Progress

Emma and Paige have been working on some big milestones lately, and making some big steps, both literally and figuratively:

Look at how fast she's going! Making turns! And on a slippery floor! That's my girl!

Paige now takes her turn reading scriptures every night, and reads everything she can find! This is my 4-year-old.
Anna is here and we love her too, she's just too fast to catch most of the time.

Knock Knock

Paige discovered jokes lately, and has been making up her own. Her favorite one for a long time was, "Real cheese can't carry a bean!" and later, "Don't meet a stranger by falling in love!" We've been trying to teach her some jokes are a little less cryptic. It's pretty funny.

The littles decided to give it a go too:

Hopefully our door doesn't fall down from all this knocking. Silly girls.

Belated Valentines

I meant to post these right after Valentine's day, but I forgot. At any rate, after being pirates all winter, I decided we should do pirate Valentines. Yo! Ho! Ho!

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.