some new experiments, made possible with my new toy.

Ugh now unfortunately Celia is out for the count with this virus. Let’s hope she gets through it faster. I’m hoping I can send Josie to school tomorrow.

The girls and Jordi went along with my dad ice skating quite a few weekends this year, enough to go through a whole pass of tickets and some more. The difference from the first try to now has been amazing. We got Celia some single blade skates and she’s determined to move herself across the ice. Josie likes to hang out, but when we found her a friend at the last session, she just went around and around holding that little girls hand in friendship and moving herself along. Nothing like a new friend for some motivation! Celia is mostly walking but she just goes where she wants, when she wants. Here’s a rare photo of her holding on to one finger as she watches the action around her. My dad’s facebook page has some video of them actually moving to get the real effect. Can’t wait to join them next year zipping around the ice.

Josie got a stomp rocket for Christmas this year, and now that’s it’s finally nice out we’ve taken it out a few times to play with it. She’s got it mastered and Celia’s got the hang of it too. It’s so much fun for all the kids at the park and the girls have been great about sharing it and taking turns. Today we got a few minutes of playtime before it started to rain on us.

Celia has taken up an attachment to Josie’s old ballet leotard. If you’ve seen us about town lately you’ve probably been treated to Celia lifting up her shirt and showing you her leotard. At home it’s pretty much all she’ll wear, if she’ll wear anything but a diaper and undershirt. It’s for games like ‘ballet class’, ‘gymnastics’, and ‘doctor’. It’s a wear-everywhere type thing apparently in this two year old’s mind.

She’s also obsessed with Josie’s new lace-up shoes and I found her an old pair of Josie’s that just happen to fit and have laces. The only other lace shoes we’ve ever owned. Lucky coincidence.

This week we got the quilt I made for Celia back from the quilter. I made the top and bottom, but the quilt is too big for me to machine quilt on my machine and there’s no way I’m going to hand quilt something so I sent it out to a woman with a ‘longarm’ quilt machine who sewed the lovely flowers on the top and the bottom and even did the binding for me. It’s a mis-mash design on top, nothing official, just something I made up from some pictures I saw on the web and liked too. It was my first applique usage too. The back is all purple, same as Celia’s name.

And now I’m on to the next one. Josie got a bug theme quilt, Celia got an elephant one, and the new baby will have an owl theme. Hopefully I’ll be close to done with it by the time the baby arrives and not as late as I was with Celia!

Finally here at the end of March it feels like spring! Today we went into town and played on the Boston Common and met up with Jordi for lunch. Home again for nap, reading and chore time before we headed outside to play. The girls had very minimal patience for me to snap a photo but I got one I liked.

And for the finale of December, here in February, we went to Pennsylvania to see my dad’s side of the family. Celia unfortunately got sick and on the trip down was actually asking to get back into her car seat and rest which is very unlike her, but very convenient for having an easy trip for the rest of us. Christmas Eve she was unfortunately running a low fever, but we gave her some medicine and tried to take it easy with her as we celebrated at my cousins Sue and Jeff house and went to church. The girls were great at church and even went up to the front to hear the children’s part of the story. Zeke, Sue and Jeff’s gigantic dog was a big attraction for the girls although they were wary at first and all had to learn how to get along with each other.

We all enjoyed some yummy food, and exchanging gifts. We got the girls home a bit earlier this year and they crashed into sleepiness quickly and we joined them soon too. We couldn’t fit all the presents with us in the car for Christmas morning so we left our own presents at home and just exchanged with the Graybills that morning so it was a short and sweet time to appreciate our gifts one at a time.

Look how nicely those two hold up their stockings and pose! Maybe in 15 years I’ll get that too, instead I got this:

But Josie was feeling magnanimous and posed for me in front of the big glass windows.

After presents we had a delicious Christmas brunch.

And we otherwise had a lot of time to hang out, visit, play with our new presents and eat cookies for the rest of the day and the next. We had snow on Christmas Eve and so it was a pretty white Christmas. We also had another storm the following day which prevented us from doing as much visiting as we might have done with other people, but Josie and I got to build a snowman. The kids next door had been out sledding and made some ‘sleigh tracks’ down the backyard and there actually are some deer around too behind the house so we had some cool tracks in the snow for a Christmas morning story.

We spent a lot of time, grownups included, playing with the magnatiles we had brought with us. They built a tower up to the ceiling after going through many different design options to get enough stability and reach. Todd asked why he didn’t get these toys for Christmas.

All too soon it was time to go home and we had a pretty good trip home again, although my mom flew and it took her as long to get home as it did us because of delayed flights. The girls were quite patient and enjoyed the toys and the attempts of me and my dad to entertain them.

Once we had gotten home, we took a day to recover and then had our third Christmas present opening at our house again under the tree. This is the big stash of loot Josie had definitely been waiting for. Somehow it does all fit into the house though.

Jordi and I got some wonderful new warm blankets that are huge for our bed which we’ve been really enjoying. Plus new luggage for our fairly frequent trips. The girls got way too many things and we’ve been doing a lot of art with the supplies we got as well. But of course, they also just played in the giant boxes we got too.

Things seemed to be going well with sledding. All aboard!

Yay sledding!

uh oh, just a bit of snow. Poor Celia.

Shake it off kids!

Good job ducking behind Celia, Josie!

Oops. Jordi and a bunch of feet sled down the hill.

From a few days ago, we had some vociferous reading in the morning light.