Dance, Baby, Dance!

Carrie figured out how to dance today! She bops up and down with her knees. We tried to catch it on video, but every time we started filming she stopped. Go figure. She was dancing to “All Star” (Smash Mouth) and then “Best Years of our Lives” (Baha Men). I’m putting together a playlist for her party, so I’ve been playing more/louder music in the daytime than usual – I generally try to keep it a bit quieter so she can hear what I’m saying when I talk and read books to her. But I think she’s enjoying the extra music time, so I’ll probably make more of an effort to play it on a daily basis.

Carrie’s been doing a couple other cute things lately. This morning at breakfast, she was eating grapes. The dogs, as usual, were stationed on either side of her high chair. Carrie looked at a piece of grape, looked at Molly, looked at the grape, and then dropped it for Molly to eat. Then she did the same thing on the other side for Murphy. That’s the first time I’ve seen her deliberately give the dogs each a piece of food – before now she’d just drop things and let them scramble for it.

And she’s also mastered walking backwards recently. If I’m sitting on the floor, she’ll turn around in front of me and back up until she can sit in between my legs or on my lap (depending on how I’m sitting). The funny thing is that when we play with her ball, instead of sitting across from me, she’ll back up, sit in my lap and roll it away from both of us. I guess she thinks we’re playing with an imaginary friend?

Spring Cleaning?!?

With a munchkin in the house, detailed cleaning tasks have pretty much not happened at all – it’s amazing if we can keep up with the laundry, vacuuming and dishes on a regular basis, forget about dusting or cleaning windows. So with Carrie’s party coming up we’ve been trying to focus a bit on the details. I just cleaned out a windowsill with an ungodly number of dead moths and stuff and I’m going to have nightmares forever about it. (Well, OK, maybe not, but it was gross!)

What on earth was I thinking, inviting a gazillion people to my house, planning to make all the food and the cake myself?!? Thankfully, Lisa’s helping with the cake! I have a plan in place for the food, but it’s pretty dependent on finding a good variety of recipes for those wrap sandwiches you cut into rounds – like these. Anyone have any other good combos they like?

And I’m starting to come to the conclusion that cleaning the windows is a lost cause. They’re so dirty on the outside, and there’s absolutely no chance that I’m going to be able to get up on a ladder and deal with that anytime soon. Maybe I’ll just put a bunch of those window clings all over them so no one notices…

OK, back to cleaning!