Great weekend in Ithaca

While I was packing up for our weekend to Ithaca, the boys got into the pantry.

Theo had a grand time playing the piano with Grandma Joanie. He liked to bang along on the keys and dance to the music.

Saturday was a beautiful day in Ithaca, and we enjoyed a great time exploring the yard. The highlight was the pond, with the frog fountain and very slippery rocks and many many real frogs on the shore.

There were also lots of trees to rub and hug.

Saturday night after dinner the boys had a riot holding hands and touching each other's arms and then laughing at each other and the adults' reactions.

Grandpa Stu busted out ye olde Amish wood toy, which was a huge hit (sarcastic), as you can tell from Theo's face in this picture. A big old piece of wood just has very limited appeal. Yes, it's neat that it converts from a rocker to a highchair to a desk but none of those toys individually is very neat so the whole thing is pretty much a clunker. Look for it at Mama Goose/Mimi's Attic in the near future.

The real project of the weekend was replacing the elastic in the legs of our BumGenius 4.0 diapers. As our boys have thinned out after the fattiness of the 9-10 month phase, their diapers have become a little loose in the legs, causing leaks and requiring too many diaper changes. Our friend Stacey pointed out that she had recently bought some new diapers and had noticed that in comparison, the older ones looked less elasticized. Grandma Joanie and Grandpa Stu bought US some new ones recently (because we were having to do so many diaper changes) and we noticed the same thing. It seemed daunting to change out the elastics on 30 diapers, but luckily Grandma Joanie tackled the task with passion. She watched a couple YouTube videos on the subject, figured out our best strategy, and then patiently walked us each through the process. In the end, everyone found their own niche and favored technique. Grandma Joanie stuck by the sewing machine even as it misbehaved. Grandpa Stu did everything by hand, including sewing, start to finish. He also repaired the most diapers, he would like you to know. Mama Lovebo took a while to get the hang of the technique but did a combination of hand work and passing along to Grandma Joanie to finish the last seam. Daddy Lovebo's primary responsibility was taking care of the boys while the rest of us could work but became valuable as the "fixer"--threading through "lost" elastics that came loose from their safety pins. In all it was a highly successful group effort and amazingly, we finished all 30 diapers! We had to do 15 Saturday and 15 Sunday because we had to have a lot of diapers in use (darn kids kept peeing and pooping through the process, so we couldn't just do them all in one day) but we got all of them done! Most importantly, the newly repaired diapers fit much better and I think we're going to get a lot more wear out of them. We did not yet repair the back elastics because it was less of a priority (except one Mama Lovebo repaired by accident), so we'll see if we need to do that in the coming months. Here's a picture of us at work:

Pictures of our Sunday trip to Iron Kettle Pumpkin Farm to follow in the coming days....