Every morning, our old house with our old windows has condensation on the inside. Ezzy and others look forward to it each day and she licks it off in a new pattern.

After the storm on Wednesday, the snow pile is now above the bottom of the window. It’s very sad we have a snowthrower that needs a tune up in the garage.

This is supposed to capture just how they look, good, bad or whatever.

This is how I feel I spent a lot of my day, looking at the back of Josie’s head while she’s running off to do something and oh yeah Celia’s there too.

In an effort to get myself to pick up the camera some more and play with it with the girls I joined a project called Joy of Love. It’s basically a bit of photography class combined with a bit of inspiration for what to guide your photos. You’re supposed to focus on something you love, and you can shift each day, but I’m mostly going to focus on Josie. Things have been challenging for all of us with this 2.75 year old and so I want to highlight some positives and make sure to take time for some attention on her, and maybe even make her comfortable enough not to look away from the camera.

Day 1: What they do

So perhaps the rules are one photo picked per day, but this isn’t school, who needs rules.

This is Josie playing with some toys on the couch. It’s a little overexposed unfortunately but I think it just shows her gorgeous hair and pink lips.

Josie really likes to play with lots of little things lately, putting them in bags, lining them up, stacking them, carrying them around and distributing them. Here she lines up the numbers from her clock plus some lacing animals and a coin from her cash register for Mio. The light these days is super super harsh inside because of all the snow so I had to play with the exposure a bunch of times just to get the shapes to remotely show up. This scene ended with Mio swatting at Josie when she tried to move a piece that was near him, her crying briefly and him running away. Oh well.

Many things sprouting up around our house, kids notably, but also a few little beans. Jordi and Josie put some black beans in a jar with water and newspaper and put it in the sun. Eventually a few of the beans sprouted and one grew into this little thing. Josie enjoyed looking at it and seeing how it grew. Then it grew mold and it went in the trash. We’re going to try to grow some real plants this spring once I manage to order some seeds. This summer with any luck we’ll have something we grew ourselves, maybe, I just won’t kill these ones if I send them to my mom’s house for her to take care of them once they’ve grown into anything.

Celia has been working on a few skills as of late. She’s still a big talker and has lots to say, I think we’ll have a loud house from now on, but she’s also working on grabbing and shaking things. She can often get what she wants now and has managed to stick her hand into our dinner a few times now too. Her favorite is to grab things and shove them into her mouth. She’s also clearly working on her sitting up muscles and standing. Josie was starting to sit independently at 4 months so I imagine Celia will be a fast learner  too. Here she demonstrates her grabbing of the spoon at the dinner table.

Of course there is nothing better than the toy that your sister has, even if it’s a baby gym.

Today while we were doing a little early celebration of Jordi’s birthday we asked Josie how old is Daddy? Her response?  “You’re almost grown-up.”

Here’s just one shot of us playing around with the camera outside, it was cold! It’s also her wearing one of the size 4 shirts she’s got, sheesh she’s growing fast!

Here’s a snow day photo of the four kids all together!

We’ve had a lot of snow. Snow at Christmas, snow again last week, snow again yesterday. Big big storms. So now we’ve got a big big pile of snow in front of our house. I’ve had to knock the pile over closer to the house twice so far just so we can continue to pile more snow on top of the pile near the drive way and sidewalk. As a small child who doesn’t have to shovel though, I can see how Josie thinks it’s pretty neat. It is also very useful for getting some of her energy out with climbing up and down and around. These pictures are from last week’s storm. Now the snow pile is up so high and so wide that I can toss Josie off of our front porch onto the top of the pile, and she can look directly into our front windows of the house while standing on it.

Ouch my aching back. Yesterday’s storm we were down a shoveler because our neighbor was out of town so we hired some teenagers to work on it, but I still put in a good two hours in addition to three of them working for an hour and a half plus Jordi doing some too. We also joined forces with our neighbors and had Ethan and Zach at our house so all the kids could be together and three adults could shovel at once.

yowza’s, I knew Celia had grown but it looks like she’s up at 13.2 lbs according to our home scale at three months, that’s a lb and a half this month. Josie was 12 lbs at this time, someone’s growing a bit faster! No wonder those clothes look like they keep shrinking in the dryer. Good thing I’ve been working out.