Happy Holidays

Christmas Eve - a day early

Today is our unofficial Christmas Eve. We've arranged for Santa to come a day early for our house this year. That way we can head over to Grandma and Papa's house in time for Christmas Eve mass.

This means that Buddy, our Elf, will be heading back to the North Pole with Santa tonight. Last night, he was taking a test drive in an airplane. I think he's trying to send Santa a hint that he prefers first class.

Last weekend we went to the mall. We didn't stop for pictures with Santa, but we did let the girls have a quick ride on the train. As we were walking up, they were already loading so we quickly bought the tickets and put the girls in their seat. We didn't really think it through and Brooke was terrified. She didn't know what was going on. In hindsight, we should have let her watch the train before sticking her in it. She finally settled down in the final lap right before the ride was over. Luckily Paige was in the car with her, so if she tried to escape, hopefully Paige would've been able to grab her.

Buddy the Elf

 At the beginning of December, we had a visit from an Elf. He came along with a book called "Elf on the Shelf". This elf will visit us each year at the beginning of December and stay with us until Santa comes at Christmas. Each night he reports back to Santa on the good and bad things that he watched. In the morning, it's a game to find out where the elf is hiding or what he was up to after he returned from his visit with Santa. We named our Elf Buddy. Below are some pictures of where we found Buddy in the mornings:

 These blocks used to spell "Believe"

Paige wasn't too happy about this one. Barbies are off limits to Elf!

 Snowman and Buddy got into a snowball fight!

18 months

Brooke turned 18 months old on November 21st. So I'm a little late on posting this!

She had a doctor appointment on 12/3.
Weight: 21pounds, 6 ounces (10th percentile)
Height: 31.25 inches (30th percentile)
Head Circ: 18.75 inches

In the last few weeks her language has exploded! She attempts to say a lot of words, but usually only the vowel sound will be correct. She plays a game on our phones called Peak-a-boo barn and it makes animal sounds and then says the name of the animal. When she sees the picture, she can now identify the animal and "say" it's name. Before she started using any words, she mastered the art of nodding her head. It is so cute to see her nod yes or  no. I'm sure half the time she didn't know what she was agreeing or disagreeing to, but at least she was getting her opinion out there! Now she'll say Nooooo along with nodding her head no. Her first and favorite word is Ella. She'll say it a million times over every time she sees her cat. She hasn't yet learned how to say Paige and she still some times confuses Mama with Dada. She probably says about 10 words correctly and consistently. But around 20-30 words that we can tell what she's asking for.

As our pediatrician pointed out, she has started the terrible twos phase. She was in a less-than-pleasant mood for her appointment. Although, after waiting an hour, who can blame her. Luckily, her tantrums are fairly short-lived. If she doesn't get what she wants, she'll collapse onto the floor face first and have a mini-meltdown. We just let her get it all out for a minute and then she's ready to be redirected.

She is still very much a cuddler. Often times in the morning she'll wake up around 6am and I'll get her from her crib and bring her in to lay with me in bed for awhile longer. She just loves snuggling up.

Happy belated 18 month birthday!

Pictures with Santa

Here are some of the pictures we've had taken with Santa this year so far. The first were on light up night on Thanksgiving weekend.

This one is from the Lunch with Santa party that Justin's work put on for the kids.

Christmas Tree

On Sunday we went to cut down our Christmas tree. We went to the same place as last year, JB's Tree farm. Last year was absolutely beautiful because it was snowing and we felt so much more in the holiday spirit. This year since we were getting it earlier than usual, there wasn't any snow. We thought we'd be missing out on the fun, but in the end it was so much nicer not freezing to death cutting it down. Or trying to tie it on the car with numb fingers.

Our sad attempt at a family picture in front of our tree:

Brooke loved riding back in the cart pulled by the horses squeezed in with all the cut trees!:

The girls and I sitting on the side eating popcorn while Dad tied the tree to the car:

We got to meet 2 of Santa's reindeer:

At home with the tree all decorated:

Cards

It's that time of year again. I'm starting to think about what to send out this year for our Christmas cards. I like to send out a picture of the girls. Last year I did their school photos, but this year I didn’t purchase any of Brooke’s pictures because they didn’t turn out as well. I update the blog and facebook with pictures, but we have many relatives who we don’t get to see often and who aren’t online. A picture at Christmas time may be the only picture they see of the girls each year!

Shutterfly has a wonderful selection of holiday photo cards this year. They are very affordable as well, starting at $.32 a card. That’s not much more than what you’d pay for a generic boxed card set without the personalization of a picture! I haven’t decided yet what format to do for our card, but they have tons of options including some that have room for photos and some family tidbits like this one on the right.

If you’re looking for a nice personalized gift for family members, check out their photo gifts section for things like mugs, books and these new desk calendars.

Right now they are running a promotion for Free Shipping on orders of $25+ Promo Code SHIP25

If you blog, sign up here to receive 50 free cards from Shutterfly by writing a post about their products.

Paige School Pic

After last year's lack of smile school picture, I talked to Paige beforehand that it was picture day and to make sure she gave a nice big smile for the camera. She gets shy in front of new people, so I knew we'd have to work on this a little. We practiced a few smiles that morning to get her ready. Perhaps we practiced a bit too much.

Happy Halloween

Our town does Trick or Treating on Thursday night instead of the 31st. I have no idea why. Paige was so excited to go. I've never seen her this excited for a holiday before. Christmas is going to be a blast this year. When I picked her up at school tonight around 5pm, she ran up to me then darted to grab her bag and coat and was at the door in about 5 seconds. I made a comment to her teacher that I've never seen her move so fast. The teacher told me she asked her earlier if the teacher could call me at work and tell me to go home and get her costume and bring it to school so she could get dressed there.

I took this picture this morning. We dressed them both in grey shirts and orange pants today. Completely unintentional.

We had a difficult time getting them to pose together in their costumes before we left:

She was much happier once she realized she was getting candy! I can't tell you how many times we'd be walking along and look in the stroller to see Brooke with a candy bar in her mouth...wrapper and all!

Recycling Crayons

It seems like our crayon stash has been multiplying. And one of Brooke's favorite games is to dump all the crayons (and everything else she can get into) all over the floor. After about the hundredth time of picking up all the little pieces of crayons that we store in a gallon size freezer bag I got to thinking maybe we should sort through them a bit. So Paige and I did a little crafty project. We picked out all the homely broken crayon pieces and peeled the wrapper off of them. Paige liked this part. Then we sorted the crayons by color and broke them into small pieces. Next I put them in a cute decorative cupcake pan. I put in the oven for about 20 minutes at 275 degrees until the crayons were all melted. Here's what they looked like when I pulled them out.

After they cooled I popped them out and we had pumpkin crayons! For most of them I mixed 2 or 3 colors of crayons together for a swirled end look.

I have other seasonal cupcake pans, so we may be doing this again in a few months!

Brooke School Pics

Below are Brooke's school pics. She was very unsure about the process. She had just gotten to school and I took her straight to the photographer. She didn't cry, but every time he was about to take the picture she'd flinch because of the flash and the clicking noise. He took a ton of pictures, but these were probably the only two where her eyes were actually open. He also managed to crop out the sippy cup that was in her other hand. She doesn't really have one specific "lovey" item that she keeps on her at all times, but she definitely does like to hang on to things for comfort.

Pumpkin Patch

This past weekend we went to Valewood Farms again for their pumpkin patch. This is the 3rd year in a row that we've gone. Follow these links to see the posts from 2008 and 2009. The kids really love the corn box, hay ride, animals and games they have. It's great for this age. Our first stop was the dairy store for ice cream. Brooke couldn't get enough of it! Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of the cows. We got to see them up close on the hay ride and they had a calf in a fenced area that Paige reached through and pet!

 The new feature this year was the corn maze!

 The trees were so beautiful on the way home. It's such a nice drive this time of year. 

Brooke 15 months

Today Brooke turns 16 months old! But I just realized I never posted what her stats were for her 15 month doctor appointment. So here they are a month late:

Height: 29.25"
Weight: 20 lbs, 10 oz

For some reason I've been thinking that Brooke is so much smaller than Paige was at this age. But I just looked back at an old blog post and saw that Paige was 20.5 pounds and 30 inches at her 15 month appointment! It says that Paige had lost a pound from her previous appointment, but we didn't really see that with Brooke. Her weight gain has just been slow.
 

Kitchen facelift

Here are a series of Before and After pictures of our kitchen facelift. We tore down all of the lovely flowered wallpaper and painted the walls a light shade of green.

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

These last 2 pictures are my favorite. Look how much bigger and open the kitchen looks without the crazy flowers!

   BEFORE

AFTER

Now we just need to do something about that red door!