A new decade, a new year, an old blog.

Well hello again, it's been a while.

I'd really like to get back into blogging and this will be my first attempt to get back into it. Hopefully there will be more to come.

My husband had to work so we spent Christmas at home. It was nice being able to wake up and let the kids run downstairs to see what 'Santa' brought them. Their little hearts were just filled with excitement, my oldest even started talking to herself at one point, holding her chest, telling herself to calm down. *squee* That's the moment that parents wait for at Christmas time.

Santa was good to them too. They were very specific this year. They asked for Purple Unicorn Pillowpets, A Baby Alive Feeding Baby, and a Doctor Set. Santa can live up to those expectations!



If you really want to see excited though, we'd need to look back to a few days prior. We took our annual trip to the 'North Pole'. For some reason the girls got it in their head that the local Lightfest is the North Pole. We probably put that in their heads being silly at some point, but they believe it and it always seems to work in our favor. The drive isn't that far but we usually go late at night so it's dark and they don't know where we're going. The line is long so they typically fall asleep until just before we enter the gates, and you drive through all of the lights to the end where Santa is. They get to go in and talk to Santa in their PJ's, get a pic and drop of their letters in the mailbox. It's good family fun, but back to my original point - this is what excited looks like according to my 4.5 year old:



Don't you wish you were 4 again?
Or maybe you want to be a 3 year old mommy?

Yes, that's right. My baby just turned 3 on New Year's Eve. I can honestly say that I have no idea what happened to the last three years. It feels like I was holding this sweet little baby in my arms yesterday and now all of a sudden I have a preschooler. The sweetest, smartest preschooler that I know. She amazes me each and every day. She came home the first week of school and signed the letter 'B' and said she wanted to take Barney as her letter B item for show and tell. All throughout the Holiday Season she's had us in good spirits with her constant caroling, and best of all she smothers me regularly with her awesome hugs!

We're in Pennsylvania visiting family for the New Year so we celebrated her birthday with cupcakes and ice cream and we'll do it all over again once we're back in Michigan. She's cute, so we let her slide like that.. having two birthdays.

Speaking of Pennsylvania, we're having a great time. We don't get to visit nearly as often as I'd like but when we're here the girls have a blast. Sure they eat too much sugar, stay up to late, don't get enough sleep and they're cranky... But they get to see their grandma and pappy, their grandma sassy and all of their cousins, aunts, uncles, etc... That's the one thing about living so far away that gets me, they don't get to see their family - I don't get to see my family.

Pretty soon though it'll be back to Michigan, back to work, back to school, back to the realities of life. 2010 brought sickness, heartache, family drama, a financial crisis, difficult jobs, too much stress, too much mess and I'm glad that we're putting that all behind us.

2011 is a fresh start and I'm looking forward to it. After all a few good things did come out of 2010 that will pave our path in 2011 like the Church and Church family that we've become a part of. It has been our saving grace, literally. We were both saved and baptized at CrossPointe in 2010, and we're definitely looking forward to the exciting things to come at CrossPointe in 2011. We also found an amazing school that the girls are going to. N is in the Preschool 3's and K is in the Pre-K class and they love it! We couldn't have found a better school!

So goodbye 2010, Hello 2011 - I'm looking forward to the adventure that lies ahead!

Happy New Year everyone!

Want a good upper-body workout?

Just get a snap press!!

Never buy another peice of exercise equipment again!

Just go snap-happy once a day and ache your muscles into submission!

I never knew how difficult snapping with an industrial snap press could be until I got one, and tried it for myself. I got it just before I had Taters and I think I probably gave myself a hernia the first time I tried to apply snaps to a diaper. It takes some serious force (or perhaps I really should work out more.) I can only apply snaps to diapers in small increments. I think 6 diapers is my limit. I just applied snaps to 6 diapers and I fear that if I try to continue tonight, my arm just might fall off.

Hugga is coloring with markers at my feet at the moment. She didn't take a nap today at Mamaws house and so she slept from the time I picked her up, straight through dinner, until about 9pm when I was trying to get Taters to sleep. Then, of course, Hugga wakes up - energized and hungry. Now that she's had something to eat she's not ready to go to bed. So coloring it is. She dumps the entire bucket of markers all over the floor, picks the marker that she wants to use (usually blue these days) and colors all over the page. Then she puts the markers back in the bucket, dumps them out again, and puts them back in the bucket again. She has an obsession with organizing things and I know where she gets it from. I hate cleaning, but I love to ogranize things - go figure.

Here's my current sewing To Do List:

20 Diapers & 20 Inserts for Jesse

10 more Diapers for Taters

10 Panties for Hugga

Skull Sling for Leslie

OS Diapers for Bethann

Holiday/Birthday Sewing

Fabric Dollhouse for Hugga

Fleece Pants for Hugga & Taters

Dresses for Hugga & Taters

I-Spy Bag for Hugga

Blankey for Taters

Fleece Sleeping Bag & Pillow for Hugga

Crayon Roll for Hugga

Dolls for Hugga & Taters

Puppets for the Girls

Fleece Scarves for 25 Adults

Cloth Bags for 13 Adult Couples

Disclaimer - My list isn't even done yet and I know I won't get it all done! I'm over-ambitious, but at least that means my heart is in the right place - right?

My kids amaze me every day!

Hugga played with a little "laptop" for the majority of the day yesterday. It has letters AEIOU on it, a picture of a corresponding item starting with the letter next to it, then it has colors, shapes, and numbers on it. There's a little game you play and it asks you to "Find it" by matching what is shown on the screen. My 2.5 year old has mastered this little laptop. She matches them all and rarely has a mistake. I'm so proud of her!

She's also recognizing most of her colors. We went through a phase where she called everything Orange. If you pushed her to tell you the real color eventually she would but she'd always start off by saying "orange." Last night we were picking out pajamas and I asked her if she wanted to wear her piggie jammies or her princess jammies. She told me mommy.. no, purple princess jammies (wasn't even one of the options.) She caught me off guard though. I said oh, which ones are purple? Sure enough she reached to the bottom of the pile and pulled out the purple Ariel pajamas. So I ask her what color her shirt is and she replies "pink", what color is mommy's shirt "orange", what color is the couch "green" - we haven't really been going through this with her because everything has been orange but I guess it all clicked in her little head one day :)

My last gush for the day about Hugga is that she loves her Mommy & Me DVD. It had been packed away for a while because we never opened up the boxes of DVDs after we moved (because we still haven't come to an agreement about what to do with them - we have an obscene # of DVDs.) Well we started going through them in the process of purging excess "things" in our house and I found a whole stack of Hugga's DVDs. She loves this one in particular because it's like a video of a mommy & me group singing and dancing to nursery rhymes. She knows all the moves and she dances around the living room happy as can be :)

Taters loves that video too. She actually stood up completely on her own with her hands in the air (because they were singing about up & down.) She went from crawling to walking around the coffee table, couch, and loveseat - all in the same week. Now she's making every attempt she possibly can to step out on her own. I am NOT ready for her to start walking! She's pretty much the best a baby can be - perfectly well behaved, rarely cries, etc... but she gets into EVERYTHING, she's very curious to say the least! I'm afraid of what her curiosity will get her into once she's even more mobile!

She's starting to say "mama" more often. Her first word was "dada" which is fair, I guess, because Hugga said "mama" first (though it's a little frustrating when I do everything for her and yet she calls me "dada" much to my chagrin.) No matter how many times I say "mama" back at her up until this point she's just smiled at me and babbled on about "dadadada" sigh. But now I think she finally got it - I'm mama, not dada!

It's funny how it's so exciting to hear these first words and you feel as though you can't wait for them to learn how to talk but then reality sets in. They learn how to talk and then you wish that just for one minute out of the entire day they would "hush" and quit saying your name and get out of your rear end long enough for you to get something done or have a thought to yourself. Hugga has a problem with saying something over and over again while she thinks of what she's saying next or saying your name until you acknoweldge her. It wears my nerves thin to hear "mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy" over and over again and then hear "I, I, I, I, I, I go to bed with daddy!" - as if she has a stuttering problem. She doesn't really though, I think her little brain just works to fast for her to spit all the words out.

What happened to my babies, they're growing up way too fast! Furthermore, Who told them it was allowed!?

Hugga (03-04-06)

Taters (12-31-07)