Ten Months

My little guy is 10 months old day and he reached an important milestone...unrolling the toilet paper.

We sure love watching his curiosity blossom. The age of exploration is always so entertaining. He's also really into standing next to the bathtub (or standing next to anything, really), unloading the dishwasher and pulling things off the coffee table.

He still army crawls. I'm starting to wonder if he'll ever hands-and-knees crawl or if he'll go straight to walking.

He's not my best sleeper. He still wakes up most nights and I'm such a sucker for him so I don't usually make him cry that long. It feels easier just to feed him quick and put him down rather than listen to him cry forever but I think I may start to regret my weakness pretty soon.

He absolutely loves to eat. I think he would eat all day if we let him.

We sure love our sweet boy!

For fun, here's Abby unrolling the toilet paper for the first time, right before her first birthday.

Lost Tooth

While Sam was brushing Abby's teeth the other day, he noticed that one of her teeth was loose. We expected it to take a while for her to lose the tooth because her personality isn't the "wiggle your lose tooth incessantly" type, if that makes any sense.

Two days later, the girls were playing Play-Do in the living room while I was in Grant's room playing with him. Abby started crying really hard and came running in. She was bleeding and her tiny tooth was in her hand. We didn't prepare her for the possibility of blood so it scared her. Once, she calmed down, she was very excited.

Being the dental daddy, Sam came home for lunch to check it out. I had mention to him that it looked a little strange to me and that I wanted him to take a look. The tooth had a funny shape and it looked like there was some tooth/root left in her gum. He took her in, took X-rays and dug around a bit only to realize that it was just her adult tooth popping (the first thing I typed was pooping, hehe) through.

I made her a little pouch to put her tooth in when she put it under her pillow. She had a really hard time going to sleep because she couldn't stop thinking about the tooth fairy. The first time Sam went in, she sat up so he had to leave and wait a while. She's never had a problem sleeping on Christmas Eve but maybe it was the prospect of someone coming into her room that was making her anxious.

This feels like such a big kid milestone. Stop growing up so fast sweet girl!

NYE

The day after we got back from Utah, we went to Marana to celebrate New Year's Eve. My niece Ella had decorated and set up activities for the kids. She is such a fun girl and we just love having her around!

 

Whenever we go to the cousin's house, the kids love playing on the trampoline--even Grant!

They played pin-the-nose on the snowman.

They watched a Barbie movie. Do you see how Ella has her arms around the girls? Melts my heart.

We decided to get crazy and let the girls stay up until midnight. They were playing hard the whole time. There was no whining and the grown ups were able to play games. It was pretty awesome.

At about 11:55, Clara started crying and freaking out. I took this picture at 11:57. She was so close!

We did poppers and blew horns at midnight and Abby loved it!

These two were being hilarious blowing their horns at each other.

Unfortunately, Grant was up most of the night and ended up puking in the morning, poor guy.

Christmas 2013

I haven't been in the blogging mood lately, but I think I'm ready to get back in the game....

 

We had a wonderful Christmas in Utah. We were there for about 10 days and, aside from some illness and losing my keys, we had a blast.

 

Clara woke up Christmas Eve (technically Christmas morning) puking. After getting everything cleaned up and getting the girls back in bed, they actually slept in a little bit Christmas morning. Clara proceeded to puke every-other-night for three nights. It was super weird.

 

We didn't get a lot of pictures because our camera battery died. However, do you notice our improved photos? We got a beautiful new camera for Christmas. I haven't even attempted to figure out how to work it, so our photo quality will continue to improve.

 

Grant didn't wake up until the girls had already finished opening their gifts and he was pretty overwhelmed by it all.

 

Clara's highlight was some new Barbies and Abby's favorite was starting real Legos (rather than Duplos).

It was a wonderful Christmas filled with fun: new toys, cousins and candy!

Live Nativity

When we asked Abby what she wanted to be for the family nativity, she immediately said Mary. Clara said she wanted to be the baby Jesus. (Can you blame her? It is the most important part.) We convinced her to be an angel instead.

 

Abby helped Grammy pick out all the costumes. She was excited all day to be in the nativity.

 

Daddy made an excellent donkey and Uncle Matt was Joseph.

Clara and Myra made beautiful angels.

Abby was the sweetest, most loving Mary. After we finished acting out the nativity we sang a bunch of Christmas songs. The whole time we were singing she was taking care of her sweet baby. It was really precious.

Santa, I Know Him!

We watched Elf with the girls and I forgot how much I love that movie. It is so stinkin' funny. The next day, Clara said, out of nowhere, in her best deep voice, "Bye, Buddy!" She's great for dropping a random movie quote and I love it.

Anyway, now that we've had that totally random tangent...

Santa was at our church Christmas party. This was the first year Abby would even approach him so we're making progress. I guess we don't have an awesome BuzzFeed post in our future.

 

Christmas Cookies

I'm not usually one to play catch-up on the blog. If too much time has past, I just say good riddance and move on. But, with the craziness of the holidays and vacation I haven't posted for a while and I didn't want to leave it all out. So, here I am, doing some holiday catch-up...

 

We had my parents over to make our traditional schliefferlies and to decorate sugar cookies. We had lots of fun decorating. The girls didn't scrimp on frosting. Unfortunately, when I tasted one later, they were AWFUL. I went back and looked at the recipe and it had some typos. It called for WAY too much salt but it didn't occur to me while I was making the dough. Oh well! At least we had fun.