All Things Supercinski

Since Annalise was a few months old and wanting to be upright at all times, I have always held her that way. However, she still lets Thomas hold her like a baby. He says, “Can you be my baby, Annalise?” and then cradles her and walks around talking to her about her day. It is so precious. She babbles to him and answers his questions with rapt attention and sweet little grunts and words. They do this almost every night. I finally got a few pictures of it. And this was just some snuggling and reading time the other night.

Can you tell? Did the cookie residue around her mouth give it away? Or was it the balloons?

I saw this on my friend, Megan’s, blog, and I thought it was so interesting that I had to do it myself. Our blog tends to be a little kid-focused these days, so perhaps this will give some of you a bit more information about me than you ever wanted to know.

2000
Celebrated Y2K asleep in a recliner at my best friends’ house on my first outing after back surgery.
Spent about four months in a fog recovering from said surgery.
Started my freshman year at Texas A&M University, majoring in education, thinking I was going to be a math teacher or go to nursing school.

2001
Spent spring break in London.
Decided teaching wasn’t really what I was supposed to do, changed my major to community health intending to go to nursing school someday.
Spent eight weeks in Nepal that summer. Got worms, made some great friends, experienced an earthquake and was robbed at gunpoint by Maoist rebels who stole all our stuff and attempted to burn down the house I was staying in. It was a life-changing summer, if you couldn’t tell by my brief description.

2002
Junior year of college, got really involved in the college ministry at our church, met Thomas and made more wonderful friends.
Applied to a bunch of nursing schools to transfer to a BSN program. Didn’t get into a single one though my grades were really good. God firmly closed that door, though it was shocking to me at the time.

2003
Lived with a wonderful family who taught me a ton about marriage and family.
Thomas and I started dating in November.

2004
Internship at Hope Pregnancy Center the semester before graduation.
Thomas and I got engaged in August.
Graduated in December.

2005

Thomas and I were married on January 8th. Had an awesome two-week honeymoon in Paris.

Found out we were pregnant in early May.
Bought a house in September.

2006

Josiah was born in February.
Made some great mom friends who helped in the transition to motherhood.

2007

Lived it up with one kids and lots of fun friends (that picture is horrible, but one of the few I have of most everyone.)
Started training to become a Bradley Method childbirth instructor.
Found out I was pregnant with Annalise in October.

2008

Annalise Claire was born in May.

Became fully certified as a Bradley instructor.

2009

Enjoying life with two beautiful kids and a wonderful husband.

We have been traveling a lot this month (one more trip to go tomorrow), and we have had a great time with family and friends. We have enjoyed visits with friends from far away…

and farther still (and Elizabeth didn’t drop them!)

We reflected on our Savior’s birth and the events leading to his coming. The Jesse Tree was a hit and will be carried on next year.

We have been busy baking and making…

and taking time to sip some tea.

Speaking of tea, I must show off my mom and Woody’s amazing craftiness. Isn’t this table the cutest?!

I can’t believe how big our little lady has gotten lately. She is talking up a storm these days–I can’t keep up with all of her new words.

She loves to play with her brother. They spend their time at home chasing each other around the house, reading books together, “cooking” in the little kitchen, playing cars and trucks, having tea parties, and chasing each other some more. No one can make Annalise laugh like Josiah can, and she has proven herself strong to handle his rough play.

Annalise loves to play with her baby dolls, whom she refers to as “Baby La” (Baby Love). She carries them with her everywhere she goes, pats them, rocks them, dances with them and showers them with kisses. During our Advent season, she carried around baby Jesus and Mary from our Little People nativity set everywhere. Poor baby Jesus was left at the library, but we found him.

Our little girl is very determined. Once she sets her mind to something, she wants to do it or have it now and is difficult to distract from it. She is able to climb onto the kitchen chairs, couches, and the living room chair. I have even found her jumping on Josiah’s bed.

She is a lot of fun, loves anyone who shows her attention and brings our family a lot of happiness. We love you, Annalise!

The children of our fellowship put on a Christmas play earlier this week. Josiah was the youngest child involved and played one of the wise men. His line was, “Gold I bring, for the newborn king!” I was too busy listening to record him saying it, but it was just precious, as you can imagine.

The older children wowed us by singing Andrew Peterson’s “Matthew’s Begats” song from memory, as well as a recitation of Luke chapter two.The younger children sang a sweet song about Joseph not being able to find a place to stay except for in the stable. From left to right, Josiah, a shepherd, an angel, Mary’s donkey, Mary and Joseph.

And a little clip for the grandparents and anyone else who wants to see Josiah playing a little air guitar on stage.

It has been awhile since I posted about any craft projects of late. I did not even want to touch my sewing machine after the diaper-sewing extravaganza of 2009, but have slowly come out of hibernation, though not to the point of wanting to make all of our Christmas gifts again this year. I have found fun, little projects over the past month–and the best part of these is that I only bought less than 2 yards of fabric for the all of them!

I saw this cute toddler dress tutorial, and just had to make one for Annalise. I’ve now made three and decided to hold off on anymore until spring. These were the first two I made (getting a little one to hold still for trying on and for pictures has got to be the hardest part).

I also made a pretty fall pillow cover from this tutorial to go with our new (to us), grown-up living room furniture. (Thanks again, Mom and Woody!)

And I churned out my new favorite accessory, this simple headband, during two commercial breaks one evening. I’m a simple-accessorizing kind of gal, and had to limit myself to only making two. One can only have so many braided headbands.

Then I finally got my act together and organized our ridiculous pile of library books, and it is cute, too. Previously, there was a huge pile of books on the ground, now an old milk crate has been given a new look and new purpose. This was so easy, I want to make more to hold toys in the kids’ rooms. I used this tutorial. My button is not the cutest, but I had it already and used scraps from my kitchen curtains for this one.

I also made ten of these little star ornaments from scraps and some fabric I purchased too much of (as usual). They look just like hers, so you can imagine them around our little tree.

If you subscribe to Sew, Mama, Sew’s blog, then I’m sure all but the headbands look familiar to you. This blog is such a source of crafting inspiration for me. Check it out! I think that November’s Scrap Buster entries were my favorite of all time. I will be looking through them again after Christmas.

Annalise is turning into quite the toddler these days. She is a daredevil, full of energy and enthusiasm, with a happy, out-going personality. She is quick to make friends with anyone who pays her attention, loves to sit in little chairs of all types and sizes, dances and sings often, and answers “no” to any question that is asked. She also loves dressing up, accessorizing, and bows. She picked out this lovely ensemble, and the one above:

She and Josiah have had some breakthroughs in their relationship and now seem eager to share with each other much of the time and entertain each other with rousing games of chase around the house. I love watching them play so well together.

Annalise is starting to talk a lot more these days, though I’m not sure how understandable she is to those outside our family. She is not nearly as talkative as her brother was at this age, but she is very observant and amazes us with the things she remembers and tries to tell us about. She is cutting her canine teeth right now, I’m finally seeing a light at the end of the teething tunnel. And she can finally sport pigtails!

I should be plowing through some light reading, but instead, I am uploading pictures and posting an assortment of photos from the last few weeks.

We were enjoying some beautiful harvests from the garden (have I told you how much I love a fall garden?), but then we got a deep freeze this week and lost our green bean and tomato plants (not a shocker, they are not frost-tolerant). We picked off every last green tomato, and we now have a huge canvas bag full. Check out these plump green beans!

We braved the freezing temperatures and visited a living Nativity scene and our city’s Christmas light display. It was freezing, but fun, and Josiah had his first hay ride, which he thoroughly enjoyed. Annalise and I were decked out in coats, hats AND the baby-wearing poncho, and we were still cold.

Speaking of Josiah, I had a middle-of-the-night-brilliant idea (they always seem to come to me then, a silver lining to night nursing), for Josiah to conduct some experiments in mixing colors. I had found an extra medicine dropper while cleaning out a cabinet, gave him some water colored with food coloring, and set him to mixing. This kept him busy for HOURS! He asked to do it all weekend long, then finally got tired of it. I highly recommend it as a rainy day activity. We had just read this book, so that is probably the source of the idea.

I enjoy reading about other families’ traditions around the holidays, especially families with preschoolers. We want to be purposeful in our Christmas traditions in that everything points our children back to the true meaning of Christmas–that God became a helpless baby, born in a barn of all places, as a part of his plan to redeem us to himself. In seeking this goal, we have chosen not to do Santa, but that is not the point of this post. Many of these ideas are from the book, Treasuring God in Our Traditions, by Noel Piper. Thomas gave me this book when we were engaged, and I highly recommend it.

Every night during Advent, we read a bit of the Christmas story, repeating the previous nights’ portions so that by the end, everyone has just about memorized the story. We read an adaptation of Noel Piper’s advent calendar story (DG used to sell a simple Nativity scene calendar and Noel’s readings. It was discontinued a few years ago, but I got the readings from a friend) and use this magnetic Nativity Advent calendar. We keep it on our kitchen table on a cookbook stand for the month of December.

We started a new tradition this year of doing a Jesse Tree. Every night during Advent, we also look back at many events, beginning with Creation and ending with the birth of Jesus, looking at the big picture of waiting for the promised salvation of God. We borrowed a little tree from my mom, but a branch would suffice. We are doing these child-friendly readings . Each night we read a Scripture, discuss, and hang the related ornament on our little Jesse tree. I bought many of the ornaments at Hobby Lobby–they have little painted wooden cutouts that go perfectly and are nicer than cardstock. The rest I have made from felt or painted little wooden squares to go on the tree. Here is a sample for inspiration:

We also keep kid-friendly nativity scenes out for the kids to play with, but I think we need to hide Baby Jesus and only bring him out at Christmas because he is a highly coveted item between these two kids! I also like Kendra’s idea about leaving an empty cradle under the tree.

On Christmas morning, we bake a cake for Jesus as a way to celebrate His birth. This may be Josiah’s favorite part!

In an effort to steer the focus away from gifts and teach about giving, we assemble Operation Christmas Child boxes each year. This was an easy thing for Josiah to understand and we talked about and prayed for the little boy who would receive the box of items Josiah had helped pick out for him.

From Noel Piper, “May our decorations, gifts, and festivities–or lack of them–never block our view of him (Jesus) but always point us toward him.”

If you would like to read our advent calendar readings, you can read on. (Thanks again, Megan, for typing them up for us.) Read more »