Weekend Adventures and Hensley is 21 months!

I totally spaced on Hensley turning 21 months this month! She will be 22 months in just a couple weeks. She is definitely turning into a toddler and she thinks she can do anything her sister can do. She is talking in complete sentences. Some of her favorite things to say are "No, I don't want to....", "That's so funny", and "It's my turn". She is still signing some. She signs "more", "all done", and "again" most frequently. She is now wearing mostly 3T clothes. She can fit into 2's still, but I think I will be buying all 3's come summertime. Her favorite foods are cheese and chocolate. Her favorite shows are Peppa Pig, Mother Goose Club, Daniel Tiger, and Signing Time. She loves to play outside in her water table, go to the zoo, swing at the park (and slide too), play with sissy, play some games on the Kindle, and read. She knows all her colors and is very particular in choosing her color diaper/plate/cup, etc. She is learning to count and sing the ABC's. Her favorite songs to sing are "Baa Baa Black Sheep", "Twinkle Twinkle", and "Hush Little Baby". I'm excited about planning her 2nd birthday party. I know it will be here before I know it!

 We have been trying to go to the zoo once a week since it's been getting warmer. I always bring a picnic lunch and we spend a couple hours walking around and seeing the animals. The girls play in their park for a little bit and then we come home for naps. I like keeping our weeks simple, but plentiful. We have plenty of outside time, crafts, walks around the neighborhood, library time, homeschool co-op, and all the other weekly needs.

 Hensley looks grumpy here, but she loves riding her sissy's bike!

 She is still taking a nap most days from 1-3pm. She goes to sleep for naps by nursing. At night she nurses, but then Aaron rocks her to sleep most nights.

 I got this HUGE wooden puzzle that came with erasable markers for only $4 on clearance at Target! I am in love with Target clearance and come away with some great finds!

 This past weekend we decided to take a short trip to check out our lake house. He stopped at Arbuckle Wilderness on the way down. Aaron hadn't been since he was a kid and I had never been! Tae was pretty scared and wouldn't roll her window down. Hensley sat on my lap the whole time and kept trying to feed them out of her hands. This girl has no fear. It's funny how different her and Tae are :)

 There were tons llamas and donkeys! I think that may have been the majority of the animals. There were also a few Emu's (those scared the heck out of me), a Clydesdale horse, buffalo, cows, ostrich, and some others.

 You had to hold onto the cups really tightly. We had a few animals yank ours away! They were filled with food pellets.

 Tae was perfectly happy sitting in the back and enjoying the animals from her closed window!

 Buffalo's have the longest, blackest tongues! This one left drool all over our car.

 When we left, we stopped for a quick picnic. 

 My handsome hubby. Can't believe we will be celebrating 10 years of marriage in June!

 Chocolate, her favorite!

 Our cute little lake house. Can't wait to spend weekends here when it warms up!

 The next day we went downtown and enjoyed the riverwalk and fed the ducks and geese bird food.

 I love the hairdo's these guys were rockin'!

 It was such a beautiful day! We let the girls play on the playground as well!

This is how adventurous this girl is! Her and Tae were jumping on our bed when she fell off and whacked it on our bed side table. She got the biggest goose egg I've ever seen!

This next month is busy, busy! We have Aaron's birthday, Easter, a garage sale, the JBF sale, a quick birthday trip for my nephew, my birthday, and much, much more!

Ending winter with a fire (and not in a good way)...

 I'm sure with a title like that, you are wondering what exactly I mean, huh? Well, I thought I would add a little excitement and spice to our evening by catching my cutting board on fire! Aaron was upstairs in the shower and the girls were up there playing. I had been dealing with some major head congestion, so I thought I would do some steam with eucalyptus essential oil to try to help. My cutting board was sitting on the front burner and when I went to turn on the burner under the tea kettle, I turned on the wrong one instead. I went back to the living room to watch my show and knew the kettle would whistle when it was ready. It had probably been about 10 minutes when the smoke detector went off. I didn't think too much about it at first because it tends to go off with just the littlest bit of smoke. I get up, walk into the kitchen only to see flames jumping about halfway to the ceiling. I'm not even sure what my first thought was, but I turned the burner off, threw the cutting board into the sink (both the board and the stovetop were still on fire) and ran to the stairs to yell at Aaron. I could hear Tae up there yelling "fire, fire!", but couldn't hear Aaron. I ran into the laundry room and grabbed the fire extinguisher. I have never used a fire extinguisher before and wasn't quite sure how to work it, but I got a little bit of the stuff to discharge. I turned around and turned the water on over the cutting board the same time Aaron came running in dripping wet and without a shirt on. He grabbed the fire extinguisher and put out the rest of the fire.The entire house was filled with smoke and ALL of our smoke detectors were going off now. The girls came down stairs and I quickly rushed them outside. Aaron opened up all the windows and took the batteries out of the detectors. We were lucky it had been fairly warm that day, so I gathered some blankets and set the girls up in our car to watch a movie. This was the mess we were left with. That dust from the extinguisher got everywhere. It was about 8pm when it happened and we were up until after midnight cleaning it up. After about an hour, the smoke cleared enough to let the girls back inside and I got them to bed. We had to throw away quite a bit of food that was out along with an entire crock pot full of chicken stock I was making.

I feel so thankful and blessed that none of us were hurt and that the damage was minimal. This was probably one of the more scarier moments of my life and definitely made me realize how quickly you can loose everything!

On a lighter note, I am so happy that it is now March and that the weather will soon be warming up. The girls and I have been feeling a little cooped up with all the snow and the cold.

Here's some pictures of our last snow fall. I think we got a few inches. The girls lasted about 20 minutes and then we came in for hot chocolate. We had a good snow fall last night too, but it has been super sunny today and has already melted. That's Oklahoma for you!

We've been blessed to be able to watch my nephew several times for my sister. He and Hensley are about 10 months apart and they have a good time together. They will be moving over seas this summer and we are going to miss them so much. It will be sad that our kiddos wont be able to grow up together. We are soaking in all the time we have together while it's here!

Taelyn's schooling has been going very well. We are a little over half way done with her kindergarten curriculum (Five in a Row) and she is enjoying it. She was very excited to finish her "reading readiness" work book the other day, so we had to take a picture with her certificate. This year she has learned all her letter sounds and can read pretty well. She is great at math and loves science. The book that Hensley is holding is one of our books for FIAR. We even baked an apple pie when we finished that book.

As you can see in all my pictures, Hensley loves to be naked (or close to it). I don't think that girl is ever cold. She is always asking to be naked or "naked butt" as she calls it. I love the picture of Tae and Hensley. They are both doing the same thing. Silly girls!

The girls both like to imagine and pretend. We spend many of mornings pretending we are camping and making forts and sleeping bags for our adventures. I'm so blessed to be their mommy.

And of course, we always look forward to the weekends when we get to spend special family time together. These two girls and their daddy are everything to me <3