give her the chalk and see what she does with it anyway :)

Whether that is drawing on the driveway (improving upon Mommy's attempts at sidewalk art)...

Or pulling everything out and playing with the bucket...

Or just plain running away with it...

We also broke out the water colors :) she was doing pretty well with them, though she has the steps out of order because I think she just loved putting the brushes in the water and making the water change color... it did the job of keeping her quiet for a while.

And...once she found out the paint brushes make awesome musical instruments...the art time was over...

Memorial Weekend

Okay, I know it was a few weeks ago, but we've been just a smidge busy so here's our Memorial Day weekend in review (finally!)

In a nutshell? This was just the perfect weekend... Sprinklers and s'mores and geocaching... it was just excellent.

It was really pretty hot so Daddy was awesome and DIY'd a sprinkler...way cooler than the sprinklers I had as a kid :)

Cassie however, is not much of a fan yet though...

We moved the camper over to the side of the house, all ready to try it out with the girls...

However....somewhere between all the moving we did we lost the crank that pops up the pop up :) oops... so this is as close as we got to the actual camping portion of the weedend.

So Daddy took out his frustrations out on the sprinkler and made it even MORE awesome :)

The next day we went geocaching in the morning before it got too hot out...

Daddy put Cassie on in the Ergo

and I got Alli in the Moby...

We headed out and found one cache (better than none!)

But after that one we were done, Cassie was ready for nap time so we headed home and we had a family nap time :)

Then we went backout to cool off in the water, we tried getting Cassie more interested in it...

But she would much rather play in the mud...

Which resulted in this :)

We also had a few fires, love love the smell!

Cassie was not so fond of them...

though she did enjoy the s'mores :)