Happy Birthday, Will!

Will turned thirty___? yesterday. It's the same number that's on the back of the Rolling Rock beer bottle for no apparent reason at all. If you don't know or don't have access to a Rolling Rock bottle then.... I guess I could tell you or maybe I'll just make you guess. He's younger than me if that helps with your guess....

We made him one heck of a homemade construction paper book yesterday. It literally took all day. We ran out of time and didn't get to make a cake so while he was on his way home from work we went to Farm Fresh and bought a cake. We ran out of time because I simply gave Sophia too many pages to paint and once they were all painted we had to use each and every single page in our book! I gave Sophia six different colors of construction paper! Well, by the time you fold them in half and staple it down the middle like a book it becomes TWENTY FOUR pages. It's a good thing it didn't turn out to be 33!

I'm not complaining, believe me. We had a blast making the book. While Sophia painting all "24" pages using her watercolors I was printing some of our recent favorite photos and cutting them out to use in our book. We also used stickers and wrote some text for each page.

Sophia made Will some cupcakes by carefully dumping Splenda into 12 muffin cups that she had counted out and inserted into the pan already. We wrapped the book from all of us. Then we wrapped a pair of scissors from Lamby and a measuring spoon from Sophia. When all of that was done and the table was set to have cake Will finally got home and we celebrated. Sophia loved it the most!

Sophia's first dance class

Sophia took her very first dance class yesterday and moms were not allowed in the room! We're invited to sit through the entire last class in two months. So all the moms took turns peeking through a tiny crack in the door to see our little ballerinas. The class is actually called Creative Movement, but the required attire is pink ballet tights, slippers and black leotards. Hair is required to be pulled back. Sounds pretty serious, huh?

Not so much. I saw them jumping like frogs and taking bows and doing the crab walk so I think it's a pretty carefree class. They girls all look so adorable in their outfits! Addie and Cameron are in the class too. When class was over Sophia was on top of the world and last night she wanted to play dance class where she was the teacher. This morning I heard her role playing with two of her dolls. One was telling the other one that she MUST BE FANCY and together they were sitting in their castle.

Play date with friends

Three or so weekends ago when the weather was in the 80s we had an afternoon play date with Sophia's friends. We met them at a play ground and let the girls all run around for over an hour and then went back to Haley's house for a cook out. It was fun and we just got the pictures from Addie yesterday. Take a look.

Aubrey facts

1) She loves foraging around the house for dog food. She loves to put Sadie's hard food into her mouth and then she always seems that just then she'll choose to craw with the hopes of getting noticed, I think. Example: she just crawled into the kitchen plopped down with her back to me ad started bouncing up and down. When I tried to face her she turned her head away from me hoping to not get discovered with a dog pellet in her mouth. Oh, I got it out and she made a mad dash out of the room toward my diaper bag.

2) Aubrey loves to root through my diaper bag and pull everything out to have a closer look. This can become quite annoying.

3) She also likes to go after my plants. She pulls off the leaves and tries to eat them. We don't have any dangerous plants in the house, but little Miss Aubrey is certainly determined to eat her fair share of house plants. I guess I need to move this big one now. I've already moved all the others!

4) She had just learned to clap and now whenever she has an audience she'll show off her new talent a bit.

My little artist

A silent Sophia never leads to anything good. In this case my little artist was in the closet in the "frog" into my craft paints. She knows better and she knows she's in a bit of trouble here. GUILTY

We saw Elmo again

On Saturday we went to My Gym for an open play afternoon with Elmo (and Dad). Sophia was beside herself with excitement when Elmo finally appeared. She was literally running circles around him and was acting so giddy. We didn't have the camera, but there were plenty of "Panasonic" moments like when Elmo decided to get into the ball pit! I thought Sophia was going to burst. She cried when we left and kept telling me that she didn't get to say goodbye to Elmo. Don't believe her! We were the only duo to give Elmo a hug before he disappeared again.

8K results

I ran an 8K race this morning. I met my goal time almost exactly dead on. Take a guess what it was: see my results.

What a fun mess

Yesterday I left the room for maybe two minutes and came back to this sight!

Both girls grinned as if they had never had so much fun. I wasn't mad at all. I thought it was really adorable. Look out, Uncle Rob and Big Daddy....we could have some amazing future female poker players in the family.

It took a while to clean up especially because Aubrey really enjoyed making new messes.

Sophia was methodically collecting all of the royal blue colored chips and placing them into a ream inside the case, but I mixed all of the colors together in an effort to save time. Will is in for a big surprise when he opens up the case.

Aubrey at the library

Coloring eggs on video

Just running around.

Coloring eggs with Grancy

Sophia and Grancy colored some eggs over the weekend. Sophia asked me if this was a possibility when she found out Grancy was coming. I guess she remembered from last Easter. It's too bad the Easter Bunny isn't scheduled to arrive until this coming Sunday because I would have loved to go to the Mall with Cynthia again to visit the Easter Bunny. That's what we did last year and Sophia remembers.

Everyone had fun helping in the egg coloring/decorating. We even did the fancy "egg wraps" which involved a lovely shrink wrapping process. It started with a 3-second dunk in boiling water for the egg followed by a 10 second blow-dryer session and Presto! Chango! your egg has a design (that can be picked off, but not really and then it's is "BROKEN" as Sophia would call it and must be thrown away!

Happy St. Patty's Day

Can't believe I got the first image on film. Sophia was being sweet to Aubrey.

I guess I'll have to start buying two of everything. They were literally fighting over the hat in the second photo!

Grancy came for a visit

Sophia couldn't wait for Grancy to arrive on Saturday afternoon! I took her to the library in the morning for a Shamrock craft and she made two wreathes - one for me and one for Grancy. She also got to make a bookmark and a Shamrock magic wand.

Grancy brought Sophia a small red robin bird from Jamestown and yesterday Sophia made that bird squawk all day.

We tried really hard to get a nice photo of all of us and I think this was the best one. You snooze you lose, Aubrey.

It's going to rain for days.....

According to our always-wrong local meteorologists it's going to be raining for days, in fact they are saying it will rain indefinitely!

That's ok because I know one little girl that can't wait to get outside and play.

Perfect timing

I just happened to be filming a video tonight of Aubrey when she decided to stand up using the ottoman. It was her first time. Great job, Aubrey!

I'LL JUST PRETEND, MOMMY

Ok, so she fooled me twice today and once yesterday and I think even a few other times in the last week, but I'm on to her now!

Yesterday I overheard Sophia talking to Lamby about measuring how tall he is and making a tick mark on the wall. I saw her running to a door frame to make her mark with a black crayon. I stopped her and told her NOT to write on my walls. I told her Daddy would be really mad if she wrote on the walls too. She told me that she would JUST PRETEND. And, need I really say this part, I believed her.

Later in the day I saw that had she made four or five different tick marks on the wall.

Today she fooled me two other times with her I'LL JUST PRETEND, MOMMY. And when I later find out that she did more than pretend she literally fights and screams. She's trying to manipulate me and, just like her little friends, starting to talk back too. We know she's just testing her boundaries, but man! She's only two, what are we in store for when she's 12 when she's testing a whole different set of boundaries?

I had to wake her up

Aubrey must be going through a growth spurt because yesterday she slept from 9:30am-12:30 and then again from 2-6pm. Then I had to wake her up this morning when it was time to take Sophia to school.

She's so active when she's awake she must really wear herself out. She's crawling everywhere now, but hasn't tried any steps yet. She also is pulling herself up when she finds something that she approves of using to assist her...it's usually me.

Aubrey adores Sophia and literally wants everything Sophia is playing with and this makes "Little Miss I'm the Center of the World, Aubry. Not You" extremely ticked off. So she yells NO at her and asks me to TAKE CARE OF AUBREY (translation: remove her from my sight now, please). Sophia pushes Aubrey down a lot too. I cannot leave the two of them alone in a room together for very long without hearing Aubrey crying or Sophia shouting at her. Here's to sisterhood!

......oh how I want them to be the best of friends.....

Aubrey's 9 month rocking chair photos...

Sophia's February Wall of Art

All of these works of art were hanging on the side of our refrigerator! Picture it. Anyway...click here to see all of Sophia's preschool artwork for the month of February, each of the girls swimming class certificates of completion, and a random looking glitter thing.

Play date with Haley and Carlie

Do you all remember when Sophia used to push all of her friends and knock them over? Well, as the saying goes, payback is a b**ch. Haley was one of the girls Sophia chose to pick on and Haley muddled through, but I know it was hard for her mom to watch. Well, now that Aubrey and Carlie are playmates, Aubrey is getting picked on by Carlie. Carlie scratches and lunges at Aubrey. She's really not doing any harm, but Aubrey cries every single time. It's hard to watch!

On one of our nice days we met them at the play ground. Enjoy the pics....

Aubrey is 40 weeks old

That basically means she's 9 months old. :-) Does she look like a boy in this picture?

At her appointment she weighed 9 pounds 5.5 ounces and was 28.25 inches long. That put her in the 70% in height and 45% in weight. Her head is in the 75% for her age. She's long and lean. She picks up anything and think it's food. She's about to get another tooth, but I can't figure out which one. It was nice to have a break, but she did have an ear infection in the meantime so she still hasn't been sleeping through the night for weeks. Oh well..

She's as cute as a button! She says ma ma ma ma ma ma ma and today she said da da da da da da to Will.

Prince Sophia and Princess Lamby

Yes, you read the title correctly. This is a photo of two little girls: PRINCE Sophia and PRINCESS Lamby. They're having a royal tea party that ended up lasting about 2 hours.

They both slept in these dresses on Sunday night and then didn't change until noon the next day and then after her bath Sophia put on her light blue Cinderella dress.

New pictures

Doll house

We moved Sophia's doll house into her bedroom and now instead of "destroying her room" during quiet/nap time she plays with her doll house family.

Through the monitor I can hear her having conversations about waking up and eating pancakes for breakfast. I can also tell that she enjoys changing the channel on the fake tv because I hear the same three tv theme songs playing over and over again.

She also loves letting the entire family cruise around her room in their minivan. She still has a hard time getting the family into the van and usually takes off all the doors to shove them in that way, but often she calls for me and I have to go in and help - put the rest of the family in their seats and then reattach the doors. The greatest part of doing that is when she literally kicks me out of her room afterward so she can keep playing - WITHOUT ME! (Of course this makes me extremely happy . . . and extremely sad at the same time).

Back again....

For the second time in less than six months I have been without a computer for the past five days. I'm quickly trying to catch up on paying bills, uploading photos and the blog, checking email and getting my schedule coordinated.

And, as if to not be outdone, for the second time in two weeks Will has been sick. The kind of sick that wakes you up at 3AM and makes you run for the bathroom. He was so sick the first week that he took off work on Monday. This past weekend he was out of commission all day on Sunday after a really rough Saturday night. We spent Saturday evening at Haley & Carlie's house for a family play date. Will swears my friends tried to poison him! How awful.

Last week I picked up a double jogging stroller that I found on Craigslist and literally drove right past the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News. After picking up the stroller we took a detour from our next stop, lunch with Will, to check out the museum. I remember Cynthia told me about it after she and Ginny stopped by on their drive home last summer. We agree! It's a really fun place, but I have to say that we probably picked the wrong season to visit considering that most of the cool animals were outside. I literally jogged the outside path and the three of us were frozen by the time we got back into the building. Sophia and Aubrey both loved the giant turtle so we spent alot of time there. Click here to see all the pictures.

She bites!

Aubrey bites! She pretends she's going to snuggle into the nook of my neck and then she bites me anywhere in the vicinity of my collarbone, shoulder and neck. OUCH!!!!

Imaginary friends

Sophia has three imaginary friends - that I know of. She's named them Jordan, Holly and Jessica. She met Jessica at a party. Holly sleeps at the top of her bed post. She told me some gibberish word about where she met Jordan. In fact, I don't even know if Jordan is a boy or a girl. . . . I guess I better ask!

FFF @ CAC

We went to the Family Fun Fest at The Contemporary Art Center this afternoon. We've been a few times in the past and Sophia always gets to create a work of art and since she's been having daily art shows at home we figured she would love it. She had a good time.

I think her favorite part was eating two Oreo cookies when it was over. Maybe that or just chilling with Daddy!

The theme was "cups" and each kid was given a few paper cups and told to get as creative as they wanted with the scissors, markers, whole punches, pipe cleaners, tape and string. Sophia did these:

Story time at the library

I have Aubrey signed up for the Mommy & Me story time at the library. She loves going and interacting with the other babies. All the babies in the class are between 6 and 12 months. Aubrey and Maggie (on the right) are the two youngest girls in the class. They are 8 months now, but were both 6 months when the classes started.

I also need to proudly announce that Aubrey Has Arrived! Her little personality is coming out in full force and, boy, is she stubborn! When she wants something she will try whatever it takes to get it.

I think I've written this before, but it deserves special mention: The girl loves to eat! Now that she's figured out how to pick up Cheerios and other small bits of food she doesn't want to be spoon fed anymore. She wants to feed herself. This is new to us because Sophia never showed any interest in feeding herself and, in fact, to this day she still prefers if one of us feed her. Boy, it's
messy.

Aubrey doesn't exactly crawl across the room, but she gets there. When she starts off it looks like she's going to crawl and then she immediately gets into a sitting position. Then she takes off again and immediately gets back into a sitting position. She does over and over again until she's reached her destination. She's turning into quite a little explorer and I think she might even be part monkey.

A few new pictures

Zip it!

On the way home from school today Sophia told me that she was crying in time out and Ms. Lisa told her to "zip it". Does she even know what that means? I'm not sure. I asked her what she did to be placed in time out. She told me she was running in the big room (that's their indoor recess room). I thought it was kind of funny that she was ratting out her teacher, but I didn't want her to see me chuckling.

What Animal Are You?

I took an online quiz tonight and found out that I am most like
a Llama

(Here's the description)...
A lot of people don't realize this, but llamas are the coolest animals on the planet. They are totally laid back, they have stylish hairdo's, and they've got good attitudes towards all creatures, big and small. They're like the "awesome next door neighbors" of the animal kingdom.

You're a llama! Be happy, be proud. Then go out and spread the word that there's nothing cooler than a llama. The world has got to know the truth.

Mommy, it snowed!

We woke up to this view out of our window. Sophia couldn't believe it had snowed and was chomping at the bit to get out there to play. I didn't get any "good" snow pictures, but both Sophia and Sadie had fun. The photos are here...but not very good.

Aquarium

We went to the Aquarium today. This was the first time Will joined us since we became members. Coincidentally, we ran into Liam, Sophia's classmate, and his family again there today. Sophia proudly lead the way though the turtle and shark exhibits. I could tell she was beaming because her Dad was there with her today!

play date on Valentine's day.

Sophia had a pizza making/cookie decorating play date today for her friends Haley, Addie and Cameron. Haley got sick this morning and wasn't not able to join us this time. The girls also decorated foam hearts with markers, stickers and glitter glue. Sophia enjoyed having the girls jump on her trampoline and play with all of her toys and she actually cried when the girls had to go home.

After the play date I took the Sadie, Aubrey and Sophia to a play ground near our house. Sophia got to ride a swing and the slide and run around a bit, but didn't stay long. A group of teens showed up to play hide and seek not expecting to be barked at the entire time by a somewhat ferocious looking dog. I decided we should take Sadie home and go to a different play ground, but before we arrived at the both girls had fallen asleep. I decided not to chance waking them so I kept driving for over an hour and took advantage of Peaches, my navigation system, to learn some short cuts around the area.
Looking forward to banana pancakes tomorrow morning and then spending a few hours at the Aquarium in the afternoon.

From which side of the family does the snaggletooth descend?

Click on the image and it should enlarge to give you a great view of Aubrey's upper row of teeth. The two on the hidden side just poked through so they are tiny, little nubs. The two on the left look like they belong in Sophia's mouth.

Excuse me?

Twice today!....Sophia decided to blatantly disobey me.

Well, I guess the first one wasn't as blatant as you might think, but still she didn't listen. It was before school this morning. Sophia was pretending to bake cookies and wanted to decorate them with real Mickey Mouse sprinkles. I told her, and Will can vouch for me, NOT to open the sprinkles. I kept an eye on her for a while and then walked away to finish packing her lunch. When it was time to leave I found her sitting/hiding behind the couch and she had not only opened the sprinkles, but had decorated all the "cookies for Santa". Then she asked me if I wanted one. (How can I be mad at that cuteness?)

The second time:
This afternoon I was sitting on the floor stacking up a pile of soft blocks for Aubrey to knock over while Sophia was beside us feeding her stuffed "pet cat". Sophia wasn't paying attention to us at all until I decided to get up to go into the kitchen for a bit. As I was stacking up the blocks for Aubrey one last time I noticed Sophia eying up my stack, practically licking her lips. Before I walked away I made eye contact with her and made sure she knew that it was Aubrey's pile and that she was not allowed to knock it over. She said OK. No sooner had I started to walk away I turned my head to look back and she had already clobbered the pile. She was smiling at me with her now "innocent" eyes. (Again, how can I be mad at that cuteness?)

Guess who....

70 degrees on Saturday

It was 73 degrees on Saturday so after swimming class and lunch (and our futile attempt to get the girls to nap) we took Sadie for a walk around the big loop. Sophia had an ice cream cone right before we left and then had to change her clothes. (Notice that she's practically sitting on top of her portable DVD player. The DVD player we have hooked up to the TV is on the fritz and requires the following steps for each disc: unplug, plug in again, open tray and blow air inside that tiny little space, immediately press play 5-10 times, cross your fingers while shaking your hands toward the sky and chanting 'please work, please work' and finally dancing a jig if it does work).

I asked Sophia to do a fashion show for us while she was changing into her new outfit. Click here to see how well she cooperated with me. She wanted to do the show and really liked it when Will and I showed her a few poses, but she just couldn't contain her excitement and had a hard time standing still for a good pic. I'm pretty sure this girl won't be a model like everyone claims she should/could be. She'll definitely have the height, but I don't think she'll enjoy making a living in front of the camera!

Little Miss Social, Aubrey Constance, might be our model. Not sure that she'll have the height her sister has, but she's a ham and she knows how to work a room! She rode in the front seat of the double stroller. She likes to swing her feet.

I can't wait to go to her 9 month appointment on the 27th so we can see how big she's getting. Personally, I think she's getting long, but she still feels so light. I love it.