A Star Is Born

Kate is a people-person.  She has never met a stranger and you would never mistake her for being shy.  She might not hold her arms out to everybody, but she has never cried because a "stranger" is holding her.... except for that phase when she didn't like men with beards.  So, when we found out that even the "littlest" children in our church were taking part in the children's Easter music, we were pretty interested to see how Kate would reacted.

They haven't sung on stage on Sunday morning yet, but this past Sunday all of the kids had a rehearsal to practice being on the stage.  It took place right after church on Sunday morning for just a few minutes, so there were still lots of adults hanging around.  It was a good test to see which kids are shy and which aren't.  For reference, I was always one of the shy kids. Kevin says he was too.

The smallest children are only on the stage for one song: He's Got The Whole World In His Hands.  Kate knows all the motions and practices them in the car. She loves music.  She's 19 months though, so I didn't expect her to do the motions or sing when they actually performed, and of course she didn't.  She wanted to watch all of the big kids.

She was NOT shy though and when they were finished, her teacher (Brandee) asked if she was ready to get down.  Kate's reply?  

"No. No, no."

Oh, no. She did not want to get off of the stage. She wanted to stay up there with the big kids and be in the spotlight.  Brandee's response to that was "A star is born!".  Ha!  We have got our work cut out for us.  

Stay tuned to see how she does in the REAL performance in a few more weeks.   

Horses... Neigh!

Sunday afternoon, the weather was SO nice that we decided to go for a walk.  We have a nice neighborhood that is really close to us, so we usually walk up and down a few of those streets and then head home.  As we started walking, we decided to go a little farther than normal and take Kate to see the horses. 

We drive past this horse farm every single day.  And every time Kate sees the fence she yells "hooo-ses. NEIGH!"  Even if they are not out where she can see them, she knows they are there.  So we knew she would enjoy actually stopping to see them. 

When we got there, we saw that the horses were in another fenced in area that was a little farther away and they had already been covered up for the night.  Kate didn't mind too much.  She kept saying "hooo-ses, NEIGH!" and just watched them for forever.  

I just love this picture...

And this one too...

I highly doubt that this will be the last time we walk to see the horses.  Although, I'm not so sure I will be pushing 30lb Kate uphill in her stroller to see the horses when it is 95 degrees in the middle of summer.  She better enjoy the horses while she can!

The Many Faces of Kate

Kate is a pretty dramatic little girl, and she has lots of "faces" that she likes to share. It's gotten pretty funny.  Most of these we haven't taught her, with the exception of the "sad face".  She's just started imitating what she sees and hears.  So many faces for such a little girl.

There's her sad face...  

Her surprised face...

Her faces when she is being silly...

The face she makes when she is fake-laughing... 

Oh, and I can't get enough of this sweet face...

Speaking of imitating, tonight she started calling Kevin by his first name instead of Daddy.  It comes out "Kevy" but still.  So perceptive! Guess she heard everybody else calling him that and thought "why not?". We didn't know whether to laugh at her or scold her.  We laughed and then told her "No, that's DADDY." Then she called him Daddy Kevy. We are in trouble.

Friday Favorites

I haven't done a post in a while where I shared some of my favorite things, so I figured it was about time.  I thought I'd do it a little different this time and share a few of my favorite websites for finding deals.

1. Ebates: I had never even heard of this website until about a year ago and I LOVE it.  Basically, you just shop at stores that you were already going to shop from (Gap, Old Navy, Best Buy, Walmart, etc) and you get back a percentage of your order.  Here's an example.

If you want to order $50 worth of clothing from Gap, you would go to Ebates.com, login to your account, click on "Gap" and then be redirected to their website.  You would shop and checkout like normal, and then Ebates would give you back 2% of your total order.  That doesn't sound like much, but if you do much online shopping AT ALL, it adds up!

Click here to find out more about how to sign up for Ebates.

2. Blog2Print: This is another one I had not heard of until about a year ago, and again, I LOVE it.  This blog has become Kate's "baby book" but I didn't actually have a book.  Blog2Print will import your blog into their book format, and then print it for you.  You can change the dates to include only the dates you want.  So far, I printed June 2011 - December 2011 into my first book. I plan on printing my blog yearly and I love that I'll have a hard copy of this blog to look back at.

3. Zulily & Totsy:  These two websites sell brand name children's items (clothing, accessories, strollers, etc) at HUGE discounts. The only downside is that the sales often run for weeks at a time and the sites wait until the sale ends to ship ANY of the items.  So I wouldn't order anything on here that I wanted right away.  I did find Kate's Easter dress on Zulily... a smocked dress that's normally $65+ that I got for $25. Score! :)

Click here to find out more about Zulily.

Click here to find out more about Totsy.

4. Woot:  This website has deals for 1 day only, so you have to check regularly, but they also sell things at huge discounts.  I got Kevin some saw horses on this website for $20 and I also bought my Dyson from here.  They have one "sale" item for each category (WootKids, WootHome, WootTech, WootSport, etc.)

5. Mixbook:  I haven't yet ordered from Mixbook but I have plans to at some point.  You can print photo books, cards, calendars, etc, which doesn't make them a whole lot different than other web-publishing sites.  However, one thing that I think makes them unique is that they let you import your instagram pictures and turn them into a photobook.  I think is a GREAT idea.  What else do you do with all of those instagram pictures? And to me, those are the ones that are more real-life pictures than ones you take with a real camera.  I don't want to lose them!  So at some point I would like to print an Instagram book. And, they're affordable!

So what are YOUR favorite websites? Is there anything I'm missing out on?

Squeaky Clean

Kate got a shower for the very first time last night.  It wasn't planned.  I had her in the bath tub and she was playing with a cup.  She kept filling the cup up with water and then pouring it down her chest.  After doing that a few times, she filled the cup up with water, held it up really high, opened her mouth and poured the cup full of water straight down her mouth. Needless to say, she choked and then threw up all in the water. Yuck. 

I quickly got her out of the tub, and she was clean except for the fact that I hadn't washed the shampoo out of her hair yet.  So we headed to the other bathroom (where all we have is a shower) and I stuck her in.  

She used to "play" in our shower until a few weeks ago when she figured out how to turn the water while fully clothed and got soaked.  That ended that pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure she enjoyed her first real shower though.

She did not want to get out.  Oh, and she wanted her privacy.  She kept closing the door on us and was perfectly content to be in the shower all by herself.  Too funny. 

However, she is still years off from taking showers.  Too messy.  It was a good solution to our bath problems though. :)

Baby Fashionista

Kate has a shoe fetish.  It's bad, but it is so funny.  She loves to walk around the house in my shoes and is surprisingly good at walking in heels. She doesn't discriminate though.  Her Daddy's shoes will work just fine and she's often walking around in his tennis shoes.

Lately she has gotten very particular about which shoes she wears.  The past 2 Sundays, I have tried to put on some dressier brown shoes for church, but Kate would have nothing of it. She would pitch a fit (I know, such a southern phrase!) to wear her sparkly silver Toms.  And I mean an all-out, crying, flailing, FIT.  So of course she wore her sparkly Toms.

I made the mistake of walking through the shoe section of Target to get to the check out lines yesterday.  All I heard was "Shoes. shoes. shoes. on. on. on."  She was not happy when I didn't stop. :)

Her favorite shoes though, by far, are my Dansko shoes.  She loves to wear them and walk all over the house.  Definitely her favorite.

This weekend, she got a special treat from her Aunt Angela.  Her OWN pair of Dansko shoes.  Think she's spoiled much?  She wore them all over the house, would not take them off, and even took a nap in them.  Notice in the picture below, she even had them on with her pajamas.

Weekending