Sunday, December 30, 2012

Merry Christmas

 We hope it was a great Christmas for you and that you enjoyed our card!


 I have so many pictures from our trip but only had time tonight to resize a few. Enjoy!
 
 Mara's first ride on Spanky!
 Our family all dressed up.
 Christmas morning. Love them.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Party videos - take 2

Well, I can't get this thing to let me upload my larger videos. Here ya go:


and finally,


Enjoy. 

Happy 3rd Birthday, my big girl

We celebrated Mara's 3rd birthday yesterday. Just wanted to share a few highlights of her day. I made sure to get a video of her opening Grandmom's/Pop-pop's present:


This does NOT want to load my videos of her receiving her powerwheels! ARG!!! Anyway, I will try those again soon. She had a BLAST and after about 10 or 15 minutes she really got the hang of driving it so Zack turned on the fast mode (5 mph). She loooved shoving it into high gear.

Thanks to everyone who joined us yesterday, for all your kind thoughts and generous gifts, and to all those who were thinking of her from afar. She was looking forward to her Dora party for so long and it made her day. I blinked back tears when she got out of her car on multiple occassions to give goodbye hugs and say "Thank you for coming" without me prompting!!! My little girl is so grown up! She starts the big kid class (Pre-K) today and sounds to be having a blast! She only spoke to me on the phone for like 2 seconds before she was off tracing letters!

Friday, December 7, 2012

Oh Toddler

First off, I don't have a lot of pictures to share right now because all recent ones are candidates for our Christmas card. I did take a few of Mara, though, which shows how I bribed her to take the family photos. Yes, I had to bribe because our Saturday photo session didn't turn out so well and we had to reshoot on Sunday.

 You want me to smile?
 Uh huh... well, you're gonna have to pay up.
 Cooperation!

For those of you I haven't told... we heard Mara banging around in her room after we put her to bed last night. I walk in and she's out of bed, has her toothbrush and yummy flavored toothpaste out and claims she's brushing her teeth (which we had already done). We have caught her sucking the toothpaste tube before... so I take that away, put her back to bed and return to what I was doing. A little while later... she's knocking on the door to come out... and when I open it, I've got a slick toddler staring at me. And when I say slick, I mean COVERED in Vaseline!!! We keep a tub of Vaseline in her room because she tends to get chapped cheeks and Z or I dab a miniscule amount on them for relief... but apparently leaving the tub there was a mistake. She basically has a Vaseline BEARD, ear to ear, mouth, chin, nose, hands, arms. She SHONE. I had to call Z to come see and I did my best to wipe her down with a wet washcloth. Poor kid had faceprints in her pillow and on some of her stuffed animals. When we asked her why she did that, she stone faced told us "my face hurt, and now it doesn't." Needless to say, the tub of Vaseline was promptly removed and her room investigated for any other liquids/creams/ink/anything-that-could-make-a-mess.

Our other, uh, incident, occurred last night after Z finished bathing her - she was spic and span clean and I was petting Arson at the top of the stairs, checking his legs because he's been chewing them and checking his belly for any irritation. Mara stoops down and is talking to him and proceeds to poke his penis! Arson's eyes popped out of his head like WHAT THE HECK? I told Mara that was yucky and she needed to go wash her finger immediately! I told her we don't touch that, and Z was saying "we don't touch that on anybody but ourselves, and even then only when wiping." She looked utterly confused as Z sanitized her hand and she stated, "but I don't have a penis." Sigh. You're right honey, I told her. Girls have vaginas. "Yup, bahginas. Girls have bahginas" she said. Then she proceeded to list who in the family has what.