Cold, Cold, Cold

It's so cold. Griping? Why yes, yes I am. It was 3 the other night when I went to the grocery store with a wind chill of -21. By far the coldest I've been, I'd say pretty much ever. Ridiculous if you ask me. So on top of this, while the rest of the cold United States seems to be getting snow, we do not get much snow. We get ICE. Ice in any form seems to be the trend. I do very much miss having a garage to park in. But at least it's a workout constantly scraping ice off of the car.

Baylee and I went out the other day to go walk in the snow only to find that it was not snow despite the appearance. It was ice. Everything was just a big sheet of ice. So walking in the grass was quite noisy as the ice broke into pieces. Baylee did find that part entertaining(ok so I did too) but it proved difficult for her to walk on as quickly as she desired and we didn't stay out but maybe 10 minutes.

Play group was cancelled since school was as well last week due to the nasty ice everywhere with the prediction of freezing rain in the future. We definitely missed going and won't be going for another 2 weeks because of Christmas break. :( I really enjoy the singing time as does Baylee. Well it comes in second place to the indoor slide.

We have been indoors because of the cold. Even I won't take Baylee out in this mess to play. I keep hoping that one day soon it will be at least 30 degrees and sunny so that we can go to the park and play. So far our only 2 sunny days for weeks happened to both be excrutiatingly cold and had negative wind chills all day long. That was just torturous. Baylee has taken to admiring the outside from new heights, not really a good thing the little monkey. Needless to say I took the picture and made her get down, mean Mom I am.

Baylee still loves to brush her teeth and can be found at least 6 times a day with someones(usually not her own) toothbrush she managed to get out of the drawer. She loves to brush those pearly white which is a good thing, just not that much fun when my toothbrush ends up in her potty or on the floor by the cat's box or under the Christmas tree. We clean toothbrushes a lot around here.

This week also marks the first time she has peed in the floor since using her potty at night before bath time. She was starting to grow out of her "piddler Paige" nickname and doesn't pee everytime she doesn't have a diaper on anymore. However she has not earned my trust and hates that she can't run around totally naked all of the time. But I did laugh this week when she took off her diaper and ran and hid under the Christmas Tree with the kitty and I came around the corner to see her naked tiny heiny in all of it's bright whiteness poking out at me and a little giggle coming from somewhere in the direction.

We let Baylee have bubbles in her tub one night for something fun since it's been a lot of boringness inside. Bubble is one of her best words and I'm sure she said it at least 126 times while she played in the tub that night. She was in awe at the amount of bubbles.

She's very intrigued with hats right now too. She has the general idea of hats down pat. She likes to invent her own though. She has put everything from blocks, to paper, to a bowl, to a stuffed animal on her head and smiles all big and says "hat". But yet her real hats are on her head for 3 seconds and she's angry. Funny lady she is.

Baylee and Lilli also got a blow up sleeping bag bed from Grandma Lowe this week. We blew it up to test it out and Baylee fell in love. She loves to play on it. Yesterday she had every toy in the living room piled on it leaving no room for her. But she was content to put everything "up" on the bed.

She is also very good at pointing out hot since our last incident with hot. She says hot to anything that is warm now. Maybe she did learn her lesson after all?

On the more grateful side of things...Saturday night, Cody, Baylee and I went shopping to pick up a few things. Apparently we were feeling brave and we even went to Walmart and our local "mall". After eating a nutritious dinner from Taco Bell (haha) we were all done and were on the way home. We got to a stop sign at a normally busy intersection and it was surprisingly empty. However, I had one of those gut feelings you can't ignore to not go yet. I didn't really see any immediate harm and there were a few cars but none to the stop signs yet. I looked up to see a car approaching from our right that ran the stop sign at a speed that was a little faster than our normal 25 mph around here and he didn't even hesitate at the stop sign. Had I gone instead of sit there for just those extra seconds that I did, that car would have creamed right into Cody and Baylee's side of the car. Cody never even saw the car. My heart skipped a few beats and we drove away unscathed. I was definitely grateful that I went with my instinct on that one!

The official countdown is on. I wasn't going to start it until Christmas day, but I've given in. We have one week until Lilli and Faith arrive. It will be so much fun to have them here. Crossing my fingers that the weather will cooperate next Tuesday for travelling.

We want to wish every one a very Merry Christmas and we send our love!

Time Travel

Lately I have been listening to the 80's station on our tv a lot. It's been fun. Baylee has a preference for the 80's and classic rock. She loves to dance and it gives us good workouts. I video taped a little bit of it. Ok so more than a little bit of it, but I haven't finished uploading videos. This one is to "Jessies Girl". Hope it makes yall smile!
It's easiest for me to put it on youtube, so here's the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teeC6trElFM

Busy

Between Christmas cards, Christmas shopping, and extra projects and surveys for me, on top of all the normal stuff, it's been a little busy. I am slacking in the blog area.

Through it all, Baylee is such a great helper, with laundry, dishes and straightening. she likes to wear dirty laundry in anyway possible. She makes sure all of the dirty silverware does not stay in the dishwasher once I put it in. She pulls down more when we are cleaning up than she puts up. But it's the general concept of helping she needs right?

Baylee loves to steal her Dad's seat when he gets up and always takes the remote and has even grabbed his blanket while she's at it. He comes back in the room to find a sneaky little lady has taken over and she just finds it hilarious.

So I had this great idea that I would take pictures myself for our Christmas cards. Well, it was a lot harder than I expected. It took 3 days of trying and many many deleted pictures. I ended up just zooming in on one and cropping it and turned out cute. In the end it paid off and my attempts were successful, but I had to keep some of the duds all the same. Maybe next year it wont be such a fiasco. (right?)

Baylee got a present from her MaaMaa(my mom) that she got to open early. She absolutely loved the ornament. If only I had known she didn't need anything other than an ornament to make her day, I wouldn't have gotten her a kitchen for Christmas. Well, maybe I would have but it was amusing how entertaining a Nativity star could be to one such young lady. She got angry at me for hanging it on the tree so we could go to her room for naptime. It was taken right back off and I got an evil look. I tried a second time to take it from her. She ended up taking a nap with her star. It wasn't worth the fight.

Baylee is thick headed and has to learn the hard way. She has already touched to stove after much preaching. Unfortunately and fortunately it wasn't that hot when she did that and just jerked away. Today she learned another lesson of "hot". I continuously warned her not to touch the lightbulb in the lamp that it was hot. I finally gave up and let her learn her way. She touched the lightbulb and cry she did. She was hardly able to breathe she was crying so hard. After she calmed down a little she gave the lamp numerous evil eyes for hurting her and then said "hot". Hopefully we won't have to learn that lesson again.

No big accomplishments. Though it's been a busy week, nothing too exciting going on and not too much to report. She's not trying very hard to learn new words right now. I guess she thinks she's on Christmas vacation. We have about 2 weeks until Lilli and Faith get here. We are definitely excited for that.

Down again....

Our week started out a little rough. Baylee had a pretty nasty cold last weekend. She seemed to be doing better by Monday but was waking up in the night and fighting going back to sleep. (yay, no sleep again!) After a very rough night Tuesday, I took Baylee to the doctor for you guessed it...ears or at least that was what I assumed by the repeat barking seal cough. Turns out she has another ear infection. I am grateful that we went from June until December without any. However, was not thrilled to hear it but thank goodness the Doc says I caught it early and appeared to just beginning to get infected. And it was only one ear. Hopefully this time we will get rid of it with the first round of antibiotics. I am not looking forward to the possibility of a repeat from last spring when the poor lady had ear infections from March until mid June at the cost of a little over $400 as well for visits and antibiotics! You can't blame me for that. But there is hope as she took a normal nap on Thursday for the first time this week. We still have not gotten to sleep through the night but I'm hopeful for that as well.

The other good part about the doc visit was that since I decided to skip her 15 month checkup, we got a weight for her and I measured her height at home. She's now 22 pounds and 30 1/4 inches tall. Both are right at the 30% mark. At her one year she was right at the 50% for both which had been a jump up, but now back down to where she was. She's so little but yet so big. Sometimes I forget how small she is. We went to playgroup on a different day and some of the ladies I knew had never seen her before and just went nuts over how little she was but was keeping up with their 2 & 3 year olds.

And we got to shop at Kohls while we were down in that town anyway. I am enjoying shopping more than ever before, I think because well obviously it's fun to buy for the girls. But it's also something I don't get to do as often because I dont want to drive 30 miles to go.

We finally received our first inevitable snow. Sunday morning we woke up to I'd say about 4 inches. It's been cold as snort and snowing off an on all week with it occasionally sticking but not piling up anymore and mostly melting by the end of the day.

Because Baylee didn't feel great, we have been in the house a lot this week and had to cancel a few of our plans and playtimes. She has perfected the word apple and says it perfectly, when she's not being lazy and saying app. We pulled out the Little People Nativity set for her to play with. She just loves it. We played with her toys a lot this week. The "stuck indoors" has at least given me time to pay better attention to which toys she really likes and which ones she no longer plays with and which ones she can't decide about. So I have gotten to pack up some things to take to storage which is perfect timing for Christmas coming up. I've gotten some things done around the house that I kept putting off as well. It's nice to still get some things accomplished.

Not much else to report. We stayed pretty low on the radar this week.