“Chard, smile for the camera! Smile, chard!” encourages our three year old as I try to stage a shot exhibiting the ridiculous height of the chard in our garden, while showing off her new haircut (more on that, below).

Our daughter’s hair and the chard stems in the garden were becoming too long and unmanageable.

Her hair brushing in the morning would take ten minutes as I untangled each and every curl. The chard was shading our tomatoes, a big no-no since I really want lots of tomatoes this summer.

Time to break out the scissors.

Much better.

Thank you to Sesame Street for helping occupy my daughter while I tried to evenly trim her hair and cut bangs, and for keeping her distracted each morning while we comb through her hair. (Toddler hair styling has become SO much easier since we discovered the trick of briefly plugging her into a tv show while we battle the tangles.) I am thankful for the short Sesame Street clips available on their website. My personal favorite? Madeline Kahn and Grover singing a duet, shown above and featured here.

Art is important in our family. We come from artistic families and greatly value making and supporting the arts. In that vein, our family loves picture books designed to develop and inspire an appreciation for the arts in young children.

We greatly enjoy these colorful board books for the babies and toddlers alike:

We adore this more advanced series focusing on exploring the alphabet and numbers through works of art published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

We’ve recently discovered another fantastic art appreciation series written for children to add to our family library:

Published once again by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these Can You Find It? books focus on identifying details within works of art. Think of Where’s Waldo but with an educational, historical twist.

Our daughter adores these books and has spent hours pouring over them.

These particular books were written in 2005 and are no longer widely available in stores (we bought our copies at a local used bookstore). Nevertheless, a quick search online turned up many affordable copies in used form, as well as some other books in this series, plus the Metropolitan Museum of Art sells copies online from their store.

What better way to promote art appreciation than by supporting the museum itself?! If you intend to buy this item, please hop on over there and order your copy today.

We picked up this table and three small sized chairs at IKEA a while back. Why spend $25 per chair when you can buy a side table and stools on sale for the same price?! Put together, it’s the perfect set for a three-year old.

Our daughter plays there every day.

This week we clipped some flowers from our garden and placed them in a small bell jar on our play table, transforming the space from hum-drum every day to super special. YES! We finally have enough flowers to clip for bouquets! This is a first from our small, front-yard garden. After two years of hard work, the plants are finally filling out and flourishing. We’re thrilled.

So here we are in our living room, overlooking our garden. A special, child-sized place we eat meals, practice writing letters, and serve play food to our dolls.

Now we can enjoy the result of all our hard work in the yard with this bouquet of beautiful fresh flowers while we read, write, play all week long…

May we enjoy many more hours of fun here and savor fresh cut flowers ALL SUMMER LONG.

In preparing a kids craft project for Father’s Day I enjoyed going through the multitude of father-daughter photos on our hard drives. Here are some of our family favorites to treasure and make into art!

More on that soon.

What a loving, fun father! Those are some great times.

We so enjoyed our girls road trip through Northern California up to Oregon to visit my aunt.

We’re now in recovery mode, so we’re taking the rest of the week off from the blog. We’ll see you next week when we’re feeling more rested!

I love a good road trip.

Load up the car, head out for a long weekend, experience something new: count me in!

I’m sure you’ll find it absolutely shocking that I haven’t been on one in, oh, about four years, imagine that. What with the whole pregnancy and parenting thing, we just haven’t gotten around to it.

This weekend we’re throwing caution to the wind, shaking it up and taking a road trip. A mother-daughter road trip through Northern California up to Southern Oregon to visit my aunt.

We’re leaving Daddy at home for some very needed R&R with a clean house and a pantry stocked full of gluten-laden treats. He’s under strict orders to live it up and, um, clean up after himself (got that, honey!) since my gluten-intolerant ass is leaving the premises.

Now the question remains, did we forget anything? Because I don’t think we packed enough stuff.

We haven’t even gotten the luggage, cooler and purse in the car yet. Oh, and the kid! Can’t forget her!

Enjoy your weekend and we’ll see you back here on Tuesday.

Over and out! The girls are heading out…

Remember this darling nest in the wind chime on our front porch?

A birds nest by our front door in the sugar bowl of our wind chime sounds so idyllic. Beautiful, bitty eggs and the opportunity for an incredible learning experience for our daughter. Behold, a rarely seen stage in the bird life cycle!

Well, the eggs have hatched and it’s not a pretty sight.

We’ve discovered that the, well, obvious downside to a birds nest is the tremendous amount of poop that accomulates outside the nest… i.e. on my windchime!

THANKS VERY MUCH BIRDS! I’m gonna send you a cleaning bill when you vacate the premises.

Plus, those cute baby birds? They’re loud. That’s not really a downside though. We all get really excited when we hear them chirping! Our daughter announces, they’re feeding!

Oh boy are they feeding and getting big fast. At four days old, they are now so large that they are starting to no longer fit inside the nest (that mama bird sure didn’t plan ahead in her nest site selection!). I love that they’re too big for the nest though because now they are popping up out of it, so we are starting to be able to see them. I love that cute feather fluff.

They are pretty darn cute.

If only their poop didn’t ruin my photo.