swimming

Our Dog’s Sweet Tooth + Swimming + Best Way to Wake Up

Temperatures have been in the 90s here in Pittsburgh lately, so Sadie and I took a dip in our neighbor’s pool yesterday.

Toddler in life jacket by pool Mom and daughter ready to go swimming

We have been very blessed with wonderful neighbors. They help us with Malcolm when we go out of town, let us go swimming in their pool, and have become cherished friends to us over the past six years.

Swimming with Sadie totally had me missing swimming on the swim team. I swam competitively from middle school through a bit of college, was a lifeguard, and taught swim lessons. It’s funny, though, that I don’t feel like I can teach Sadie to swim and would rather sign her up for lessons?!

Have I ever mentioned that Niva has a major sweet tooth? She has consumed sticks of butter, bags of chocolate chips, dozens of cookies, and last night she had a new first…

Ghirardelli Dark Chocolate Brownie Mix

Yup, she ate a box of brownie mix in the middle of the night. That was a fun time at 2:00 am with Jimmy, cleaning up brownie mix and watching Niva have a major case of the zoomies from all the sugar.

Today will be spent mopping the floors and deep cleaning the puke off our couch. And wishing I had those brownies, because man do they look good!

Just the other day I had to laugh because we had cookies cooling in our bedroom with the door shut because we can’t cool them in our kitchen. Nowhere (including on top of the refrigerator) is safe from our Cookie Monster husky!

Cowboy cookies cooling

While I was at the grocery store buying the aforementioned brownie mix, Jimmy was home with Sadie when she woke up from a late nap. I checked on her on our baby monitor and found the scene below.

Dad in crib with baby

I think Sadie thought that was the coolest way to wake up from a nap 🙂

Do you enjoy swimming?

Soft Claws, Swimming, and Crafts

I know, pretty random title for a blog post! Okay, fellow cat owners, have you heard of Soft Claws?

Soft claws nail caps

They’re nail caps for cats as an alternative to declawing when dealing with scratching. Our Malcolm boy is pretty destructive with his nails. He’s ruined our curtains and fabric chairs and benches, but that’s to be expected. He has been scratching Sadie lately, so we decided to try out Soft Claws (<–affiliate link!).

Malcolm is great with allowing us to clip his nails, so getting the nail caps on him wasn’t too hard. We applied them on Friday night and he has only lost two over the past few days. That’s a win in my book because I thought he would have them all off within minutes. He looks pretty cute with green nails!

Cat with soft claws nail caps

Onto swimming! My mom, Sadie, and I spent the day together last week and decided to take Sadie for a dip in the pool at my parents’ local YMCA and it was a ton of fun!

Sadie took a little bit to warm up to the idea, especially after she accidentally went underwater, but by the end of our outing, she was splashing and screaming with joy. I can’t wait to do it again soon 🙂

I’ve been trying to think of fun little crafts for Sadie to do while we patiently await the arrival of spring weather and can play outside as much as possible. I had the bright idea to buy a couple of bags of dried beans and put them in a big tote with containers and scoops so she could pour the beans and keep it all contained within the tote.

She thought it would be great to put all the beans on the floor and also eat as many as she could stuff into her mouth, lol!

Baby and toddler craft idea with beans

At first I was like, man this is a fail. Then I realized that she was having a lot of fun, even if it didn’t go as I intended. So, I’d say it was a win. I think that’s how it is in life sometimes, too. We plan something and it doesn’t go as we thought it would, but it ends up being awesome in its own way, you know?

Okay, well I better get my day started! We recently filmed a vlog that shows what a day in our life is like, so watch that if you want to get an idea of what we’ll be up to. Basically working, playing, and getting into all sorts of random fun 🙂