Our Family Blog: January 2010

Friday, January 22, 2010

Visiting Santa

The week before Christmas, the kids waited patiently in a 3-hour line to have the chance to meet Santa! This was our first time to the downtown Seattle Santa (in previous years we've met Santa more by chance at the local mall). It was well worth the wait!

"that's my brother"

"be good"

Afterwards, we went on the merry-go-round at Westlake.

We ended the night with Bryn's birthday dinner and then a trip to the Bellevue Botanical garden's light show!

Just for fun

Discovery with Daddy

From November...

Ready to head out!

Bungee + kids + Dad =

Pooped.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Neu posts

My mom has a few new posts on her blog:

http://neusnewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/gymnastic-fantastic.html

http://neusnewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/snowcation-and-sleep-over.html

Getting colder!

Mainly I'm putting this photo up so people see that I DO take pictures of Andy too, not just Sly. It's just that Andy usually plays quietly in his room these days (I know!) and Sylvia is our crazy girl. Squeeky wheel and all that!

Faces

Halloween

Our first Halloween in our new neighborhood was truly our dream come true. The kids trick-or-treated in our neighborhood, where virtually all the houses had their lights on ready to give out candy. We probably had about 50 kids come to our house (this is a huge improvement over our last house, where we'd have one or two teenagers or no one at all). I just loved walking with the kids and having groups of other little kids overtake us, everyone talking happily and running to front doors for candy.

Mom and Tom came for dinner and to trick or treat with the kids.

Oh, glory days.

Ready to trick-or-treat!

The kids are often competitive, but this night, Andy walked to every single door and then waited patiently for Sylvia so that she could ring the door bell.

Mmmmmmmmm

We all enjoyed the kids' haul. In later years, I'm sure they won't be quite so generous about sharing it with us grown-ups. But for now, we dove in like kids ourselves!

Notice the four different pieces of candy she's holding.

In an outfit of her choosing

The wall comes down ... and goes back up

Sometime in October, I thought it was time to give Sylvia more freedom by turning her crib into a toddler bed by taking off one crib side (actually, I got tired of having to get up every morning to my alarm clock: Sylvia yelling "Mommy, I'm AWAKE!"). She loved her new arrangement and immediately brought a stack of books into bed to read by herself. (Yes she has lipstick on in the phone below.)

The first night was fantastic. It was as if nothing had changed! She just rolled over and went to sleep. Given what an incredibly hard time Andy gave us for several years, this felt like a very big miracle in our own home. Then night 2 came along. Sylvia got out of bed about three times and I'd had it. It was as if Andy used up all my bedtime patience so that, whereas he got 10,000 out-of-bed chances, she got three. I immediately put the crib side back up. Sylvia cried, but we've been doing fine ever since. One of these days we'll get her a bed and she'll move on from her crib for good ... but maybe I'll let Shawn do bed time the first few nights.

Those are some BIG pants.

Andy thought it would be funny to try on Shawn's painting sweats, with funny results:

All in!

Sweet

Not only does Sly look sweet in her sundress dancing around the living room (yes, in mid-October, I'm still catching up), but you can see what one of Shawn's friends called a "bad hangover room" -- white walls, large glowing windows even with the curtains closed. Also note the unfinished floors. This will look different in later photos!