Life changes

I'm a little bit of a pinterest junkie.  I am finding that I love some projects and will add them to our repertoire and others don't seem near as fun as they sounded.  This is one we'll probably do each year... We filled balloons with water and food coloring and put them outside when it was -30 or so.  We let them freeze several nights then pulled the balloon part off.   Voila- colored balls!  This year, they have really been decor, but we could put out bottles and do bowling, or make colored people, or yard decor.

This is a card we made for the Standing Buffalo community.  Their dancers were at the winter festival and a pic was posted in the paper.  It nearly made me cry to watch them dance, sing and pray after all they've been through (they are down the road and have had a couple of homicides and numerous suicides this year).  Again, saw this on pinterest-- Emora and I cut strips from the pics and glued them onto a silhouette.  I'll definitely need to try this again, I loved how it came out.

This project was lots of fun.  I complicated and messed it up a bit by having her do the two hands, and it was a much harder project than I thought, for Emora to do.  She can't quite follow the lines, so all she ended up doing was the final color of yellow over it all.

She does love to color though!

and be the source of laughter!

It is slowly dawning on me what a huge transition we are moving through each day as Emora grows older.  For nearly a decade, we've had baby on our minds, in our home, baby stuff in the closet and toddler activities.  As Emora moves through preschool age, she is bringing me books and telling me they are too babyish for her.  Wow!  We've always had a next kid to use it.  Now it's the big decision of what to pass on and what to treasure away.  I'm a big believer in letting the goods flow through.  If there is someone who can use it, use it they should!  At the same time, there are some puzzles that we have of Brian's when he was a kid, that my kids also got to use and there was something really amazing in watching them and being able to tell them- your dad did that puzzle when he was your age.  So I'm squirrelling away some much used books and games, puzzles, that we will enjoy when I'm WAY older than now, in the next generation.

This week, I also found myself taking pictures to remember them by.  Emora will still enjoy this puzzle for a while, but his days are numbered.  I've been doing this puzzle with a little one since Ivan was small.

Emora decided she is getting big for her stroller and I figured, yeah, this summer, you may be too old to squeeze in there.  Wow, this thing has gone a lot of miles!  But we know someone with a baby on the way and that baby will want to see the world too and we've got the wheels to get him/her there.  We've had this about 9 years!  I have used it more than any baby item ever.  Who knew when we got it that it would be such a huge part of our lives!  It's not new at all, but has some kick left to it, so onward it goes.  Emora and I gave it a bath and shower to make it nice and less garage smelly ;)  Again it hit me that all the big baby things are disappearing.  Emora is still in a car seat, but is about 3 lbs away from a booster and I guess we'll be moving the sippy cups out too, although they sure do handle spills better than cups!  It's not just her who is growing up- our whole family is growing up along with her- out of the youngest stages and into the next era- of school and soccer, karate, dance, school activities, tests, homework, "secret crushes" and friend issues.  It's such an amazing journey and not one you can pre-imagine before it happens.  I'm so thankful to get to travel it with this Baggett team, no matter how bonkers they can make me- they belong with me and I with them.