five years

on november 19 josh & i celebrated our five-year wedding anniversary!  we dined at andina, one of our favorite portland restaurants.  incredible peruvian food.  it was a perfect dining experience, complete with connected conversation as we reminisced about our past ten years of friendship, and mused + dreamed of our future.  life together has been beautiful, growing, & a grand adventure, as well!  

we had planned to leave the kids at mike & marti's (josh's parents) house in seattle for a night the following weekend so we could head to a bed & breakfast.  but as the day approached it became clear that shepherd wouldn't be ready for that yet.  instead, we took advantage of extended-family togetherness, and played games & ate pizza with our seattle family.  

on our way out of town we took the kids to golden gardens, where josh & i got engaged.  here we are, now five years later, a family of four!  

a snowlady named nellie

thanksgiving day we were up in seattle with family, both garrels & ramsdale, and we enjoyed a perfect + beautiful day of snow.  josh & heron built a snowlady & named her nellie.

: alli helped with her accessories :

(so did mike)

: then josh built a snow fort, and the snowball fight ensued :

: uncle josh soon became the target :

the ponyo dress

my daughter is a self-determined little thing.  she wakes up every morning, unzips her footie pajamas, takes off her diaper, goes potty, and puts panties and a dress on before coming in to see if we're awake.  she's two and a half, and this has been her morning ritual for months now.

every day, a dress.  she'll rarely allow me to put pants on underneath, though homemade legwarmers are okay with her.  my mom said i was like this, too, with dresses.  but neither of us are (or were) girlie girls.  we're tomboys all the way through.  tomboys with dresses.  so i'm starting to make heron lots of dresses.  sometimes she'll choose to wear the same one every day for a week.  this is one such dress, at the end of a week, stained with play, but i'm finally getting around to taking a picture of it.  i tried to take pictures of it with heron in it.  but she's going through a phase of not wanting to get her picture taken.  (josh says it's not a phase, but the next few years of her life)

when i showed heron the fabric for her dress (that had once been curtains in her room), she said, "oh, mama!  you're making me a ponyo dress!"  i had no idea what this was, but then i saw it.  the pattern of the fabric totally looks like the jellyfish from the miyazaki film ponyo which she (ponyo) rides up to the surface of the ocean.  since this is her favorite movie, this is now her favorite dress.  score!

our family in yarn

thanks, lisa!  i had no idea a great blue heron finger puppet existed, but here it is...

catching up

i've just posted seven blog entries, catching up on the past week or two.  read on!

: heron at drew & sara's house, seattle :

halloween

i guess what i did to heron could be considered brainwashing.  every time people would ask heron who or what she was going to be for halloween, she'd say, "i'm going to be a bear."  i discovered this after i'd already decided on an easy costume for her (since a week was all i had to work on it, along with shepherd's costume).  i didn't even know she knew what halloween was, so i didn't expect she'd have an opinion on the matter.  so one day while shepherd was sleeping we were together in my sewing room upstairs.  i put on a cartoon of "little red riding hood" on my laptop while i sewed her little red cape, a cozy reversible number with red corduroy on one side, brown flannel with woodland toadstools & blue rick-rack on the other.  she would carry a little basket with a little woodland creature, say a bunny or an owl, in it.  and wear boots & legwarmers, maybe a little brooch to snug the cape around her neck.  you can see how smitten i was with the red riding hood idea.  at the end of the cartoon i said, "now heron, what do you want to be for halloween?"  and of course she yelled, "little red riding hood!"  so, here you have it:

little red riding hood + the big bad wolf (or, "a sheep in wolf's clothing")

: at our neighbor robin's before trick-or-treating :

: the little bad wolf :

: at our neighbor jocelyn's house :

(josh had to do very little dressing up to be red's woodsman father)

heron was not into letting me take her picture, but for posterity & practice i may try a little portrait session in the next day or so.  if so, i'll post them here.  do you think she would've let me take pictures if i would've let her be a bear?  i think next year for halloween i'll be a less selfish mama.