Sunday, January 30, 2011

Jillian's Birthday!

I can't believe Jillian is 1. This first year has flown by. Aside from the fact that she's very clingy, she's an pretty good kid. She isn't walking on her own yet, but she loves to walk along the furniture or walk while holding my hands. Lately, she's also taken to letting go of whatever she's holding on to and standing by herself. She can't stand longer than 10 seconds, but she's getting better and I think we'll see some walking in the next month. Here are some pictures from the family birthday party.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Sledding

Last Saturday, we enjoyed a nice family outing. There was some fresh snow on the ground so we decided to go sledding. I had to borrow a couple sleds from a friend (I know, how can we live where we live and not own sleds) and a snow suit for Jillian because the zipper on hers broke. But we had a blast. One of the sleds was big enough for all four of us to go, but Annabelle preferred to go down the hill by herself. All Jillian wanted to do was be pulled around in her sled. Both kids and parents had fun and there were no crashes, tears, or fits, so I'd say it was a very successful trip. Here are pictures and videos.







Sunday, January 23, 2011

cereal, Cereal, CEREAL!

I am not a couponer; however a go, if I happen to come across a good deal, I take full advantage of it. For instance, last week, I went to the store to pick up just a couple of things for my piano students and I saw that our family's favorite cereals were on sale. We are huge cereal eaters in our home and so it only made sense to get a lot, and so I did. In our house, we call cereal by the color of the bag (Annabelle started doing this and Michael (somewhat facetiously) and I do it as well now). I bought 16 white (can you tell that's our ultimate favorite kind of cereal?), 4 yellow, 2 blue, and 4 red. (There are only 2 reds in the picture- I found 2 more bags as I was putting the cereal away after taking the picture.) And boy, did I go through a lot to get the white. Apparently, it's other families' favorite cereal as well. I had to dig through 8 cardboard boxes before I finally found these last 16 bags at the absolute very bottom of the last box. I can't imagine what people were thinking when they saw me almost completely submerged headfirst in these giant boxes filled with bags of cereal.

Now, for the savings. If I had paid full price for each of these cereals, it would have cost me $114.48. Instead, I got 26 family-sized bags of cereal for $60. Now, we are set on cereal for a long time and I can say that we've now officially started our food storage.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Bear Crawl

Jillian will be 1 next week, and although she isn't walking yet, she is coming up with some creative ways to crawl. Here, she is demonstrating how good she is at the bear crawl. She prefers to crawl this way about half of the time over the regular crawling method.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Snow

Annabelle and Michael spent some quality time together playing in the snow on Saturday. We have plans to go sledding as a family this weekend, so I guess I should get prepared and buy a sled. Can you believe we live in a place where it's winter 8 months out of the year and we don't own a sled?




Don't you love Michael's outfit? He had just returned from a run up to the temple and back. I can't believe he's running in this weather, but whatever. Way to go, Michael.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Panoramic photograpghy

Michael got me a new camera for Christmas. It's really nice and will make uploading pictures and videos to my blog a lot quicker. One of the coolest features about it is its ability to take panoramic pictures. Love it!

Cute ( and not so cute) hairdos

One of the things I love about having girls is that I get to play around with their hair. Annabelle has been trained to hold still (sometimes for a very long time, which, considering the endless amount of energy she has is pretty amazing) while I try new things on her hair. After years of practice, I now know how to to do over 6 different braids, cool twists, and other fun stuff. Jillian's hair is getting long enough in the back that I can do a ponytail, but her hair in front isn't long enough to be included in that ponytail, so for now, she gets ponytails on top of her hair. She, also, is trained to sit still while I do her hair. Thankfully, it takes less than a minute to do her hair. I don't know if she's capable of sitting still for long periods of time than that. Here are a few pictures of some cute (and not so cue) hairdos:



Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Gymnastics class

I enrolled Annabelle in gymnastics and today, she went to her first class. I had to explain to her what gymnastics even was, but once she learned that she would be doing somersaults and lots of jumping, she was so excited. There were only 2 kids in the class and they had both taken gymnastics lessons before, but Annabelle had no problem jumping right into the activities. Her teacher told me that usually kids are nervous or even scared to use some of the equipment the first time, but Annabelle had been very eager to get involved. It was so fun to see Annabelle have so much fun. She can't wait until next week's class. Here are some videos and pictures.



Sunday, January 2, 2011

Welcome, 2011!

What a great weekend we've had. We got to spend more time together as a family that we have in a long time. Friday night, we let Annabelle stay up late (til 9:30) and we watched Toy Story 3 as a family.
Saturday was filled with, what else, but football. Of course, there was a lot of playing around the house going on as well. Speaking of which, what's wrong with this these pictures? Ah, this is better:This year, church is at 1 pm (rather than 8:30 am) so I had plenty of time to get the girls looking cute. And Annabelle now goes to Primary and she came home singing, "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam" and wearing a sunbeam around her neck that she made in her class.