life lately

So glad January is over! Both Jan and Feb are my least favorite months of the year, with the exception of the very few days of snow I cross my fingers for. Halfway through winter and onto spring! (I should give credit where its due however, and mention that it was warm enough to go to the park this morning for a good long while before it began to rain incessantly. Even a little break from cabin fever is so appreciated at this point.) Nothing too exciting to report about over the past month, just a smattering of new crafts and activities to keep our sanity.

Practicing with his new toddler scissors...


These scissors are brilliant! I don't know if I'm late to the game or not, but they're spring-loaded or something so Jake only has to hold the outside and squeeze them together. It took less than a minute to help him figure them out, and then I cleaned out the entire linen closet while he confetti'd his room, so big win for the scissors.

Lots of baking happening. I'm not very creative when it comes to making up games to play--I leave that to the fun parent-- but I'm good at including Jake in cooking and baking. So we made cinnamon rolls one afternoon, and then I had a cinnamon roll for breakfast (ok, and for a snack..) for like a week straight.

Helping fix his broken bed rail. As soon as he saw Deric bring in his tools, Jake told me he probably needed to get his tools too to help Daddy.

Nothing fancy, but I forget about playdoh so often that its pretty exciting when I remember to pull it out.

I finally put all that pinning to good use and actually did one of the activities I'd saved. Jake drew the snowman's face, complete with a "pickle nose" based off the book Snowmen at Night that Grandma read to him over and over at Christmas.

And another idea from Pinterest...a car wash/bubble bath for some toy trains in the sink. I've done this twice now and each time Jake was totally into it for an hour and a half! I pour in his bubble bath, add some trains and every so often, give him another kitchen utensil to use. Then I go about whatever kitchen prep and cooking needs to happen and when we're both done, we sop up all the water on the floor, change Jake's soaking wet clothes, and move on. The car wash idea is going to be in my back pocket hopefully forever. Jake always wants to help me in the kitchen but sometimes he just can't, so this is a lifesaver because he gets to be right next to me but doing his own thing.

Looking back, I guess January wasn't so bad. But we're still ready to hustle spring here a little quicker and get back to enjoying parks and playgrounds on a daily basis!