Oden Adventures: October 2016

September 2016

Posted by Amy Evelyn Oden , Saturday, October 15, 2016 9:26 AM

September was a full & fun month around here. We watched The Wizard of Oz a lot, wished that start of fall meant leaves to jump in (not quite yet here), endured a few more days in the 100s and enjoyed the backyard blow-up pool longer that we thought we would.

Oliver - who in 25 months of life has barely paid any attention to the television - is now completely obsessed with the Amazon Original show "Creative Galaxy" which he calls "Arty". He wants it on from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to bed, even if he's not in the room or not watching it. He throws a fit if you turn it off or if Vianne wants to watch something else, so he's learning tough lessons about not always getting what he wants and having to take turns with his sister. Vianne enjoys the show, too, and it has inspired her to craft up a storm lately for the past several weeks. This is great in that both of them have been happily occupied for more time than I have been used to, but there are also a lot of resulting messes and tantrums...so it's sort of a love/hate thing for me.

Oliver continues to amaze us with his new phrases. He likes to pick up objects and say, "How this get here?" (Now that I think about it, I probably say that...spatula in the bathroom? Canned food in the guest room?) He sometimes has what sort of sounds like a midwestern accent, "What happened, Mom?", another of his cute phrases, sounds like, "What hyeahappened, Mom?" And because of the Wizard of Oz obsession, all "why" questions in our house are now answered by both kids with "Because of the wonderful things he does!" except Oliver's sounds a little more like "Buh-tuzz wunner feens he does!" and I make him say it over and over because it's so cute.

Vianne's favorite thing continues to be pretending we are people other than we are. We are still quite often the Hsiehs or the Blairs, recently added The Shields, or the usual cast of Disney Princesses/Transformers/Marvel Super Heroes & Villains. She really likes to be the villains playing tricks on the good guys which usually involves putting something that tastes yucky into what they're eating. She also likes to pretend, when we are returning home from somewhere, that we have missed our house and the driveway we are pulling into is someone else's house...and we hope they're nice and will let us stay...and we hope they have kids to play with. This imagination of hers!

I've found windows of time to get back into scrapbooking and back to my Marie Durand research project. Sometimes this feels very satisfying, sometimes this means coming out to find that what I thought was fifteen minutes of peace was really the kids making an unexpected mess in the other room. But it feels like a good start to regaining a little of myself back...I feel like I've been missing for awhile now.

Smiles for Mama during one of the many Wizard of Oz viewings

Very focused on the movie + popcorn

Our pretty-in-pink little lady, ready for church and obliging for a photo shoot...

Grampa came for Labor Day week & brought the rainbow pool!

Patrick at the grill for our low-key Labor Day BBQ

Batman to the rescue!

The month-long craft-a-thon begins...

Each craft starts nicely like this...

...and quickly devolves into this.

We were invited to our first friend birthday party since moving up here and introduced both our kids to the sport of bowling in the same event! Oliver was all about the shoes.