Tag Archives: grandbebes

The Easter Ball Hunt

2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, Stuff I Actually Think, ,

Tsk.  Bad grandparents.

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We had the kiddos over for the traditional Easter Ham Dinner on Sunday.  And we didn’t have any eggs to hide.

Now, all of them had attended Easter Egg Hunts Saturday and earlier Sunday and had collected more eggs than any of them needed.  We sorta thought their parents would bring the ones they had for hiding and hunting and they sort of thought we would have some…and well, poor bebes.

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We had just bought a spring stash of big, colorful bouncy balls to see them through the warm days of spring and summer ’13.  Resourceful little boogers that they are, Gemma and Averi devised an Easter Ball Hunt for the other kids.  They tucked the giant spheres here and there among bare-branched shrubs and then called to everyone “Come and find them.”  How cute.

easter 

Back to this ham thing…

Isn’t it weird and odd that we Christians chose ham (aka pork, aka pig), to eat for the Resurrection Celebration feast?  I mean, true, we were set free from that dietary tradition long held by law-keepers when the New Covenant kicked in, but it doesn’t mean we should just throw caution to the wind, does it?  It seems sort of bold, like saying, “Hey – we don’t have to follow Jewish tradtion anymore, because Jesus (a Jew, btw), has set us free from that.  So keep your deliciously-spiced-and-herbed slow-roasted lamb!  We choose pig.”

I just don’t know.  This may be a case of our liberties being lawful but not necessarily expedient.

Oooohhhh…Who put their peep-stick back in the bunch?

peeps on sticks

It was Rocky, of course.  He made fun of me for asking that strange question so incredulously.

easter at jeanierhoades.com

He is risen.  Risen indeed!

The Traditional Candy Bar crosses…in miniature

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The Ladies Willing Worker Band at the Kokomo Church of God taught me to use full-size Three Muskateers Bars for making and selling candy crosses at Easter.  I made them for years.  But who really ever even eats Three Muskateers?  Anyway – I got the “snack size” and they make these very tiny versions.  It is hard to tell, but they are on 4 x 6″ photo paper for a serving tray.  That is how tiny they are.

easter jeanierhoades.com

I made 8 of everything just in case Baby Girl Rhoades came in time.  :(

a peek in the easter baskets
Being the amazing Nonna/Nonni I am, yes, there was candy, but mostly fun little toys (clothes for Kai) and salty snacks to counteract all the sweetness of the day. Stuffed animals, peel off nails and colorful hair and Guini got her whoopie cushion (she is so silly) and they all got their crosses, for heaven’s sake!

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Lined up and waiting for seven sweet grandbebes on Easter.  Gavin (9.8); Hunter (8.5); Guinivere (7.75); Gemma May (5.83); Averi-J (5); Amelie Belle (3 on the dot) and Baby Kai (12 weeks).

Easter is THE day and I got to spend it with THE people I love so much!  How did you celebrate this year?  What are your traditions?

Holy shambles!

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Christmas lights are twinkling through bedroom windows as nightlights and I pray over cherub faces and tuck each child in with the requisite two stuffed animals and/or squishy toys.  We whisper our good-nights, the boys in one room, and 4 little girls next door.

grandkids at christmas

I give the regular if-you-wake-up-before-everyone-else-please-just-read-a-book-and-don’t-wake-your-cousins speech, though I know with 100% certainty that it will be ignored at 5:54 am sharp tomorrow.  Still, I go through it and ask one more time: Did you go pottie?  Brush your teeth?  I add more blankets so they won’t get cold.  They kick them off, “I’m hot, Nonna.”

Everyone is tucked.  I can’t help but pray over them again and again for God’s anointing on their little lives and for peace and joy and for good restful sleep and a smile in their hearts and for God to heal little sniffles and keep them safe from evil, who lurks near our babies – this, we know.  I pray and I pray and they let me.  They make their requests known and soon, if I don’t say amen, we will be up all night praying over every detail in their universes…

More hugs, more kisses, more one-last-drinks…whew.  We made it.

I walk into the hallway and through my house.  O.my.goodness.  There are globs of toothpaste in every sink, toothbrushes teetering on counter edges.  There are overcoats and outer-wear and underwear strewn about in bathrooms, entry, living room, family room, and yes, even in the kitchen.  Every couch pillow and cushion has been used otherwise and our floor is covered with blankets and baggies of cheese balls and water bottles with names written on them.  Are there any toys left in the playroom, I wonder?

12 29 12 with their reindeer prints

Is that a marshmallow gun target on our front door?  Why, yes, it is.  Why do you ask?

Evidence of a family feast-night and a disco dance and watching the Turtle Man- Christmas episode and a couple of Gilligan’s Island re-runs (to my great dismay) and my house is in utter, complete and total jumbled, snarly, tangled, topsy-turvy, chaos and clutter, with a side order of full-blown dishevelment.  Yep.  It is a mess.

And me?  I love it.  I am neck-deep in grandbebes and it is grand!


Still basking in the glow of the holy days of the holidays. Merriment continues…

Mulch ado about nothing

2 Mi Familia, 4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, ,

Mulch.  I just cracked myself up!

I think “Mulch ado about nothing” is one of my best blog titles ever, because I have never ever {to my knowledge} heard it said before.  Hahahahahahhahaha!  Yes, I think it is funny.  I am probably not the first, but I am not going to google-it yet…I will enjoy my utter hilariousness for a minute or two more.

Really, I was just planning to share some very unrelated and yet interrelated ideas and thoughts I have as I meander through the suburban backyard garden.

Garden wisdom I would like to share:

1.  Mulch is a protective cover you place onto the soil around your plantings to help retain moisture, stop the weeds from horning in, avoid erosion and to make pretty.  You can buy bags of red, shredded bark for beds and borders and it looks nice, but mulch can be shredded bark or newspapers, nut shells and any number of other materials.  Even in containers, I like to mulch to discourage all that darn evaporation that happens in hot Colorado on sunny days!

2.  I am late getting started.  So what is new?  It is never too late to garden, though.

And none of us are really late.  Yes, the lilacs bloomed 5 or 6 weeks early and we have had unseasonably mild days and nights.  Yes, the stretch of 80-degrees-plus temps have made us want to hit the pools, but people, I implore you!  Remember it is Colorado.  We could have a major blizzard in May.  I hope not, but we could.  Tender veggies and flowers are safer planted after Mother’s Day.  We can sneak a few into pots, but just be ready to haul them inside at a moment’s notice!

 3.  None of has superfluous time to spend.  And that’s OK.

Just tackle a 5-minute area: clear away dead winter debris and unleash the new green.  Water a little, think about something colorful to add, and voila: off to the garden races.  If we went outside for 5-15 minutes daily and planned to just deal with a 10-to-12-square-foot area, we’d be all over the yard in no time and healthier for the fresh air.

4.  Advice: don’t create a garden too big to handle.

Let’s talk veggies.  Most of us are not gardening to support our full vegetable and fruit intake for the entire year (although I really really really think we should start thinking about living a more self-sustainable life).  But every little bit we do to feed good, clean, organic food we grow in the soil ourselves, straight from the garden to the dinner table to our families – is just a thousand times better!  But people decide to garden and then bite off more than they can chew…or weed…or keep up with.  Start small.  Even a 4 x 4′ raised bed can do wonders.  Be successful with that and then add on.

Me?  I have 3  4’x4′ garden squares and some large pots for food gardening.  I also tuck veggies into other places around the borders because they can look decorative and get needed shade.  I learned everything I ever needed to know about gardening {this is true!!}  from Mel Bartholomew’s Square-Foot Gardening.  HIGHLY recommend!

5.  Advice:  If you are going to grow tomatoes, invest the time to grow the most amazing tomatoes on your block &/or in the universe.

This is a value I wholly subscribe to.  Try all the tips and tricks you ever hear of – from tying the tomatoes to metal stakes with strips of your old pantyhose (for the electrical charge), to burying seedlings with Epsom salts for the magnesium – or whatever else you hear.  Just grow good tomatoes.  It will speak so much about your character as a human being when you can spot the perfect tiny seedling and grow it into a fruit-producing machine that will taste so good.

Oh and, an extra piece of advice for free – never let a tomato go to waste.  Never ever.  Sauce them.  Roast them,  Sun-dry them.  Freeze them.  Sandwich them, deep fry them or salsa them.  Just EAT them for the love of God and all that is holy!

6.  Extreme truth:  there is no reason to garden at all if you are not growing tomatoes.  Don’t try to debate me on this {Bryan}.  Seriously.

Pictured:  The Kelley kids making garden stepping stones for me on a Sunday morning.

Ship Shape

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Pre-school is cool!

The privilege {greatest honor} of my life is that I have gotten to be the “pre-school teacher” for my grandbebes.  First Gavin, whose thirst for all-things-learning just blew me away.  He came at 8 am on his “school days” and just was raring to go.  Then I got Hunter and then Guini.

A year ago, Gemma and I started hanging out for a couple of hours for arts and crafts and “school.”  We still meet on Wednesday mornings.  Next week, Averi, who is almost four, will start showing up for some everyday-educatin’.  I am one lucky Nonna!

Simple stuff.

For several months when Gavin was only 2, his favorite “toy” at our house was a big stack of disposable, plastic cups.  He’d build and build and build with those things.  Hunter got to make art from his paper shapes a few years ago, too.

Simple learning is the best.

I am drawn to big expensive learning systems like everyone.  I felt my own children suffered because I couldn’t afford the I-am-hook-ed-on-pah-honics-I-am-learning-to-read” back in the day.  They didn’t.  Because life teaches us what we need to know.

Pre-schoolers just drink up knowledge from measuring cups while helping you cook and getting to run around the house with rulers and measuring tapes and making texture pictures with paper and crayons.  They learn by watching you and yes, even watching Sesame Street.

My advice? Forget trying to have your children read at a 3rd grade level by the time they are four.  Some kids are prone to it, but some parents are grieviously hungry to prove something about themselves by making their little ones bypass learning-through-play to following rigid educational systems.  No bueno.

A three-year-old should be a 3-year old.  And a four-year-old who is four rather than acting 12 is so much more preferable.

Shapes and colors.

I started this with Gavin and every kid since gets to do this simple thing, too.

The simplest.  Colors and shapes.  I pull a piece of every color of construction paper I have at the moment.  I cut basic shapes from each (stack ’em four-high!).   Currently we have maybe 8-10 colors (including a blue and a light blue) and the shapes are just squares, rectangles, circles, triangles, hearts and stars.  With this simple little pile of paper, your pre-schooler can achieve success over and over, time after time in lots of fun ways.

  1. Practice identifying the shape and color by using full sentences, like “This is a red triangle.  Here is a purple square.”
  2. Sort all the shapes by color.
  3. Sort the whole pile by shape.
  4. Divide shapes into “sets,”  making sure each set has one of each shapes.
  5. Gemma is currently into “patterns.”  So you could start a pattern and have your pre-schooler finish it, like: circle, square, heart, circle, square, heart…”  And then they would keep the pattern going from the shape pile.
  6. Then there is counting.  They could go through and count just the triangles, for instance.  Or they could try counting the whole pile of shapes.

At the end of their pre-school time with Nonna, I let them make an art piece gluing all the colorful shapes to a large piece of paper.  Somewhere surely I have pictures of everybody doing this?  Must look.

Meanwhile…

 

Shapes and colors, because we all had to start somewhere.  *smile.

Christmas is for Kids

2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 7 Keep Christmas, 9 TV & Movies/Books & Entertainment, Stuff I Actually Think, , ,

Grandbebe’s annual Christmas PJ Party with Nonna and Poppa~

1.7 seconds after they got through the front door, this is what I saw.

The PJ party included, but was not limited to cookies for baking and Toys R Us for shopping and Good Times for eating and food playing.  There was hot chocolate with marshmallows and whipped cream and popcorn and movies and 7up and cookies and cousins and the-best-way-to-spread-Christmas-cheer-is-singing-LOUD-for-all-to-hear and the Christmas story and  making ornaments for Nonna’s tree and the annual reindeer-head print using little-but-growing hands and feet and paint (what the heck am I thinking!??) and watching  Gilligan’s Island, of all things and sleepy little heads nodding off anywhere from between 9 pm and 2 in the morning (Guini and Hunter are almost always the hold-outs).  And somehow they still wake up at the butt-crack of dawn no matter how late the festivities and little monkeys jumping on beds and o-my-goodness: I was born for this!

I snapped these while talking to my mom on the phone while the kids ate breakfast with Grandpa.

The employees at Toys R Us did not seem nearly as joyously enchanted with our little monkeys as we were.  It was merry mischief.

 

Merry Christmas from us and our grandbebes.

With flash, with no flash.  Cameras!  grrrrr….

 

I can picture it in my mind’s eye

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First of all, I took these 3 photos.

Which turned out w a a a a a y better than they should have for my little $69.99 Kodak digital camera.

Check out this weed.  This was in the mountains when Dave and I were there a few weeks back.  It was getting ready to spread its’ seed everywhere.  I just like how it captured the almost explosive-movement.  No touch-ups.  Just this.  As weeds go, pretty lovely.

 

And then these two.  With really good cameras you can adjust the focus so that the things you aren’t focusing on are blurry, out-of-focus.  I do not have that option.  But my camera, for some strange reason. did that anyway.  I think I may have been zoomed, I am not sure.  But I love how it blurred the background.  These are not touched up.  If I’d known I’d stumbled into something, I’d have tried more of whatever it was.  *smile

Look at that crazy-awesome background blur.

Secondly, Hunter enjoyed trying a feather and ink for alphabet writing recently.

Thirdly, Peaches & Cream, from Palizzi Farm.  As amazingly sweet and delectable as it sounds.

I LOVE corn on the cob.  Did you know that?  Love it.  It is the Iowa girl in me.

Here they come, walking down the street.  Get the funniest looks from – everyone they meet.  Hey-hey for grandkids!

All together now – JUMP!

Remember when we were kids and adults made us smile for pictures when the sun was totally in our eyes?  Yeah, well, now I have done that to my own grandbebes.  I just thought they should experience it.  Haha.

Peek-a-boo, little monkeys

Gemma drew her family

And other things.

Granddaughters are sweeeeet!

Little tiny Amelie walloped her cousin, Gavin, the other day and when her daddy said, “Amelie-no hitting,” she crossed her arms and lowered her shoulders with a decided **harrumph** and plopped herself down.  It is hilarious thing to see such an itty-bitty pull such a big-girl move.  It probably won’t be that cute 6 months from now, but it sure was this week.

Tredessa got her dress.  And I can’t show you, of course, but she is beautiful in it.

Engagement to her cute guy?  Check.  Amazing ring?  Check.  Location for the wedding (a barn!!)?  Check.  Dress?  Check.

This is just wrong.  Right?  Probably.  But it is evidence that the grandkids were here.

THIS?  Is a good morning sight!  Fresh from the garden!

I should mention, I had just dropped the green beans into boiling water for 10 seconds and then quickly submerged them into ice water to shock them green-green and make them positively delectable for random all-day-long munching.  Mmm. Mm. Mm!

And in honor of the first day of autumn, I am making red beans and rice and missing my brother, Joe, whose gorgeous first born will walk down the aisle tomorrow to be married. {Mrs. Elise Leonard, aka Elise-the-Niece}

You’re just going along, enjoying summer living, and then the veins of the leaves go blood red and begin pumping color into a random branch here or there.  Fascinating!

 

“I can picture it in my mind’s eye and it’s beautiful, Clark.”  (Christmas Vacation)  I can also see it here at my blog and remember and smile.

Summer Centerpiece

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That’s right.  This is the centerpiece as of late.  A crystal bowl full of sidewalk chalk.  A container of every-SPF known to mankind.  Bug spray and after-burn potions.  And a basket full of left-behind swimsuits and trunks. 

It’s what’s on the table and even flowers would not be more appropriate. 

Another interesting part of the season is the bathroom just off the kitchen when everyone leaves.  For there I usually find tiny pairs of underwear and little socks and flip-flops and shoes, hair ties and other misc. clothing…in very small sizes.  If their mamas are looking for something, I may have it. 

Nonna and Amelie.  A Sunday afternoon nap.  On the swing.  In the shade.  After a swim.

Good sign.

This is what I found when we arrived home from Chicago.  The sweetest message ever! 

We were SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO sad our Kelley family didn’t go to Moslander Family Reunion with us this year (they are very busy and important people!), but they so kindly gave the dog room and board and took care of the house and garden for me.  In fact – they took such good care of the garden it grew like a jungle and is so much more the blessed for me having been gone!  THANK-YOU Steph and Tris and the 3 adorables!  Love you so much and we want to tag along when  you go to Chicago, soon!  Pretty please??  We were thinking about you and missing you the whole time!

Gemma on a Saturday

cen·ter·piece, n.

1. Something in a central position, especially a decorative object or arrangement placed at the center of a table.

2. The central or most important feature

The Girly-Qs

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Moslander Reunion provided some round-the-clock fun with the little Rhoades sisters, Averi & Amelie {together in perfect harmony}

 One time Averi saw a picture of my dad and exclaimed, “There’s Grandpa Ross Moslander!” 

Chloe-the-dog was quite longsuffering and sweet.

“A little turkey.”

                 

  

Amelie loved Lake Michigan!

Lucky One

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A little first-day-of-summer gardening with the Kelley kids yesterday yielded a great surprise:

Gavin has his first tomato!

He was pretty excited to have beat me.  I only have 4 tomato plants this year and he has 3, but he got the first tomato out of the deal, a tiny, green sphere getting ready to turn into a gorgeous red tomato.  Yum.  We were so happy.

Then, to Gavin’s great excitement, we noticed he also had a pepper on his little sweet pepper plant.  Glory be! 

“I’m the luckiest boy in the world!” he told us.

Be still, my melting, proud, love-filled, gooey-sweet, this-kid-is-amazing heart.  He gets the gardener in me because the same heart beats in him, too.  Gavin and I were born to be sustainable-living-backyard-farmers.  I am the luckiest Nonna in the world!

If you could see his eyes (I stink at photography), you’d know they were happy!

My latest movie project

Hunter is at the most hilarious stage.  He likes to make me laugh and will pose for pictures for me.  I caught a few before he jumped in the pool recently.  He loves pulling out his Kung Foo Panda moves.  I laugh every. single. time.