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!

Maryland's Bravest

The smoke alarm in our new kitchen is a bit sensitive, and tends to go off if we have our oven on above 450 for more than a couple minutes. Paige hates it and starts crying anytime we turn on the oven. Anna's taking different approach. She's hoping to get certified soon, I think. She even makes her own siren sound as she rushes around the room.

Garden Party

Paige finally decided that she wanted to be a bee for Halloween this year. I think that the wings sealed the deal. That girl loves any excuse to wear a pair of wings. But, she sort of wanted to be a princess too. I asked her if maybe she wanted to be a queen bee, and she said no, but she did want to be a princess bee. So here is my little princess bee, ready for the ward trunk-or-treat:

The babies didn't have much of an opinion about what they wanted, and I had lots of leftover yellow felt, so they ended up as a butterfly and a sunflower.

In spite of only having one bee, all three scurried around the courtyard for a good ten minutes making buzzing sounds and looking for flowers. I had to trample several large mushrooms before my curious flower crawled into them.

The babies had sort of a love-hate relationship with their costumes. The things were fun to wear for a minute, but they couldn't see themselves, and got annoyed with the accessories pretty quick. I distracted them with cookies long enough for a few pictures.

Anna really wanted wings like Paige, but I thought I'd make her something less breakable. They worked as long as she was distracted, but the wrist straps bothered her, and the yellow markings are already starting to come off.

I think I might try making something like these for our dress-up box instead:

 I keep having to remind myself that real Halloween--and Paige's dress up day at school-- is next week. Is it really still October? Come on November, hurry up! I need all this candy out of my house. Sheesh.

A Walk in the Park

Because Paige's preschool is down where we want to live in a month instead of where we live now, it's a half hour drive each way and not really gas/time effective to come back home in between. So most of the time I take these two wiggly girls to the park for a couple hours. They don't seem to mind too much.

They're getting really good at going down the slide.  Boo stays at the bottom until I hold her hand to walk back over to the stairs, cause crawling on wood chips is no fun.

Anna doesn't usually face-plant... Sometimes other moms come up to me and tell me that just watching me watch two little toddlers gives them anxiety. I don't really know how to respond to that.

Also, we enjoyed Conference last week, but I confess that I didn't get as much out of it as I did before I was a parent.

So Long, Summer

Paige has been solidly wired for several days now. She was awake and dressed over two hours early this morning, waking up her sisters with, "Today is my big day!!" Jeff and I both confessed to each other that we kind of felt the same way. Why?

Today was Paige's first day of pre-school!

It took some of the parents a long time to say goodbye, and while we were waiting to pick kids up, several moms confessed to crying on the way home, but I was mostly excited (and maybe a little jealous). I love school!

That said, I'm a little sad that summer is over. And these babies are going to miss the extra time playing with Paige every day. It's been a fun summer, albeit a quiet one. We played dress up just about every day. Anna always has a hat, necklace, bracelet, or shoe (singular) on.

Paige built these epic chalk drawings that took her several days,

and wore baby clothes when all her clothes were dirty. Those are not capris. Those are size 18 month pants which she now refuses to give back. The shirt is also 18 months

The babies discovered the joy of cooking (notice the tiara headband necklace),

as well as the joy of Rocky the rocking horse.

We played princesses in our castle,

and wrestled.

And took a lot of baths.  Anna loves fajitas.

Yep, summer was a lot of fun. But I think fall will be good too.

Back to the Norm

I kept meaning to blog all about our recent adventures in Alaska and Utah right when we got home, but then we were jet-lagged, then sick, then I forgot, and when I finally remembered, I went looking for pictures and realized that we were having too much fun for too many pictures. Woops.

At any rate, here's the few that we took, along with several pilfered from family members! Brace yourself.

Alaska is so pretty, even at 2 am. Though I've decided that I appreciate it a lot more when it's not 2 am. Just a personal preference.

 

The landscape is mind-boggling. Glacial mountains to ocean mudflats in a few hours.

Fishing with Grandpa was a must. It was the one thing Paige talked about for weeks before we left. She enjoyed it until she realized that she couldn't bait the hook, or hold the pole, or dance in the boat. She wasn't too keen on eating her fish later either. We'll work on it.

Daddy had fun on his trip though! Salmon fishing is the best! Or so I'm told. I was napping during this trip. Napping is the best!

What a catch!

It was a bit gloomy on a couple of the days. Anna was less than thrilled, Paige borrowed Grandma's coat and still complained, but Boo managed to stay pretty chipper! That's my Emma!

Also, we saw a bear with a crooked nose.

On sunnier days we ran through fields of daisies and explored old mining towns.

This is one of the only pictures of us as a whole family. Take note, because it may not happen again.

As for the Utah portion of our trip, I think I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:

Babies everywhere! It was so much fun! The girls are pretty sad to be back in our boring home with just their boring parents for company. We're kind of sad to be back too. Oh well. Laundry is fun too, I guess.