April catch-up

Happy belated Easter!  I had actually planned to do a post before Easter, knowing full well that a holiday trip to Fredericton would warrant a post all it's own, but alas I never got around to it.  So now I offer a condensed view of all of April. Here goes!

1: Juniper the handywoman!

Clark picked up this soft tool set when he was at Ikea earlier in the month, and Juniper has since taken her fix-it duties very seriously.  On a side note, I believe that Juniper's hair has become an entity unto itself.  It will get cut one of these days, I swear.

2. MEC ad...

Is it just me, or could Juniper and Patrick start a side career as Mountain Equipment Co-op models?  Rain gear this adorable means that at least there is a perk to the seemingly endless rainy days we've been having around here.

3. Ride-em cowgirl!

Besides being just a cute snapshot of Juniper riding her beautiful rocking horse, I love this picture because it showcases her new-found interest in her stuffed animal buddies.  It seems as though a month ago, a few choice animals suddenly celebrated an elevated status in her world (she had relatively no interest in stuffed animals before then).  One of them is this teddy she got for Christmas - she will diligently find a pillow and blanket, and put him down for multiple naps during the day; he rides with her on her horse; and, having just acquired a hand-me-down doll stroller this past weekend, Juniper now spends a good chunk of her day strolling him around the house.  Yesterday, in fact, (in the two seconds that I turned around to put something in the oven) I caught Juniper with Teddy and stroller down by the (already wide-open) front door .  Apparently, they were about to go find "dada". 

Though I don't have a picture of them, the other two animals that have become very important to her are a bunny and a sheep that she has decided to sleep with.  A couple of weeks ago, she also decided that if they were all going to sleep together, she should also be offering them breast milk.  Juniper now gets nursed twice a day - once when she wakes up, and once before she goes to bed.  So, recently, we'll lie down to breast feed, and she'll loudly proclaim "BAAAAA!", meaning - "wait! Go get the sheep!", and then "bunny!" (ie "don't forget bunny"), and they both get first dibs at my breast before she does.  Little did I know I'd be feeding three hungry mouths at once!

4. Drawing 101

Here is a little video of Juniper drawing.  I don't know - it might not be as interesting to everyone as it is to me, but I find the whole process very cute.  One quirky thing she's been doing (as you'll see) is referring to herself as "you".  It makes sense  - we address her as "you", but I have been finding it VERY difficult to explain using "me" instead of "you" to refer to herself - English sometimes makes no logical sense!  Also, you see at the end of this video the way all videos seem to end these days - with Juniper jumping up and asking to "see" the shot.  It means many videos and pictures are over before they even begin.  I'm sure Juniper won't be able to fathom that her parents grew up with cameras that a) didn't take videos, and b) didn't show you an immediate image after taking a picture. 

5. Ring Around the Rosie...

Toni introduced this to the kids at a playdate a couple of weeks ago, and Juniper has been obsessed with it ever since.

EASTER!

Easter this year was very... mixed.  I shouldn't say that - Juniper had a ball, and so did everyone who got to spend time with her, which was really the whole point of going.  I, however, got incredibly sick with some form of bronchitis or pneumonia, and was just miserable the whole time. Also, because I was so sick, I didn't get to see my cousin Claire and her new(ish) little boy, our friend Christie and her new(ish) little girl, or my grandmother - I didn't dare expose the very young or old to my plague.  Boo! But on the upside, I had loads of people to help take care of Juniper while I sat in a corner and hacked up a lung, and there were many adventures to be had by the healthy folk.  Here are some highlights:

1.  Market madness!

 No visit to Fredericton is complete without a Saturday trip to the market. As you can see, my sister Andrea (far left) made the trip home for Easter, which is the first time she'd been able to come home from BC in over a year.  We also got to hang there with my brother Paul's son David (right next to Andrea), and my sister Kelli's family (Ali, Ethan and Sawyer, and Jamie at the back).

2. Pretty dresses

The weekend before we got there was the bi-annual M.O.M (mothers of multiples) sale in Fredericton, and my mom managed to score a bunch of beautiful dresses.  These are just a couple of them, but I was more than happy to have such a good excuse to dress Juniper up.

3.  Hanging with the cousins

Boy oh boy, does Juniper love hanging out with her older cousins.  This is especially true of Ali, who Juniper clearly idolizes.  Ali was all she could talk about before we even left for Fredericton, and then she couldn't wait for some quality one-on-one time.

4. Egg decorating

Juniper was just as big as everyone else this Easter, participating in an afternoon of egg decorating fun.  We tried some natural home-made dyes this year (using turmeric, blueberries and beets for the three primary colours).  It didn't work as well as the professional Ukrainian dyes we used in years past, but I felt much better about Juniper being involved this way.  Maybe I just have to perfect the technique to get the vibrant colours I was hoping for - I'll try again next year!

5. Backyard fun

Juniper LOVED hanging out in the backyard this trip, no matter what the weather offered.  This was especially true if there was someone (or preferably multiple people) that would bring out the wheelbarrow.  Here's a little video of some of the seemingly never-ending wheelbarrow shenanigans:

6. Easter egg hunt!

And finally, an Easter post couldn't be complete without some footage of Easter morning.  The bunny had hidden mini eggs around the living room, in conveniently low and pretty obvious "hiding" places.  I wish I had had the camera at the ready for when Juniper first climbed the stairs, because she had a hilarious (and somewhat unsurprising) reaction to the scene: Stuff as many mini eggs as humanly possible into her mouth as fast as she could, and then run away before anyone could tell her to stop.  She spent a full five minutes or so trying to process the great gob of chocolate in her mouth (drooling chocolate and unable to speak), before we were able to convince her that the real object of the exercise was to find the eggs and put them in her bag.  This is a video of when she first made that transition - unfortunately, my battery died just after that, so I didn't capture the pure joy of the egg hunt that ensued.  She loved it so much that we spent the rest of the trip doing multiple egg hunts - she would grab a handful of eggs, give them to one of us, and then hide her eyes while we placed them around the room.  She'd them squeal with delight as she found them, put them in her bag, and then demanded that we do it all over again.  I'm thankful that this all happened at my parent's house, because if it was here, she might have expected daily Easter egg hunts for the whole year!