Friday, January 31, 2014

Faye J.

Lately I've noticed that Faye's little body is a lot slimmer than it used to be. Baby chunky thighs are now slender, big-girl legs. Sad and cute at the same time. Our spunky girl turned three last week! She's been tricking people into thinking she's three or four for a long time now though, so I guess her birthday just got her closer to telling the truth.
This wintertime lack of humidity has really put a damper on Faye's curls! We still can get some body going though.
Faye girl has a great big smile that's a little off to one side. We love that!
When she finds something funny, Faye throws back her head and laughs so hard. She is one fun girl.
While parking at Costco, the kids always beg me to park by the "climbing wall." That's why they build these, right?
She's so proud!
Big three-year-old girls must keep up with their brothers.
A couple of months ago, Everett got the hang of riding a two wheeler, so the balance bike was up for grabs. I was surprised at how fast Faye caught on to it! This particular day she rode almost two miles on it!
There goes my girl. And my triple stroller is feeling a little empty with just one baby!




The crew.
Rick's schedule has been quite busy lately. After a weekend on call, the kids literally hadn't seen him in over a week. (Except for taking them to the bathroom in the middle of the night!) Rick randomly stopped by the house to change clothes one day, and when he walked in the door we all froze and stared at him like he was some stranger. And then the girls ran over and jumped on him!
Isla gives the sweetest hugs and kisses. (Faye's feeling a little jealous?)
Faye definitely loves her daddy. I hear about it a thousand times a day when she's upset with me, crying, "I NEED MY DADDY!"

I wouldn't say Faye has a great attention span for sit-down activities and crafts, but she did like playing with shaving cream one day!
Faye is a child who NEVER wears shoes. As soon as we get in the car, they're off. If she wears them to the park or the library or anywhere else, by the time we leave they're no where to be found. Faye has lost one of almost every single pair of shoes she has owned. I suppose I could enforce some shoe rules a little better, but I tend to let me kids decide on things like whether they'll wear shoes and then suffer the consequences. On this particular day, Faye had taken her shoes off at the library, and then we were walking over to the park. We stepped off of the sidewalk onto the grass, and she froze and started screaming her head off. I picked her up, and the bottoms of her feet were covered with a ton of tiny burrs, "pricklies," she calls them. I had to sit her on the sidewalk and pick out each and every one of those slivers while she kept screaming. It was awful! There were a few stuck too deep into her feet to get out, so we went home planning on using tweezers there.
Faye wanted to have a rest in her room as soon as we got home, so I put her in her bed. She must have crawled out and gotten halfway down the stairs before falling asleep! The happy ending to this story would be to say that Faye learned her lesson and always wears shoes now. I can't say that's true!
Faye had a fun birthday. She got to go to a gymnastics class. (Which, I hate to break it to her, but I am going to cancel it immediately. I mis-read the info, and it costs twice as much as I thought!) I let her watch a whole episode of Calliou in Spanish. I think I even let her have treats right when she woke up!

Faye requested caramel popcorn for her birthday treat. I found a recipe for a salted caramel cake, which was really good! We served it with birthday cake batter flavored caramel popcorn.
Faye only wanted to invite the neighbors over for her celebration. (She also really wanted them to bring their dogs and cats. Her big plan was to have them all chase each other around our house.) Right before we ate cake, our friends the Allreds stopped by to bring her a present, so we were glad her party got a little bigger! (It's nice to have a friend whose husband is also always at work; we stick together!!)
Faye liked blowing out her candles and opening a few little presents.
We are proud of Faye for throwing a lot fewer tantrums now that she's three (and a lot fewer breakable objects). We're also proud of her for cutting a few cute little bangs all by herself. (She did a pretty good job, right?) I'm maybe the most proud of her for finally giving up her paci!! A couple of months ago I started telling her that when she was three she'd be too big to use a paci in her bed anymore. I cut the tip of her pacis just a tiny bit. The first night after I cut them, she was a little upset and kept complaining about her paci, "it's squeezing air!" But she slept all right. Faye would often claim she was done with her paci and was going to send them to her cousin Soren, but every night she would cave when she couldn't sleep without it. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, we had a yard sale. She said she was going to sell her paci, and put it in with the yard sale toys. That night we couldn't find it, and I told her to lay down while I looked for it. Five minutes later, she was ASLEEP WITH NO PACI IN HER MOUTH. That has never happened in her life! (It helped that she hadn't napped that day, so she was nice and tired.) She hasn't looked back and has done a great job sleeping at night like a big girl! (She also quit napping, which is sort of rocking my quiet afternoons.) 



Everett keeps reminding Faye that he's "heard of the terrible threes," so she's not out of the terribles just yet. While this girl getting mad really can be pretty terrible, we sure love our spirited, fun, strong, beautiful, lovable three-year-old girl.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Christmas.

I've been putting off organizing pictures over Christmas, mostly since I am so disappointed in myself for not documenting it better! Ever since I got a smartphone, I take awful-quality pictures instead of any nice ones. And I think the great quantity and low quality of pictures is sort of depressing enough that I stopped taking many at all. I must fix this! The kids aren't going to be this cute forever! Anyway, here's hoping that this is our family's worst documented Christmas. (Not pictured are the huge Christmas dinner party and nativity reenactment that we host every year, and lots of fun times with Rick's parents including a visit to the Riverwalk to see the Christmas lights.)

For handmade gifts this year, I got several bamboo cutting boards and etched some little drawings in with a Dremel. It was a fun new thing to try out.
We did this the night before Christmas Eve, to avoid staying up all night on Christmas Eve. I think that just made us stay up late two nights in a row. Oh well, next year I will wrap in advance!! Rick had an entire week of for the holiday, which was really nice.
This is Faye with, not her grandma, but our next-door-neighbor. We have grown to really, really love them, and luckily they like us too and don't mind that two little girls to toddle over to their door every morning at 7:30 a.m. (They hang out with Granny Cheryl while I drive our kids and theirs to school.) Cheryl gave soft Christmas blankets to the kids, which was perfect, since Faye had stolen one of hers.

Isla actually prefers Cheryl, and will jump out of my arms to go see her anytime she can.
Sprinkling reindeer food on Christmas Eve. Carson is very vocally a non-believer, but for some reason he still thought the reindeer food was very important.
Santa sure works in mysterious ways. A trampoline just sort of appeared over the fence and, with the help of the neighbors, we set it up. (Santa scored it for free from someone who didn't want it!)
Ready to go downstairs...
Reading the note from Santa.
She later said that Cheetos were her favorite Christmas gift. Apparently better than the trampoline, baby dolls, etc.
Carson and Grandpa Sam setting of one of Carson's gifts, a rocket.
We celebrated seven years of marriage a couple of days after Christmas.

Monday, January 6, 2014

The last of 2013.

At about 11 months, Isla finally broke her first tooth. (It was pretty cute to have a toothless baby who could walk before that!) And then eight broke through at once in the following few weeks! One top tooth came in a while before the other, so we called her "scraggle tooth" sometimes. 
This was a family night in November: an obstacle course.
Yes, it was warm enough to be without clothes on outside in November!
One of Faye's little pre school activities on colors. She wouldn't drink the colored leche though.
One cold Sunday we got to bust out the sweaters.
The boys' are hand-knit by their great aunt. They are beautiful!
Carson can be an awesome older brother when he decides to be one. (New Year's resolution number one: get rid of Faye's paci. I snipped the tip a little bit two nights ago, and when she was trying to suck it to go to sleep she kept saying, "it's squeezing air!" She didn't like it, but the time has finally come.)
I was super happy to discover that the kids like kale chips.
Faye would prefer to wear her leotard most days.
Playing war.
Still bathing all together.
The first weekend in December was really, really cold. (Today is as well. What is going on, San Antonio??) We had planned on going to this Christmas festival thing though, and the kids still wanted to go despite the cold. We went, everybody cried about for about 20 minutes, and we left. It was miserable! They had some fake snow there, and Everett was the only one who would even go in it for a minute.
Our next-door neighbors' dog Bubba died, and we attended the burial.
Isla loves the pet store.
I turned 30! I stand by Golden Corral as the best family restaurant. Good enough salad bar for me, plenty of food for babies and kids, meat for Rick. We made a humongous mess at our table. Isla ate two whole cobs of corn and stayed in her high chair for probably an entire hour, which is a record for sure. It was pretty amazing.
Not to mention the desserts! Which one of these is not like the other... Isla still has her corn!
Carson lost his first tooth soon after turning 6! It was pretty sad, though, since when he went to put it under his pillow we couldn't find it anywhere. It didn't help that I had just vacuumed the entire downstairs, and when we went to look in the vacuum bag we found a million tiny white pieces of popcorn, disguising any tooth that might have been in there! RIP, Carson's first tooth. He left a note for the tooth fairy and got a quarter anyway.
My baby is getting to be such a big girl. I get a little teary sometimes when I hold someone else's newborn. For the first time I have a one-year-old and am not pregnant! It's a little bittersweet. 
Isla is a pretty smart little thing and wants to do everything her siblings are doing. These kids learned and grew a lot in 2013; onto the next year!