Sunday, November 24, 2013

Week 47- Extended Family Fun

"Extended family" is such a stuffy and formal title for this, isn't it?

L-R (back/standing): Clint, Elisabeth, Brad, Nora (age 2.5), Yours truly, Preston, Ed (holding Hudson age 5), Dan, Caleb (age 4), Penny, Bill.
L-R (front/kneeling/sitting): Cooper (3.5), Amanda, Jennifer, Keaton (2.5) , Conrad (5), Jenni (holding Caden 2.5), Patsy

That's about 1/4 of the Pratt side of the family. Dan, Jenni and their boys, Caleb and Caden, were visiting from Texas, so Penny hosted another little family get-together. Nora and her 6 boy cousins played nicely together with both blocks and Barbies without missing a beat.


They also stood around the dog gate playing with the dogs and wishing for them to be set free. Max and Molly were in agreement about this.

Caleb is so funny!
Free Max and Molly!
Nora and Conrad were making "beautiful" music on the piano. Well, Conrad actually sounded like he almost kind of knew what he was doing. Nora just pounded loudly on the keys.


We had fun visiting, and we look forward to another family visit later in the week when the Wroblewskis arrive for Thanksgiving from Ohio. Nora will have another girl cousin play with when Adelle arrives!

Yesterday, Nora had her regular weekly gymnastics class. We almost didn't go because she seemed to be feeling under the weather. She took a 2 hour morning nap from 9:30-11:30, which is unheard of, but she woke up cheerful and ready to go, so go we did. This week, Amelia finally switched from her Wednesday evening class to our Saturday class. Nora was so excited to see her that she ran up to her and they hugged. They had fun throughout the class, sometimes sticking together and sometimes branching out to do their own things.

Here they are like 2 peas in a pod.


After class, we went to lunch at Chilis and invited another little girl, Penelope (and her parents, of course) to join us. Nora ordered lemonade, pizza, and pineapple. Amelia ordered lemonade, a corn dog, and corn. Penelope ordered chocolate milk, mac and cheese, and mandarin oranges. They were all fairly confident in both their food and drink orders, which I thought was adorable.

Speaking of food, Nora has been on a very limited vegetable meal plan for a while. I decided to get sneaky this week and add some green veggies to a "milk shake" for her, and it worked like a charm!


The first night, she ate it with a spoon. The next 2 nights through a straw. Blueberries, avocado, greek yogurt, ice, and a small amount of apple juice. Next week, I think I'll try strawberries and spinach.

Finally, we're going on week 3 of Nora being in her big girl bed. I was kind of hoping that by now I'd be able to just put her in her bed, say good night, and not see her again until morning, but it's not quite been working that way. I am still laying with her until she falls asleep, and about half of the time, she is waking up and asking me to come back to bed with her in the middle of the night. I know it will pass, but for now, I'm kind of enjoying the snuggles.


Sunday, November 17, 2013

Week 46- Fun With Friends

Today is "World Prematurity Day", and March of Dimes encouraged people to wear purple in honor of premature babies in our lives. Brad, Nora, and I wore purple for Naomi, of course! She will turn 3 months old in a few days. Her adjusted age is 1 month now, so she's starting to meet those 1 month developmental milestones, and she's growing steadily. She's up from 3 lbs 14 oz to 10 lbs now!

Cheese!
Yesterday and today, Nora stopped to pose on the pumpkin on our way out. Completely unprompted. She sat and said, "Cheese!" and looked at me, waiting for me to get the camera and take her picture. Do you think this child has had her picture taken much in the past 2.5 years?

Here's yesterday's version on our way to her gymnastics class.


Yesterday was a busy day for Nora. We went to The Little Gym for her 12:30 "Superbeasts" class. Then, a little later in the afternoon, we picked up Kaitlyn and went to Amelia's house for some fun. Nora's mind was blown that she got to play with BOTH of her friends at the same time!

The girls got to make their own Papa Murphy pizzas and tear up Allison's livingroom by taking pretty much every one of Amelia's toys out of her toy baskets.

Creating a masterpizza
Testing out some of the ingredients
Almost ready for the oven!
Nora and Amelia got impatient waiting for pizzas to be ready so they started singing the "Clean Up" song and sweeping up for Allison.

Cook, pizza, cook!
What's taking so long?
Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere!

Finally, at long last (10 minutes later), the pizzas were ready.


Before we left for the evening, Nora and Amelia had a little giggle and hug fest in the tent. Honestly, they couldn't possibly be any cuter together.


After we left Allison and Amelia, we headed home where Nora had her first ever sleepover at our house. In the car on our way, Kaitlyn was very talkative and educated me about several important things: Where babies come from (they magically appear in their mom's belly), the rules of the road (did you just run a red light?!) No, I didn't. But thanks for watching out for us, Kaity! She also informed me that since she was spending the night with us, her mom and Jason would probably be very bored because they never did anything fun anyway. 6 year olds are a blast! Something to look forward to in a few years with Nora.

So once we got home, the girls took a bath and then crawled into bed in their PJs for some bedtime stories.


I know one day all too soon, they'll be flipping through teen magazines with pictures of their favorite boy bands instead of princess bedtime stories.

I had hoped that with Kaitlyn by her side, Nora would sleep better, but no such luck. She woke up at 1 a.m. and ended up in bed with me because there was no way all 3 of us were sleeping in Nora's bed. Oh well! It was still a fun evening even if my master "sleep in my own bed without Nora all night long" plan was a bust.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Week 45- "So Pretty, So Cool!"

I'm starting to understand the term "threenager". Nora's just a little older than 2.5, but I swear sometimes she is going on 13. "So pretty" and "So cool" is how she described her new bed when we set it up last night.

Where did my bed go?!
You can trust me when I say that this was a fake smile. He was not very happy at this point.
Daddy's little helper. "So cool!"
Hey, how did all my books get back on these shelves?
"I love it. Thank you, mommy." (My heart melts.)
Mommy got all the thanks for putting the pretty blankets on the bed. No thanks to Daddy who spent the better part of 2 hours disassembling the crib and putting the new bed together for her ha! I'm going to post some more pictures in another week or 2 when all of the bedroom "accessories" arrive. Decorating is so much fun! (Brad might be rolling his eyes at me right now.)

The best part of this, though, is that Brad doesn't have to sleep on the couch anymore if Nora wakes up in the middle of the night and wants Mommy. I can climb into bed with her until she falls back asleep, which is what I did last night. Or if she insists on coming to our bed, at least he has a bed to go to now instead of a couch. I think last night was the first night in over a month (maybe longer!) that he was able to stay in our bed all night and without having a certain little someone kicking him in the side to move over (and out!)

Today, we had lunch with Dede and Grandpa. Nora has so much fun when she visits- she loves her Dede and Grandpa so much, and they adore her, too. She loves playing with Bella dog, and she loves hunting for Kitty cat Doz. She also loves playing in the closet of toys from yesteryear. Here she is snuggling with her Daddy and a baby doll that belonged to Elisabeth 30-some years ago.


And on days like today, she loves playing with whichever of her cousins shows up. Hannah was the lucky one this week. They played hide-and-seek, which was hilarious, because Nora would "hide" in plain sight but then would laugh so hard when Hannah "found" her.


One last tidbit. I'm going to go ahead and call it: Potty trained! I'm not going to over share any of these details, but we're pretty proud of our big girl. It took us about a month with the help of Ms. Tracy. The first 2 weeks were hit and miss, but then something clicked, and she's had very few accidents since then.

So, this week was all about our little girl showing us how grown she is. My heart aches and bursts all at once.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Week 44- We All Love To Trick or Treat

Nora has been really into all things Halloween this year. She's been watching her new favorite TV show, Little Einsteins, and she especially loves their Halloween episode, which includes this cute little song set to classical music. "We all love to trick or treat, trick or treat, trick or treat. We all love to trick or treat so Happy Halloween!" I wish I could have taught her to sing it as she went door-to-door. Maybe next year.

Speaking of door-to-door.


Nora and Kaitlyn has fun knocking on doors for candy on a perfectly warm but windy Halloween night. It was so sweet hearing Nora say "trick or treat" and then "thank you" at each house. At some houses, a basket full of candy was left out for children to choose from, and Nora thoughtfully chose one piece of candy at each of those houses to put in her pumpkin.

I felt like a domestic genius when I cut up her tiger head piece, which you may remember that she hated at Boo at the Zoo. I hot glued it to a head band and voila!


She wore it all night long without complaint. I WIN! In the end, our little tiger and orange tabby cat collected a pretty good stash of candy.


Brad and I sifted through and picked out a few of our favorites. (What? She's 2. She doesn't know any better, nor does she need all that candy ha!) I also picked out some that I didn't want her to have for various reasons and took it to school for my students. (Just what they didn't need.) Since Halloween, Nora has been asking for candy each day, and we let her choose one piece after dinner. Her favorites were the dum dum suckers followed by all other suckers. Now she's into her "leftovers", and she's having a harder time choosing. I'll be interested to see how she handles it once the pumpkin is empty because I can promise you that I won't be buying a random bag of candy to continue her post-Halloween habit.