Friday, December 30, 2011

Mini-Vacay

A bonus to brothers working for Marriott is benefiting from the associate discount--thanks, Michael, for hooking us up with a room. And while Chris and I took the girls for a little adventure down south, Ben had a sleepover with Amy and Chase (thanks to you, too). Hooray for helpful siblings!

Nothing too grand, but we had all kinds of fun with pizza,


swimming,





games,


movies,


(it was the first time they've ever seen Alice in Wonderland)


and hotel breakfast.



Simple pleasures make happy memories.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Duly Required

cookies for santa



christmas pajamas





christmas morning





(ben kind of missed it...)


(but he caught up a bit later)




(and then megan finished for him)


favorite presents
(it's a book called "I Like Fruit")


christmas morning's resulting tornado


Tuesday, December 27, 2011

5 Months

3 Days


5 Months


The girls wanted in on the action, too.


Friday, December 23, 2011

On this Christmas Adam

I've been informed that Adam came before Eve and it therefore stands to reason the Christmas Eve is likewise preceded by Christmas Adam.

Of course, it's possible that I find that amusing at the moment because it's not quite 5:00 in the morning and I'm sitting on the couch with an extremely happy baby. I confess that I do find his smiles slightly less appealing when they are the means of keeping me out of bed. We do spend this particular hour together oft, however, and I thought I'd take advantage of it this morning.

That was wordy. I must be tired. I always talk too much when I'm tired. (Have you ever wondered where Jane gets her linguistic tendencies?)

In light of the fast-approaching holiday, I thought I'd share a certain two decorations, both containing personal touches. First, Chris's contribution to this year's festivities:


Part of family pictures last week included cleaning up the yard and trimming the bushes. Chris took advantage of that opportunity to fashion our first-ever wreath.

Megan's touch was, shall we say, less generous in holiday spirit.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

because he Loves me

Because Chris loves me, he read my favorite book. 
He figured that if I liked it so much, he should probably know what it's about.

Remember my favorite book?


Yes indeed, my husband read Pride and Prejudice
I will even venture to say that he enjoyed it.

But wait, it gets better. 
Now that he's done with the book, he agreed to watch the movie with me.

Not the Kiera Knightly two hour version, mind you. 
We're talking the real deal here. 
All six hours.


Ah, it's good to be loved. 
He even laughs at the appropriate moments.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Friday, December 16, 2011

Fat Rat



Is this not just everything a school photo should be? Slightly awkward smile, one wayward bow, complete adorableness that simply cannot be matched? I submit that this is picture perfect.

Jane continues to amaze and impress me with her quick learning at school. Her teacher gave me a report of her beginning of the year test scores. She is fairly average on everything, except two categories in which she scored far beyond where she should be by the end of the year. Any guesses?

Social Skills
and
Oral Language

Big surprise, huh? What actually surprised me, though, was a little game we played today. We have a large puzzle consisting of alphabet blocks. Jane was spelling out names and words--I told her the letter, she found the appropriate block. I ventured to get a little more complicated and started telling her sounds instead of letters, and she still managed to spell everything correctly. To end our game, we ran through quite a few -at words, just switching the starting letters...cat, sat, hat, rat, mat, etc.

Hours later, we had this conversation.

Jane: 
"Mom, you can't carry me because I am too heavy. Dad has to carry me. But I can't carry you because grown-ups are HUGE."

Me: 
"Are you calling me fat?"

Jane: 
"No, you're a rat!"  
(she exclaimed this very enthusiastically)

Me: 
"What?"
Jane:
"If you take fat and take off the F and put on an R then you're a rat!"

Just this once, babe, I'll let you call me a rat. But just because you're three and it's pretty dang amazing that you can figure that out in your head several hours after we were playing with a puzzle. And because your picture makes me giggle with its adorability.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Ben And

At four and a half months, Ben is...

14 lbs. 14 oz.
33rd percentile

26.5 inches
85th percentile

...tall & skinny.

In his four months, I have collected a few pictures of him next to other babies, none of which have I ever posted. Let's do that now, shall we?

Cole & Ben
Cole is our neighbor. He's two months older than Ben...but more than two months bigger. :)

Ben & Ivan
Yay for cousins! I'm very excited for Ben and Ivan to be best friends. Even though Ben will probably forever be way, way taller than Ivan. I'm with Ivan on this one, though. I was always the short one.

Deirdre & Ben
Deirdre is Tannie's baby. She's five months older than Ben, but when we stretched them both out, she was only about an inch taller. Dude, Ben. You must be your father's son, because you certainly didn't get it from me.

Kennedy & Ben
Kennedy is the girl I watch a couple of days a week. This picture was just funny because their clothes matched.

Joel & Ben
You want to talk about huge... Both of Lisa's twins are home from the hospital now. Yay! And yay for even more cousins so close in age!


I keep cracking jokes about how tall Ben is. It will be even funnier if it's all a fluke and he actually ends up really short. Ha.