It'll be better for her...or at least

that is what I, her humbled mother, am telling myself. Maybe I should say it'll be prettier and more feminine or more common or maybe I should just say that I got sick of hearing about male versions of her name. The bottom line is that we are legally changing Aubrey's name to Lillian Constance Alexander. We'll call her Lily.

Please make a special effort to call her Lillian or Lily in the future. We've confused poor Sophia so much by just testing out other random names on Lily for days at a time and then changing it again. Sophia now calls her made up names like Peekish, Toedee, Goombaga, etc....

I announced her new name at the library earlier this week and again last night at dinner with friends. At the library someone commented that Lily is a very fitting name for her and our friends love the name Lillian and if they would have had two girls instead of a boy/girl set of twins they were planning to name them Lola and Lillian. (smile)

Indoor fun

Dad was a genius last weekend when he decided to offer some indoor fun for Sophia and Lamby...

Check out the rest of the pictures.

Haley & Carlie's birthday party

Last Saturday morning, during Uncle Dan and Ali's visit, the girls and I attended Haley and Carlie's joint birthday party at Hop Skip & Jump. Haley turned 3 and Carlie turned 1 the next day. Sophia and Aubrey were both very clingy during the party, but we still had a good time. Two minutes after I attempt to put Aubrey down to play she would wail like this...


Sophia finally warmed up to the place after cake and ice cream, but by then there were only 10 minutes left to play before the party was over. She really enjoyed dressing up in costumes and playing with the mail box. I didn't get very good photos, but you can see them all if you click here.

She loves dance class

Sophia loves dance class almost as much as she loves tormenting her sister! This photo was in the parking lot at dance class this past week. Sophia was banging her ballet slippers off of Aubrey's head as I was locking the car.

Easter egg hunts

Sophia enjoyed a few Easter egg hunts last weekend. It took her a while at each one to really get the hang of it and figure out that she was supposed to run around and pick up as many eggs as she was able. I had fun coaxing her toward the hard to spot ones.

The Easter Bunny made a special guest appearance at the Rec Center Egg Hunt last Friday and Sophia loved him so much. She ran up to him and gave him at least 20 hugs - like she is in this photo. She was shrieking and running around like she didn't know what to do with herself. I'm so glad she actually liked the Easter Bunny this year!

Every Friday from 10 - 11:30 we go to the Rec Center for Munchkin Play Time. They have an open play area filled with toys for the first 45 minutes and they they provide a snack, dance time, craft (and last week an Easter egg hunt too). Sophia loves going because her friend, Barbara, is there. Barbara is John's wife and you will see John kneeling down beside Aubrey in this set of photos. She's Sophia's grandma stand in on Fridays. Sophia seems to hitch herself to the "grandma" aged person no matter where we go. A bit of an old soul, I suppose. So, to sum up our friendship with Barbara and John: Sophia adores Barbara and John is nuts about Aubrey. As soon as we walk in he steals her from me. I love the break...she's a heavy little girl!

Sophia took this picture of us.

What do you think?

Where does the time go?

I know it's been forever since I've updated the blog because there were 156 photos on my card reader this morning. That's a lot of posting to catch up on in order to get current. Be patient with me.... here's a cute photo from Friday when we saw the Easter Bunny.

March art work

There are officially less than 2 months of school left for Sophia this year. School is over on May 22nd...that's before Memorial Day. Yikes! I think Sophia is going to go to summer camp at her current school for a few weeks into June and then we'll call it quits for the summer.

March was a fun month for school crafts. I think my favorite is the clothespin butterfly. Take a look at all of them.

A busy week

This week flew by and I didn't have a chance to post any blog entries, but I certainly have a lot to report.

On Monday we spent a quiet day at home, but had to get out the Dora tent because every other toy that offered to Sophia was deemed boring. Aubrey was in awe of the big tent in the middle of the room, but Sophia didn't want her to play inside or even near her tent. Only Lamby was allowed. In the evening we had our first kick ball practice. Game on Friday night.

On Tuesday we met Addie at The Jumping Monkey after school. Both girls had a great time, but Sophia does not like to go in the bouncers at all and over half of the place different bouncers. Some even have slides in them. Sophia really enjoyed being a fire fighter and Aubrey spent a lot of time practicing her standing skills.

On Wednesday we went to the mall for a play date with Rajchel (pronounced Rachel) and her mom, Belinda. We rode the carousel, ate lunch and then visited the Easter Bunny. Sophia wasn't scared this time. We brought a carrot from home and he put it in his pocket with she offered it to him. Aubrey didn't feel like cooperating because she was really tired and the only was she quit crying was to hold my keys so they are dangling from her hand in the photo. (Side note: my keys are her favorite new toy and she literally fights me for them!) I'll try to scan the photo later this weekend....it's cute.

Thursday was Sophia's Spring Music Program at school. Will and I both went. She sang her little heart out and had a blast doing it. She was beaming from ear to ear as she sang each word - very loudly.

This morning we went to Rec Center for their Munchkins and More program. This was our second time going and we had a blast again. Next Friday the Easter Bunny will be there and if the weather is nice they're going to do an egg hunt too. We're doing our first egg hunt tomorrow afternoon at 2:00.

We lost our kick ball game tonight, but I scored the first point for our team. Will scored too. I think the final score was 12-8 or at least we'll say that's what it was.

Feeding the ducks with Dad

Sophia and Will took advantage of the warm weather on Sunday and went outside to feed the ducks in our little pond. Sophia always has a blast spending time with Dad. After they fed the ducks they played outside with the grill and Sophia told me that "she would be the cooker and Daddy would be her pleasure". This simply means that Will must comply with everything she requests him to do.

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.