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.

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.

So Far, So Good

We have a pretty mellow Christmas laid out this year, much to my enjoyment. We do have a party three Saturdays in a row, but that about covers all major events this season. Yay for simple.

Last Saturday, we went to the ward party at church.

We actually missed the annual Petty party because of it, but we did make it down to Draper for Grandpa Petty's 80th Birthday party.

Impressively, they managed to have all five of their children in attendance. I say impressive because one lives in Arkansas and another in Maryland--that's a ways to come.

Santa made an appearance at the ward party. Megan was quite excited.

Jane, on the other hand, was terrified. Ran and hid. Ben couldn't have cared less.

While we were in Draper, Jane was playing the backyard with a few other kids. Smart her, she wanted to show everyone how to walk on ice. And then the ice broke and she fell into the pond. Ha. Luckily, there wasn't much water and she managed to keep her footing, too, so she wasn't completely soaked, but she did lose the use of her shoes for the rest of the day.

P.S. Happy Birthday to my Mom!!

Christmas is Complete

Special shout-out to my wonderful aunt Nancy--Ben's stocking is here! Thank you Thank you Thank you!!!

I cannot tell you how irrationally happy it makes me to see all five of our stockings hanging together. Best early Christmas present ever.

He's not an ambi-turner

Ben has been rolling over for a few weeks now. The first time was the day he turned 4 months old, coincidentally enough. But, while he will roll over readily and often, he only goes from stomach to back, which is normal enough, but he'll only go to the right. He will not turn to the left.

He hasn't seemed too concerned, though.

My Kids' Other Mom

Brenda has been living with us since Halloween. Amy has been practically living with us almost as long, coming over pretty much every day to hang out and help with the kids. It only seemed fair then to throw her a birthday party, Wampler style.

We set the stage.

Then we partied hard. ...You know, doughnuts and puzzles with pictures of baby raccoons.

And velvet posters that come with markers. Remember those? Yeah, we hit up the dollar store. Good times.

The family gathered later at Mom and Dad's house for the more traditional cake and ice cream. Quite the turn out.

Happy Birthday, Amy!

Pick a branch... but just one branch...

Our first Christmas activity of the year was creating our paper chain countdown.

Jane helped with cutting.

Megan attempted but couldn't figure out the scissors. She resorted to ripping instead.

She did better helping put together the chain.

I wrote scripture references on each using my friend Meghann's advent calendar list--each day we tear off one link and read a story about Jesus. It's been really nice to have that focus this season.

We did manage to get our tree up, though later than I had hoped. As per tradition, Chris first secured the tree to the table while the girls looked on.

Over the next day or two, I managed to get the lights put on, after extensive effort from Chris and others to get the light strings back into a useable condition. Funny side story--We took out the middle section of the tree to make it easier to light the top. When Megan saw it, she ran to me panicked, yelling, "Mom! Mom! Dad broke the tree!"

We can no longer deny it--we have two major talkers.

In favor of simplicity, we only have a handful of ornaments this year, all plastic. That way I don't have to care too much if the girls get a hold of a few. It also made it really easy to let them decorate the tree themselves, although we did have to rearrange just a few of Megan's placement choices to keep the branch of bending out of shape.

Hopefully we'll get Ben's stocking from my aunt within the next week or so. Before Christmas, she said!

To me, it's really the tree that makes Christmas. Chris promised we can invest in a much nicer artificial tree for next year. And once we're passed crawling age, real trees all the way. So excited.