Indoor Recess

It's cold in Maryland. We haven't gone outside to play in a long time, which makes it feel like it's been January forever and we've been doing nothing all month. I feel a little better after looking through the pictures on my camera though. Wanna see?

That's a measuring cup. We play a lot of dress up. We love hats, and anything that might be a hat.

Seriously. These girls didn't choose the hat life. The hat life chose them.

Pirates are the current favorite in dress ups. It started out with just the bandanas, but we quickly added some felt vests, a cardboard sword, and some tinfoil coins for treasure. It's not uncommon to go on multiple treasure hunts a day, and all three girls have perfected a growly "Arr!"

I have to admit that Emma is my favorite little pirate. I love when she asks for a "hat" and then wanders off saying "ho ho ho!" to herself.

We do a lot of window watching. The garbage truck and mail truck are really exciting. Daddy coming home is the daily favorite. Snow is like the 4th of July.

Actually going out in the snow is another matter.

 Anna was not happy to learn that her mittens are not waterproof. Poor baby.

 Paige, on the other hand, is totally un-phased by the cold. She loves to go play in our front yard, and doesn't get why we're not interested in playing at the park. Plus, she usually gets hot chocolate on cold days.

Yay baths! Warm baths are the best on cold days.

We've been trying to grow some sugar crystals. This is our first attempt. It fused to the bottom and we couldn't get it out without breaking the crystals. Paige didn't mind too much--they still tasted good. We've tried a couple other techniques with various success. We're still looking for a solid winner though.

All the pictures I could get of this were super blurry, so I took a video:

Paige is a pretty good yoga instructor. AND, if you didn't catch it in the clip, that's Emma doing it along with her. Emma's doing really well with her walking. She'll stand up on her own and walks shorts distances (5-6 steps) all the time. It's fun to see her get more confident.

I have to post this last picture because I'm super proud of how this turned out. I loved this maternity sweater because it was so soft, but it had a small hole right in the middle of it. Jeff suggested I split front into two pieces, so I copied a baby shirt, but made it longer to be a sweater dress. I love it, and it gets a lot of wear with it being so cold. Hurry up, Spring!

Once There Was A Snowman

This year, we discovered that it's hard to take pictures on Christmas morning when you're wrestling two babies and a hyper preschooler away from a stack of shiny presents. The only Christmas pictures we got were these:

Impressive, huh?

Christmas was pretty magical though, even without photographic evidence. Paige's only complaint was that there was no snow. She's been rather disgruntled about it all winter. It just so happened though, that we got a bit lost on our walk the other day and found ourselves walking past the local ice arena. And tucked behind the parking lot were mounds and mounds of snow!

I wandered back to make some inquiries and happened to run into the general manager, who told me I was welcome to as much as I wanted. So to celebrate the new year, we built a snowman! I think Paige said his name is Oolfin.

 Happy New Year!