Last Month of the Year

Basically, we had a good one.  Christmas was filled with fun this year, since we had tons of good company and the excitement of a 3 year old at Christmas. Mostly this is just going to my mad dash to try and get some pictures up before I print off the hard copy. I suppose I can start with the earliest which was somewhere before Christmas when we went to the Christmas Village with the Morris family.  Grayson and Molly had a good time as always and we even got to watch Grayson sing Christmas carols with his preschool class which was super cute.

Whooping it up on the bounce slide

 I'm sure "Iowan gal" Aunt Stephanie had a good laugh at this, but this was Molly first sledding experience.  She went down twice.  The second time she scratched her hand on the ice and was over it.

 Maggie was a trooper as always.

We had our annual Christmas Eve gathering at our house.  I know so many people always have the dilemma of where to spend holidays so it's really nice that Jonny and I haven't had to deal with that.  For now anyhow, most everyone is close enough that we can all get together.  This year was even better since we had a full compound with Chris and Stephanie and Glen and Margaret.

 Mere and the kiddos

 

Truly a Christmas miracle.  She let Ben hold her and she didn't even scream...until Granny Kathy touched her foot...then she lost it.  She's getting better about the stranger danger screams though. At Christmas dinner at Cassie's I think at some point everyone was allowed to touch her without hysterics.  Ben should even have a picture of Granny holding her, so I guess she's been forgiven for the foot incident.

Santa was good to the girls.  Jonny and I were pretty good to them too.  

Molly and papa got a case of Christmas olives.  She actually ate an entire can of these in one sitting.  I don't really like olives so to me it sound kind of gross, but I guess it's better than cookies.

 She loves her princess dress and has even worn it to farmer's market, the park, and Lute's.  What the hell, you're only 3 once.

 Merry Christmas!

 Dr. Princess Molly

Cowgirl princess Molly riding Rusty

 

I think the full compound was good for Maggie.  By the end of every one's stay, she was giving out hugs to everyone and she had even let Chris and Stephanie babysit her for a bit one day without screaming.

 Hugs for Glen

 Hugs for Margaret

 So now it's time to print this thing off, I can't believe I'm going to have 4 of these things.

Christmastime

I was having a hard time with blogger so I'm even more behind than usual.  Lately we've just been gearing up for Christmas. We're going to pack the compound to maximum capacity for Christmas, so it should be fun.

We had Bill Butler take some pictures for us so those are posted here and there below.  The ones of Maggie, are of her wearing a dress that was my Grandmother's and my mom had pictures of me taken in it when I was a baby too.  I think they turned out pretty cute. 

 

No this is not a joke, or neglecting my children.  It really has been that hot.  It's finally this past week been cool enough that maybe this might be a bad idea, but the first week of December, it was more than warm enough to play in the sprinklers...by the Christmas tree. 

Friday, Molly had her school program.  She did a good job singing Santa Claus is Coming to Town and I've Been Waiting for Christmas (think I've Been Working on the Railroad).  She's been practicing for weeks and I was pretty proud of her memory of the lyrics (I'm a little lyric obsessed).  I guess I shouldn't have been surprised she likes to sing her two favorite songs, Gingerbread, and America all the time.  While they're both pretty funny to hear her sing, America (from West Side Story) is particularly funny.  I think her favorite part is the howling dogs noise part.

On stage with her friends from school.

She even got to see Santa and Mrs. Claus afterwards.

Jonny and I would never have caved and bought something like this.  Aunt Meredith is a whole different story. At least she lives here too, so she gets to "enjoy" it as much as we do.

Where's Maggie?

Peek-a-Boo!

The worst, (or maybe it's the funniest) is when she does this and walks into something.  Babies are crazy.

Looking through pictures of Maggie, I'm surprised that I don't have one of her with only one shoe on, since for some reason she always takes one off.  It's not always the same one either so we don't really know what she's thinking.  She's pretty much in love with shoes.  It's to the point where I think it's stunting her language development.  Sometimes it seems like she can't think about saying anything else but "shoes".  When we pass by shoes in a store, she pretty much looses her mind.

A few more little goofy stories I feel that I should write down so we can remember:

Molly loves to play school and of course she likes to pretend she's Miss Aly, her teacher.  One day she was playing like this, and she needed to blow her nose, so I made her stop and take care of that.  I'm always bothering her to "do it again" "take a deep breathe this time" "ok, this is the last time" "wait one more time" but this day, she was in the position of authority (Miss Aly) so when I started in, she says "alright, that's enough, Miss Aly doesn't have all day"

The other day a little spider was running across the counter and Molly freaked out a little bit so I smashed it.  Afterwards, she started asking questions about the spider: what happened to the spider?  Where is it now?  Deep questions.  I gave her some quick answers and she had this sort of contemplative look on her face.  When the next round of questions didn't come I asked "What are you thinking about?" her answer:  "presents!" 

Fall Festival

Molly's preschool had a fall festival recently.  She had a really good time and is still talking about it.  She found our extra game tickets in the car and so we've been playing pretend fall festival.  I was pretty proud of myself because I came up with two fall festivalish games on completely short notice but of course as soon as they had been played a couple times, she wanted to know what else I had going on for her.  I guess the real fall festival just set the bar too high for me.  Maggie also had a good time.  There were lots of slides to attempt, a few tunnels to explore and lots of people to glare at suspiciously.

Getting ready to go: always a challenge.

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 Bounce house

 Boo!

 I swear she was way more enthusiastic about this than she looks here.

 

The other day Maggie was kind of sleepy before her nap and she kept laying down in the the little sunny spot in the kitchen like a little cat or something. 

Meow!

This and that

I suppose I'll just start with Halloween.  We had a good one.  It was fun that Molly was able to go up and be generally polite enough to receive candy from strangers without us constantly coaching her.  She was also appreciative that I wasn't such a total hard ass and actually let her eat some of the candy.  Make no mistake though, I ate a bunch and I even threw a bunch away. Nobody needs dots or more than 1 ring pop.

Jonny carved our pumpkins.  I think he's getting pretty good at it.

This one only makes sense when you know that Molly was a 50's "poodle princess" (it's all about how you sell it) and Maggie was a pink poodle.

 Pirate pumpkin

 Worried about the pirate pumpkin.

 The whole gang

 Poodle girls

 Crazy Jonny!

 It took a few days to knock her off her poodle princess throne.

 Random cuteness

 "I don't sleep"

 

She has mastered the slide and she's pretty excited about that.

 Of course now we have slide competition.

 The girls went to their first wedding!  Jonny's cousin got married in Mesa this past weekend and Molly in particular, had a blast.

Maggie and I didn't last through the ceremony, but beforehand, she made it clear that she had her own ideas about the seating arrangements. 

 Molly all hyped up on wedding vibe.

 She was all about the dancing!  Here she is doing the robot?!?!

 Molly's own Gangnam Style dance.  Shout out to Jonathan for providing some inspiration.  I could have posted a picture of him here, but no one reads this...so I posted on Facebook.  Sorry Jonathan.

 What we came for.  At one point we lost track of her (I think she was a little too comfortable weaving in and out of the crowd at knee height) not to worry though she was found stalking the lady who was cutting the cake.  At the first wedding I went to, I remember being equally obsessed with the cake.  So much so that I remember constructing a conspiracy theory in my 5 year old mind about how the flower girls (who were serving the cake if I remember correctly) were trying to keep the cake away from me. 

The first wedding was fantastic and a complete success!  Kudos to them for outsourcing the serving of the cake to an unbiased party.

No one to hear you scream

Again I've been a negligent blogger. I don't think it's a coincidence that I stopped keeping up with this thing right around the time Maggie started walking/talking.  I don't think I forgot, but this age is sort of high maintenance and there is just soooo much screaming!  She also continues to be a terrible sleeper.  Again, soooo much screaming!  I've considered buying and cramming as many mattresses as I can into one room and we can all just sleep in a huge heap.  I know this would help with Molly who is pretty much my new bed mate (making Jonny the proud owner of a lovely purple floral bedroom). I'm not convinced it would matter with Maggie though, I think she'd still be up causing problems.

This is her new favorite skirt.  Her love of skirts and dresses cracks me up since I was completely the opposite. With her, it's "the bigger the better".

I suppose they're good for dancing.

 This is her good side...

 and this is why.

 I don't know why, but I feel like the past couple weeks she's been taking more tumbles than usual.

Maggie, like most kids, love to be outside.  She pretty much thinks she can go wherever she wants and loves to run away from me when she thinks I'm going to stop her from doing something awesome.
Reconsidering her escape plan.

She wouldn't last 10 minutes without me.

This was great.  She was licking the spatula of cookie dough while informing us that "candy and sugar make you feel bad".   I guess we can thank TV for teaching her that sugar is bad for you, but in the end the human fat/sugar/salt drive is just too great to resist.  I'm not judging.