Christmas Flashback

Our Christmas Card Photoshoot was pretty much a bust!! You've seen the one we chose for our Christmas card here and another favorite is currently in our blog header. Why was it so painful, you ask? Well... the sun was right in every ones eyes, Max and Abby were totally uncooperative for the first 20 minutes and by the time we threatened them enough into cooperating Afton was worn out and done (so we have a bunch of pictures of Afton looking adorable and Max and Abby being grumpy and or posing weird and then a bunch with Max and Abby looking great and Afton crying... of course, Cass looks great in all of them and we were lucky if we could just get Cole to sit up straight and look in the general direction of the camera... if I weren't so behind I'd post my favorite out takes). It was also much chillier than we anticipated it would be. I did try to catch a couple shots of each kid alone and here are a few of my favorites (Afton was REALLY done by this time).

Did I ever show you this one?

No, I don't think you've had the pleasure of seeing this gem:

This is what happens when the family is busy preparing Thanksgiving dinner and the 2 year old is left unsupervised while they think she is taking a nap. The slimy stuff? Kids toothpaste. (Click on the picture to enlarge it and get the full slime effect). I am so glad it isn't what I thought it was when I first found her!! (PS the lovely evening gown is actually Abby's shirt layered over a multi-fuctional onesie)

Tiny Dancer

Immediately following the princess dress obsession we entered the "dancing suit" phase (a dancing suit is like a swimming suit... but for dancing... she came up with the name all by herself). A little after Christmas she discovered Abby's old leotards and started wearing them non-stop! The first time she put one on without my knowing and came and found me to dance for me. What she did was so funny I was dying... luckily I had my camera handy and you get to see the pictures. I was a dance major in college and took my fair share of modern dance classes... the moves she was doing looked almost exactly like some of our modern dance choreography... I seriously could not stop laughing at the similarities and how serious she was about it... and it went on for a good 5 minutes, too!! Here you go... just a few of my favorites.

So what's a mom to do? Run out and find the nearest dance class for 2 year olds of course... 

stay tuned!

Pretty Pretty Princess

What is it about little girls and princesses? It seems like the minute she turned 2 she became obsessed. Starting last fall she began the habit of putting on every single princess dress, one by one, and dancing around in each one for just a few minutes. There were even a couple of months where she literally didn't wear normal clothes (unless deemed absolutely necessary by the queen... aka me). It was all I could do to get them off of her to wash them! It's funny how she obsesses over one princess at a time and will watch the movie over and over and all of her play revolves around that princess for a couple weeks before she moves on to another on. It started before Christmas with Cinderella (Cinda-lella) and we've been through Sleeping Beauty (Booty), Pocohantas (Coco-hantas), Mulan 2 (she ran around doing karate-type moves for weeks), Tinkerbell, Thumbellina (Bum-lina and technically not a princess)... we've also had a few non-princess obsessions in there... especially Cars (Lightening McQueen) and Wall-E. Of course I have taken tons of pictures of her interesting wardrobe... here are a few of my favorite.
Her current obsession is Enchanted... she loves it. She wants to listen to the Carrie Underwood song every time we get in the car (followed by the Sheryl Crow song from Cars) and insist on being called Giselle... which she pronounces Driselle. Everyone on the house is a prince or princess and she refers to us all as such. She gets quite upset if we don't answer to our correct titles and if we don't call her by her correct name. This is such a cute stage and I hope it lasts a very long time!!

Back to the Blog...

What do you do when you're more than 4 months behind on your blog? This is a question I have been thinking about for a little over a month and I have come up with 3 solutions to this little quandry:

#1 Just forget about everything I've missed and start with now and move forward. Problem with this: My blog is my journal and part of the reason I haven't been blogging is because we've been doing some really fun things lately... I definitely don't want to miss those fun things on the family journal.

#2 Start with now and get back to the stuff I've missed when I can. Problem with this: who are we kidding... I'll never get back to the stuff I've missed... and... insert last sentence from #1.

#3 Just catch up. It'll take some time but I'll be glad the memories are captured.

I've decided to go with option #3... of course. Wouldn't you? So, this week I am going to start... I'm just gonna dive in and slowly but surely I will catch up. I know you are all looking forward to it and are so excited to see what we've been up to. I bet you just can't wait! So... after four long months...

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming!