Fun in the Spring Sun

(I've been awake since 5:45am.  I couldn't get back to sleep because I'm too nervous/excited about my ultrasound this afternoon.  I'll be glad when it's over!  Because of the early wake up, I decided to get a blog post done before Noah wakes up.)

Besides that one incredibly hot day a couple of weeks ago, the weather here has not been very summer-like.  The temperatures most days are in the teens (I always have to look up conversions since the majority of my readers are American... that's in the 50's or low 60's, fyi).  However, when it is sunny, our backyard is a lot warmer than any temperature reading you'd find online.  For one thing, the little town where I live is almost always 5 degrees warmer than the city where our parents live 20 minutes away.  They have the lake, which cools them down.  And then our backyard is usually at least a few degrees warmer than our front yard, simply because it's so sheltered.  This is exactly why I wanted a pool, by the way.  In summertime our backyard is absolutely unbearable.  In fact, our whole town is pretty much unbearable.  But my backyard is worse.

I digress.  The point is that despite the still coolish temps we've been getting, our sheltered backyard has allowed us to pretend it's already summer!  And boy, have we been busy pretending!

The water was 57 degrees this day, but that didn't stop Noah!

This picture slays me:

I love the way he blows bubbles:

"Look at my bubbles!!":

"I wanna feel it...":

"It's cold!":

On another day I decided to bust out a kiddie pool, as I'm not too fond of going in frigid water (although it is up to 64 degrees now!):

Noah still thought it was pretty cold:

Those last two are iPod pictures, hence the poorer quality.

Anyway, days like we've been having are one of my very favourite parts of being a stay at home mom.  Having no "schedule" I have to follow, going outside when Noah wants to go outside, running around in the grass in bare feet because we had no shoes by the back door, getting about 10 sunburns already by May 11 (man that sun has been strong!)... I am loving life lately!  I am looking forward to a long summer growing our baby and hanging out with the most awesome toddler ever created.  Cherishing my last days as a Mom of One.

Favourite Things at 20 Months - Colouring

Noah and I colour almost everyday.  He asks for it by saying "Colour?" or "Crayons!?"

His favourite colour continues to be orange.  But he loves to name all the colours as we colour with them.

His favourite thing to draw (and to have us draw) is the sun.  If he isn't satisfied with his own version, he'll hand us the yellow and say "Sun!  Yellow."

Concentrating...

“This is broken.  Don’t think I don’t notice.”

Yes, we have several broken crayons.  And Noah informs us that they are broken pretty much every time we colour.

Did you know that Crayola makes Dry Erase Crayons?  They're washable, and you can even buy them along with a little hand held double-sided dry erase board.  One side is white, one side is black.  I ran into them at Toys R Us about a month ago, and of course had to get them (along with the dry erase board).  One of Noah's Christmas presents is a double sided easel that has a white board, but I'm not too keen on him using markers at this point, so I was pretty excited about the Dry Erase Crayons!!

Another thing we use for colouring around here is AquaDoodle!

You just fill the little pens with water, and when you draw on the mat, colour shows up.  When it dries, the colour disappears.

The mat costs close to $30 regular price (we got it $10 off), and there's an accessories pack you might want to get so you have more than one pen - Noah loves the "paint brush."  But it is totally worth the cost, since it never "runs out."  And it's totally mess free!  We have the travel version as well, which is approaching $15 in cost.

If you have any other cool and fun colouring options, let me know!!  We love colouring in this house.

Favourite Things at 20 Months - Stacking Blocks

Noah is just about to turn 20 months old.

Gasp.  Where is time going?  In 4 short months I will have a 2 year old.

I thought I would post about some of his favourite activities and toys at this age.  I was going to put them all in one post, but that would take way too long.  So I'll be splitting them up.

Today's post is about:

Scholastic's Clifford the Big Red Dog Counting and Alphabet Stacking and Nesting Blocks

These are so simple, and frankly, when we received them as a gift when Noah was about 8 months old, I inwardly groaned.  They are made of sturdy cardboard, not plastic, and Noah was still putting everything in his mouth.  I actually had these blocks put away for a long time, because Noah was a very orally fixated baby.  He wasn't like his friends, who would inspect a toy for awhile before finally putting it in their mouths.  Noah immediately put everything in his mouth.  It was the first thing he did with any toy.  So he would have destroyed these cardboard blocks with his saliva.

I don't know when exactly, but sometime after he turned 1 (maybe around 13 or 14 months), Noah stopped putting things in his mouth.  So the blocks came out to stay.  And Noah loves them.  They are definitely one of his favourite toys, and he plays with them every single day.  

He loves to stack all the blocks up into a tower (like in the picture) and then knock the tower over using various parts of his body, my body, or one of his stuffed animal's bodies.  He always names the body part or action while he does it.  "Head!"  "Kick!"  "Feet!"  "Hit!" 

He'll stack them up, come up behind me, and push me forward so that my head knocks them over.  He thinks this is hilarious.  The other day he took Scout, his stuffed puppy we made at Build-A-Bear, and was knocking over the blocks with Scout's feet ("Foot!  Kick!"), Scout's head, and Scout's paws ("Hand!").  The funniest part was when he took Scout's floppy ear, said "Ear!" and then pushed the blocks over using Scout's ear, with a huge smile on his face.

I've been watching Dancing With the Stars while typing this, and I'm pretty excited that Rob Kardashian won the relay Cha-Cha, so I completely lost my writing train of thought.  It'd take too much effort to end this post "gracefully."  So...

The End.