Thursday, April 29, 2010

Jumping is more fun when you're wearing a pink tutu


All of sudden I've realized that I have a little girl on my hands now. Seems like over the past couple of weeks Elizabeth has started to really like all those things considered girly. Yep, princesses, babies, and tutu's. As you can tell, I'm not doing much to change that. And just to be fair, I've taken every step to include Conner in these activities. In fact I offered him Elizabeth's spare tutu but he refused to wear it. Let's just not tell Chris that the offer was even made.

Signs of summer

Summer is right around the corner- I can feel it. Around here we've been taking advantage of the nice weather for some picnics at the park, beers on the patio, and planting our herb garden.
PB & J is so much tastier when eaten at the park
Conner provides the entertainment - here he is doing his rendition of Snowman, Snowman
Little hands help plant
Here Conner, put some dirt on your face too.
Mommy's juice (as stated by Conner)

Monday, April 19, 2010

Mi casa es su casa- Two little monkeys jumping on their new beds!

We spent this past weekend redecorating Conner and Lizzie's room. This makeover was long overdue, as both kids have been sleeping on their crib mattresses on the floor for the past couple of months. But really the need for this makeover was due to some wintertime snuggling.

You see in the cold months of winter, Conner and Lizzie decided that the best way to keep warm was to snuggle up with each other in one bed. As cute as it was (and believe me, it was), there really isn't room for two toddlers in one crib. Each night before we went to bed we would have to go up there and place limbs and heads hanging off the sides of the bed back in. We knew that we needed to come up with a better sleeping solution but weren't sure what option would be the best long term solution. We aren't planning on Conner and Lizzie forever sharing a room, but in our current house we don't have enough bedrooms to give each of them a separate room. And so, while we figured out how to solve the situation, we just threw their mattresses on the floor next to each other so that they could still snuggle but would have more room than both trying to squeeze onto one mattress.

Realizing that we would be putting our house on the market in less than a year, we thought that the twins' bedroom might "show" better if there weren't two mattresses lying on the floor. I can only imagine what kind of child torture people probably think we impose on our children by making them sleep on the floor. So it just seemed like a good time to go ahead and get the kids their own beds. I did some research and realized that holy crap!, beds aren't cheap. A twin bed with a headboard and footboard was going to run us between $500-700 at most furniture stores and then we still would have to buy a mattress + bedding = really, they can't just keep sleeping on the floor? And then of course I remembered how my whole house is built upon self-assembly furniture-why should I now be trying to get all fancy buying furniture that they deliver to your house assembled? And there we were this Saturday, at IKEA looking at bed options. I'll make this a short story (and really you would be impressed, we were in and out of IKEA in less than 2 hours!)- we looked at several bed options and ended up going with this one. I initially wasn't planning on getting a twin sized bed for the kids but my sensible husband talked me into getting twin-sized beds so that the kids could grow into them. There were smaller beds that would have been SO cute in the kids' room but those beds weren't much bigger than a crib and would have been too small very quickly.

The Trofast bed is pretty cool and really functional. It is expandable (with the largest size being a twin size bed) and it was so easy to put together. I have to give IKEA props, they really make their furniture easy to assemble. And IKEA is smart because they stock coordinating boy/girl bedding. You think more companies would be smart and make boy/girl coordinating bedding but there really aren't many choices for that. So we picked up this bedding for Conner, and the coordinating set for Lizzie.

We decided to paint the walls a green color, Grasscloth by Behr, and two coats later the room looked so different.

Man, I love how paint makes a old room feel completely new to you. The room isn't completely done yet. I need to paint two pictures to put above Lizzie's bed but it may be years before that gets done so I thought I would share some pictures with you now.

Before


After
Plus, I'm home with a sick kid (Conner has strep throat) so I actually have time to sit down and write a post. Hope y'all had a productive and fulfilling weekend!

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

And playing the role of Madame Buzzkill

Last night a colleague of mine and yours truly were invited to give a talk to 170 sorority girls at Wake Forest University. Apparently the Greek system at Wake is in some hot water for getting a little out of hand at this year's initiation party. So our job was to go talk some sense into these girls- by which I mean tell them the facts about alcohol use and how it affects your brain (and self-esteem the following morning!). Being that I still sometimes see myself as a PYT, I wanted to come off as smart and authoritative, with a dash of coolness. Yet, I think I just came off as a buzzkill.

As we were waiting outside the doors of the secret sorority meeting taking place on the other side, we started to chat up the two young lads in Wake Forest polos also waiting outside of the doors. We proceeded to find out that they were there to speak to the girls also, and that they were going to step inside and give a little spiel right before us. They said that they just needed a few minutes to tell the girls that if they came to the baseball games then free beer would be provided to all the senior girls. Huh, interesting tactic. Bad timing for us though, this offer of free beer coming before our talk on the badness of alcohol.

*Sidenote: the boys then asked us what we were there to talk about. Feeling a bit silly saying that we were there to try and persuade these girls to drink less, we told them we were there to talk about "science". I love to tell people that my job is science. I think it conjures up all sorts of weird images in their head involving bubbling beakers and people with white lab coats and a crazy look in their eyes. Just  to clarify, this is NOT the type of scientist I am. Instead if you imagined me sitting in a windowless office all day staring at a computer screen then you have the exact image of what type of scientist I am.*

So we did our job, gave the girls the low down on how many drinks lead to an intoxicated state, how many beers they're chugging when they play games like century club, and how their brains deteriorate as they chug-a-lug. Pretty much acting the part of Madame Buzzkill, squashing their enthusiasm for daytime drunkness at all the baseball games. While we were diligent in consulting the scientific literature to find the most compelling results as to why they shouldn't be drinking so much, I think all we really needed to do was inform them of the calories they were consuming during a game of century club (over 800 calories!). Then we probably would have captured their attention (and in advertently promoted skipping meals to save calories for alcohol binges!). Oh well ladies, go ahead and drink your gin and tonica- who needs a frontal cortex anyways?

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Easter Fun 2010

Three Easter egg hunts equating to less than a dozen eggs brought home. But at least Conner and Lizzie seemed to enjoy Easter festivities this year more than previous years. Of course we did stay far away from the Easter bunny!


I got over it

Last weekend all four of the Hatzi took a trip down to Charleston to watch Mommy run in the Cooper River Bridge Run. It was a 10K race, which to many seems like a run around the block. But it was a big deal to me for a couple of reasons.
1. My sister was traveling 11 hours to come run the race with me. I always have a great time when I am with my sister and I knew that having her run the race with me would make it less grueling.
2. The last time I ran this race was a few months before I got pregnant with the dynamic duo. Back in those days I was in great shape. I taught spinning classes, ran on a regular basis, and got my butt kicked at least once a week by my trainer Joe. So running a 10K was not a big deal at all to me. And I ran it in 59 minutes, 3 seconds. Not a incredibly fast time but a time I was happy with. So this year when I decided to run the race I knew that it wasn't going to be quite so easy. Surprisingly enough, I no longer have time to teach spinning classes and about the only time I find to run is the one hour in the afternoon when the twosome is busy watching Sesame Street. But, I was going to train as much as possible and just hope that whatever I put in would be enough to get me through the race. Well, if you've read my sister's blog then you already know the last page of this story (and my sister wrote such a touching entry about the race!). Indeed, I did survive- and I even ran the whole way! And finished in 1 hour, 3 minutes. Finishing the race, running the entire race, and completing it in a time that wasn't too much slower than my pre-mom days time just reminded me that life can return to normal after having twins (or even one child for that matter), and it's so important to find time to do those things that you loved before you became a mom.

And, not to let you think that I was the only one who got a workout when we were down in Charleston, both Conner and Lizzie ran in the toddler 25 yard run. Lizzie fell in the middle of the race (I'm sure she was tripped by those kids who saw her threatening skills) but both kids managed to snag a medal from the race.