The Turrill fam spent the weekend in Granby last week! I heart my snowbunnies!!! :)


...and I heart this smiley, energetic, funny girl!

Here is the play kitchen that Mimi spent all her time in:

two men and a baby: (and bathtub)

jumpin' with Oma

mimi and uncle drew drawing together...the most precious thing ever.

While we were all together we also celebrated Drew's 33rd bday

When I Grow Up I Want To Be Just Like My Aunt Kate

Last week Mimi and I visited Aunt Kate on Pearl Street at the jewelry studio she works at for Carla Morrison. Can you tell that Mimi adores her Aunt Kate?!

P.S. Look at this BIG girl!!!! She has turned into a toddler before our very eyes!!!!

Love Was In the Air...

On Saturday night my dad and Paytie came over to watch Mimi while Ben and I went with my mom and a friend to a D.U. hockey game. She had lots of fun with her Auntie Paytie (as you can see!)

This is Mimi's notorious "stink face"...

Then, Paytes got to spend the night with us!!!! It was SO fun and special! (also a first!). We had a fun Valentine's breakfast before we took her home.

After we took Paytie home, my mom came over to watch Mimi while Ben and I went to volunteer at the WOW Children's Museum in Lafayette. It was part of the "Give a Day Get a Day" promotion with Disney. If you volunteer a day at their pre-chosen sights, you get a free day's admission to a Disney park. Did you know that we're planning a vacation there?!? I may have forgotten to mention it.. ;)

Anyways, it was hard to be away from Mimi again, but she had so much fun with Nana showing her all of her new fun "tricks." (Apparently Mimi knows how to play Wii Tennis...? You'll have to ask my mom for the whole story...pretty funny!)

Side note: I ran the face painting table at the museum and painted faces for 4 hours straight. Ben on the other hand had to walk around the museum for 4 hours and disenfect everything in a red apron. You tell me who had more fun? :) He told me repeatedly that he felt like Uncle Fester...a creepy, silent guy, sulking around with slumped shoulders cleaning things.

Probably the worst part was that we had my mom lined up to babysit so we could go have a fabulous, long, leisurely brunch at the Brasserie in Boulder because it was also our SIX year anniversary. To try to salvage the day, we picked up some food from Efrain's and rushed home to our much-missed and favorite "fun girl." I think that we ended the day well...at least it was memorable!


Here are Mimi and Nana...

Mimi also got a Valentine from Gentry!!! Along with an OVERFLOWING assortment of Tinkerbell gear!!!! She was wearing her little jewelry all over and pasting her Tink stickers on the floor...Tink forever!!!

Here's his sweet card:


Don't you just LOVE it?!?!
There were Elmo stickers on the inside of the card too, but this is what Mimi decided to do with them instead...


Thanks Gent and Ash! I'm saving it...you know, just in case things work out between those two ;)

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More LOVE:

On Friday Mimi and I hung out with Finn while his mom, Kristina was recovering from dental stuff... We went to Red Robin, played at the dinosaurs at the mall and played follow the leader and read books at Old Navy.

Mimi was SOOO excited to be in the backseat with Finn. This was the two cuties:

(do you love Mimi's "smile" face? It looks like she's doing an impression of a hot dog)



more cuteness:

then they sat next to each other and colored the whole time!!!

It was really sweet. It was a great Valentine's Day weekend.


xoxo



On a different note, look at what we're looking at these days!!!!


A POTTY!

To be continued...

Next Time I'm Buying Organic...

I think that the part that gets me, is that she bent down to eat it like the cats, off the floor!!! I'm embarrassed to say, that for the sake of getting video and pictures (because I couldn't believe that I was witnessing this alone, I had to share), I think she maybe bent down for a mouthful at least 3 times...(I did make her spit it out, then asked her if she wanted some milk to wash down her cat food)

Seriously, all I could think of was, "Man, I buy the CHEAPEST cat food...what they heck is in that stuff? It's definitely not Organic!!!!" I should've definitely paid more attention to those cat food commercials that show prime rib and gravy and make cat food look like delicious people food. I should've bought that for our cats, not what I really do buy. I will think twice next time.

Here are some pictures.

Not So "Deceptively Delicious"

So a sweet friend gave me the cookbook "Deceptively Delicious" for a mother's day when I was pregnant. If you haven't heard about it, it's by Jessica Seinfeld and it's all about "sneaking" vegetable and fruit purees into foods that your kids eat. I love the idea and I have used a couple of recipes when it was just Ben and I. At this stage in Mimi's life when she doesn't have a love affair with her vegetables (and I feel like if I feed her macaroni and cheese again, I may scream!), I thought it was time to get a little sneaky in the kitchen....

But this little girl is hard to fool.

As mentioned before, I tried baking some dried cherries into some cookies. She took some bites, then handed me the wet, half-chewed cherry piece and continued eating through the chocolate chips. Lovely.

On Saturday night I pureed some cauliflower and mixed it in with her Annie's Mac and Cheese. I thought that I was BRILLIANT! They are the same colors and I even put some freshly shredded "fancy cheese" that we had leftover on top! I thought that she wouldn't even be able to tell...

I was wrong.


She took one bite and proceeded to adamantly declare..All done! All done! and gave me this face:

The deception failed miserably. Maybe vegetables were only useful in her world as telephones...

It just seemed too funny not to blog about..how I failed miserably at being a "Deceptively Delicious" Chef.
But....later on that day while I was cutting veggies for our Super Bowl party I gave Mimi a little piece of broccoli. Most of the time, she just carries random food around the house and I find it in the couch cushions later on. On this day she carried it around for awhile, took it into the living room and then started EATING it!!!

After that, she asked for TWO!

HURRAY!!!! Broccoli is the king of kid-rejected vegetables!!! I felt like she was really going for the gold on that one. Our day ended knowing that even if she had only had tortilla chips for the rest of the day, she was in good shape because of her broccoli encounter.

THE END



You can come to your own conclusion about this whole situation. Maybe you don't really have to be deceptive after all...

However, I think that the real moral of the story is that kids are unpredictable (and I know that tomorrow, Mimi's broccoli love will be replaced with her old standbys, macaroni and cheese and hot dogs and french fries). We moms probably just need to relax. I knew a kid who survived on dinner rolls from the Black Eyed Pea restaurant from the ages of 5-7 and he turned out fine (besides being only 4 feet tall and having a weird eye twitch... )


just kidding ;)


Side note: This is in no way a reflection of the book...! Probably the problem lies in the 'chef.' Next time I plan on trying to be deceptive
with a meal that she doesn't know so well..