Sadie Sue

**This happened over Thanksgiving so I'm a little late but I wanted it recorded somewhere and I'm no good at journals**

For reasons that I don't know, my sister Sally was given the nickname Sally Sue by my dad. When Sally had her first girl and named her Samm, my dad started calling her Sammy Sue. Over the past several months that he's been here working it's always been Sadie Sue. (by the way my mom's middle name is Sue but I have no idea if that has anything to do with it. I think it's just the "S" names).

So now that you have that background info I can move on to the real story. I've been trying to teach Sadie how to respond when asked "what's your name?" because she has always responded simply "Me". Over thanksgiving her Aunt Lorie was here and did her best to teach Sadie her name, and by golly it worked.

When Lorie proceeded to ask Sadie what her middle name was and Sadie didn't know, Lorie informed her it is Sadie Cora.

Ava quickly chimed in "No, it's Sadie Sue!"

Thanks dad. I got a good laugh out of that one!

Ava turns 4!!

Can it really be? 4 years ago I was sitting in the hospital recovering from a c-section and holding my firstborn child?

 Ava came downstairs a few minutes before our family was coming and announced she was ready. She had gotten herself dressed up in this outfit and I figured, why not? It's her birthday so she can wear whatever she wants.

 We are still working on the "how to blow out candles" technique. Ava doesn't have it down quite yet.

Ava was so sweet with her presents. She insisted that her cousin Abby get to help her open the presents. She also let cousin Roman help and later Sadie too. She was very sweet and unselfish and I was so proud of her.

Unfortunately I forgot to turn my flash on when I turned my camera back on and so the pictuers I took of her with her presents didn't turn out. Except this one. This is her new dress up dress for her Fancy Nancy birthday party (we are having next week). She also got a camera (a real kids digital one), and lots of other good stuff.

And while we were all busy with presents her cousin Charlie climbed herself onto the table and helped herself to a cupcake.

Happy Birthday, Sweetie. We love you. 

Christmas 2011

Christmas this year started with the girls on the stairs. It was hard to get them to even stand there for a picture, let alone sit down for more than one so I could get a good one. Oh well.

 With church at 9:00 in the morning we decided to just let the girls look at the stockings and open a few presents that were sitting next to their stockings before we left for church.

 Sadie, after opening her stocking stuff, said "but I asked for a cowboy horsie". haha. Santa did in fact bring the horsie but it was under the tree so she didn't get to open it until after church.

 After stockings we quickly got the girls into their Christmas dresses and headed off to church.

 Ava asked Santa for a doll that pees (Baby Alive).

 And Sadie got her "cowboy horsie".

And hour later Sadie was still happily playing with her horsies......

While Ava played with everything.

And that was our Christmas this year. Chris, among other things, got a survival hand chain saw and a deep fryer. Santa brought me a camera (a month ago!), and some amazing green apple chapstick! (I love anything and everything green apple flavored!)

Merry Christmas!

We've been counting down the days until Christmas this year with Ava by counting the number of times she has to sleep (thanks to my neice Samm for this method of count down!).  We started somewhere around 20. 

Tonight as we were headed to bed Ava asked "Are you really positively sure Santa is coming after this sleep?"

Yup, I'm sure.

Merry Christmas everyone!

You can't catch me....

....I'm the gingerbread man!

We made our first ever gingerbread houses this year. Or I should say decorated our first ever. The house came pre assembled. But we had fun doing it. And I'll bet half the candy has already been eaten. Here are a few pictures from our fun afternoon with our friends.

 See Sadie in the background? Yeah, that's about as long as she lasted. She ate a few candies and was done. Until the end when she came back for more candy.

Ava lasted through the roof and a few windows and things on the side of the house.

The rest was me. And yes, I'm proud of my first gingerbread house since I was a kid. (Ours is on the right). It includes coconut for icicles, cut up sour licorice strips for grass, cut up licorice for chimney bricks, and huge piles of frosting to represent snow covered bushes. It was a masterpiece.

 Ava and Oakley, not too excited about taking pictures.

At least I got one smile.

And do you think we were able to get one single picture of all three of us looking at the camera and smiling at the same time? Of course not.

We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and look forward to sharing ours with you.

The Home Stretch

My plumber is here right now putting in toilets. The carpet guy is coming tomorrow. My dad is leaving Wednesday. Other than counter tops and sinks ( a minor detail) our house should be done by the end of this week!

These are my amazing bathroom cabinets that came 1,100 miles. I love them! The kitchen is the same but I don't have pictures yet because we have some touch ups to do on the walls and it doesn't look pretty yet.

The lights have all been installed and I happen to really love these lights that go down the basement stairs.

My linen cabinet in the master bathroom. It's big I don't know what to do with it!

Doors and trim complete as well as paint.

And because I love my new camera so much I just can't help taking pictures. Here are more of Ava's dance class. Here she is trying to doing a plie.

Practicing her leaps.

Her teacher is so sweet she always lets Sadie join the class when they are doing the "free dance"....and sometimes even when they aren't.

Look for more pictures soon of the finished product! We are in the home stretch now.

The phrase in our house that means "don't touch"

Can you guess what Sadie says when she doesn't want anyone to touch one of her toys?

"It's decoration!"

Apparently I've said "please dont' touch that, it's just for decoration" one too may times. It's now the magic words for please don't touch my stuff.

Florida, we miss you already! (Part 1 - Disney World)

I have no idea where to even begin. I literally took hundreds of pictures while on this vacation. This is in part, or all, due to the fact that I got a brand new Canon Rebel T2i for Christmas this year (a little early) and was so excited to try to learn how to use it. You may notice that some of the pictures are light and some are dark and this is because I was constantly messing with the settings on my shiny new camera. After deleting the not so good ones I came home with 270 pictures from our 6 day vacation. So the question is how do I get this all into one post that doesn't completely bore you to death.....only time will tell. So here it goes. Our family vacation 2012 2011 (Thanks Sally for the correction...blame it on the hormones). Part 1 - Disney World:

 I was so anxious to start using my camera I started snapping pictures in the airport. This was my first attempt. Lucky for me Ava is almost always willing to let me photograph her.

 We got Panda Express while we were waiting for our plane. Chris always uses chopsticks and so of course the girls wanted to as well. Sadie made her own out of straws and I snapped this shot of her actually eating with her "chop-chops" (as Ava calls them).

 We got so lucky when we walked into Disney World Snow White was right there to great us and the girls were so excited. She was so sweet and took them both by the hand to lead them over to this area where we could take pictures. (She was my favorite princess because she looked the most like the movie character.)

 Rides were next and of course as a horse lover Sadie loved the carousal.

 Ava cracked me up trying to pull the sword from the stone. She really gave it her all and even asked for Dad to help her at one point. I finally had the break it to her that she wasn't going to be the King.

 Family photo op in front of Cinderella's castle. So cool but unfortunately you can't just wander through it. That would make it way cooler in my book.

 We finally got to meet Cinderella who is Ava's current favorite princess and she was so excited.

The look on her face is just priceless to me. Cinderella made her day and was worth the 20 minute wait.

 More rides, this time on Aladdin's magic carpet. By the way, have you noticed I'm taking all of the pictures from the ground? The only ride I did was Dumbo....once....and that was enough. Chris was in charge of all other rides.

 Oh, here it i! My one and only ride. Ava and I on dumbo.

And a picture of the girls and I with The Beast. I was behind the camera 98% of the time so I had to be sure to use any pictures of me in my posts so that I can prove I was actually on this trip.

That rounds out our day at Disney world. One day was enough for us and we were anxious to get to the beach. To see pictures from our 3 days in Clearwater read the post below. 

Florida, we miss you already! (Part 2 - Clearwater Beach)

After Disney World we spent the next three days at Clearwater Beach. It was amazing! The weather was perfect, our hotel was right on the beach plus it had a pool, and the girls absolutely loved it!

 We got to Clearwater late afternoon but the girls were anxious to see the beach so we went out for a little bit and Chris found some kind of sea creature right on the beach. I still don't know what it was but Ava enjoyed looking at it.

 The ocean water was pretty cold so Chris let Sadie take a ride on his shoulders.

 The first night at the beach Chris went out to get us food for breakfast in the morning and when we came back he said he wanted to show me something. He took me out on our 5th floor balcony and this is what I saw. I had to wait until morning to take a picture because it was too dark and I was so relieved to find it still there in the morning. It was huge too.

 We bought a few sand toys for the girls and they were very entertained with that. The sand was so white and fine it was perfect for playing in.

 Chris and the girls running from the waves. It quickly became Sadie's favorite game.

 Chris buried Ava in the sand....she is actually standing up in this picture.....and then had to pull her out. She doesn't look like she is enjoying it, but she really did. I promise. He buried her several different times.

 Sadie is a little camera shy so they only way to get her to actually let me take a picture with her looking at me and smiling is to tell her NOT to look at me and smile. Works every time.

 Chris also found this perfectly preserved horse shoe crab.

 As long as the sun was shining it was warm enough to get in the pool. I'm kind of a wuss though so as soon as a cloud came by I'd be freezing again. But we had weather in the 70's the whole time and lots of sunshine......

 Chris didn't know it yet, but he has a sunburn to prove it!

The girls and I getting warm in our towels on our last day at the beach.

The trip home was long but the girls did really well. They were nice to each other, they didn't cry or complain (even though Ava got carsick on the way to the airport and threw up) and we finally made it to Denver after 14 hours of traveling. Unfortunately we came home to a snow storm and we had to stay near Denver and come home the next morning. But we finally made it. I'm glad to be home but I just have to say.....I'm freezing my buns off!! I miss the Florida sunshine already.