Sledding, take 1

Whoo boy, we have had some snow. 

Which means, of course,. that someone needed to go sledding.

Not this someone, though.

Coming home to hot chocolate is the best part. James looks pretty miffed that he didn't get one, however.

Swinging

I searched and searched, and it looks like I never posted this video from way back last summer.

Pumping achieved (mostly!)

Baby-led Weaning Update

(It should be obvious, but yes, we're still catching up.) Look how little James was! I'm thinking these were from 10 or 11 months old, because that's when he grew out of the bumbo. But anyway, baby-led weaning worked out really well the second time around, too.

Frozen blueberries are still a favorite. There was a recent Slate article with the title "Your Kale-eating Baby Does Not Impress Me," so it seemed somewhat timely again. Just for the record, my baby-led babies have shunned kale (and avocado, which kills me), but they are generally good (if ridiculously messy) eaters.

Birthday Party Fun

Still working on the photo backlog. We went to a birthday party and had a ton of fun. James liked the riding toys:

It was a royal party, so there were wands and sceptors (and a bunch of wild running around - see the bounce house?). I didn't manage to get one of Amelie standing still.

Surveying her realm.

A somewhat disheveled queen.

Mama and James:

And finally, Amelie and the birthday girl! I think Laurel had a happy one!

Deck

Even more catch-up. Remember when it used to be warm?

James loves to be out on the deck. If the door is open even for a minute, he makes a break for it.

Handprint Art

For the past two years, we've given homemade calendars with handprint and footprint art of the kids as gifts to the grandparents. If anyone out there is looking for a fun, cheap, and relatively easy kid-made gift, I'd highly endorse this one.

I got the idea from my Aunt Lana, who gives a similar gift to her daycare parents and then just browsed Google Images for ideas. By decorating the front with markers, we didn't have to wait for it to dry to do the page on the opposite side.

The penguins are one of my favorite.

February is handprint grass and fingerprint flowers. The handprint hearts that we tried for valentines didn't work out very well.

 March is a rather thick-necked giraffe. There were lots of ideas for animals like this - lions, elephants, dinosaurs, etc.

The robins for May might actually be my favorite.

June. We are big Dr. Seuss fans around here. And the kids certainly are wild.

Handprint fish for July. When I did the marker embellishments last year, I accidentally did my mom's so that the fish were upside down.

August is a footprint rocketship. Amelie really liked having her foot painted.

The hungry, hungry caterpillar seemed fitting for September. Amelie's hand is the head and antenae and James's handprints made the body and legs. Their feet are pretty obviously different, but it's harder to tell with the hands.

November has got to be the classic turkey.

December is a footprint Rudolph. Amelie did a thumbprint to make his red nose, too.

One change I made this year was to include the next January at the end. Mostly because it's hard to make appointments around the end of the year without a place to write them down, but also because there were so many ideas for art for the season. These are thumbprint lights. 

I got the whole thing spiral-bound at Kinko's for less than $5 in about 10 minutes (parking and lugging two kids around downtown is a slightly different story).

Snow Days

Amelie has been out of school all week, and Sam and I were off Tuesday and Wednesday due to snow and cold. Here are a list of fun snow-day activities the kids did:

• making waffles
• hour-long baths
• coloring on the sliding-glass door with window crayons
• doing art on big pieces of paper taped to the floor
• playing with alphabet magnets
• reading approximately one million books
• going sledding (just Sam and Amelie - James and Mama don't much like being *in* the snow)
• making snow cream
• plenty of snacks and naps
• making extraordinary messes

Bath

I found some pre-haircut, pre-new bathroom pictures of the kids in the tub. Bathtime is one of their favorite times of day.

They can stay in there for an hour. (They could probably stay in longer than an hour, but at some point the "water stays in the tub" rule has to be challenged and/or someone is poked in the eye.)

Christmastime

Oh, my, I have a backlog of pictures to upload. It's become so daunting that I might just post a bunch of boring pictures of the kids opening presents. The right-before-Christmas post went up quite a while ago.

Our friend Caitlin S got Amelie this lovely coat last Christmas, and we got another year's use out of it.

Christmas Eve. James may or may not have taken the candle we were supposed to light at the end of the service and pitched it over the heads of the people in the row in front of us. I took that as a sign that we were not meant to participate in the actual lighting.

Amelie at the unity tree.

Here they are opening presents Christmas morning. The squeezy pouch of strawberry applesauce and the balloon were the biggest hits by far.

James stopped going through his stocking when he reached this goldmine. Fruit in a pouch!

Both kids were up by 5am on Christmas morning. (That's why all of the pictures are so dark! It was still dark!)

The chocolate mouse might have been a close second.

No wait, balloons.

More presents. We really didn't get them very many.

James needed a little help. Thanks to Emily S for the fishing toy!

Sam got me a new blue robe. (There's my old blue robe on the arm of the couch.) Thanks to Shauna for the purple monkey toy. He loves it!

They did St. Nicholas again at Amelie's school.