Goodnight, Don't Sleep Too Tight!

Dear Evelyn,

We're running out of Pull-ups and don't want to buy any more. You've done great at getting "potty a-train!"-ed as you like to say it. Now is the time to move to the next step. Please don't pee in the bed tonight. :)

Love,
Mommy

Wrapping Up December

Justin's best pal from back-in-the-day was in town for Christmas, and we spent a fun evening eating and playing games with them. Here's both our families:
And here is Evie modeling her cute new Christmas clothes!
Cousins are up for one last cuddle with Grandpa, and we took a shot with them.
New Year's Eve, we decided to go swimming with cute cousins Porter and Keaton at the rec center in Golden. Uncle Ben kept them all from drowning. :)

Evelyn and Uncle Ben.
The light was pretty good, so I got a few of Porter and Keaton in the water. Here's Keaton playing.

Keaton practicing his freestyle. Porter is being chill.
Cute brothers.
Evie totally bonded with these two while they were in town. She keeps asking for them to come over, still.
Keaton takes care of his little cousin. :)

We miss you guys!

Christmas 2009

Merry late Christmas! Too bad we didn't take more pictures! Last Christmas was priceless--kids make Christmas ten times funnier!

This was our best photo of the season, in my opinion. Poor Evie was traumatized by Santa. OK, so we obviously need to talk Santa up a bit more at our house. This was at our Ward Party and AJ had been sleeping through most of it, awaking to calmly and gamely take this picture. Justin was barely able to stop laughing long enough to take it.
Official Christmas shots...
Strangle-hold.
We chose this one. :)

I think these pictures were taken on Christmas Day? I'm not remembering... Anyway, we were at Grandma and Grandpa Riggs' home, and the kiddos were showing off their hats (AJ's was made by Sheila, owner of Croc. Rock, and Evie's was made by Grandma Riggs). Evie was reverting to babyhood again to crawl with AJ.

AJ is being attacked by Evie's doll that Grandma made her. There are those who voted that the doll looked possessed, and therefore able to attack babies. :) For the record, however, Evie sleeps with her little purple-haired doll and likes to cuddle with it because it reminds her of Grandma. :)
Evie and Aunt Annelise. I wanted to capture the extreme double-cuteness! :)

Glimpses Backward...

So, Mommy is trying to get her blogging groove back again. It's so fun, I don't know why I ever stop.

Anyway, here are some glimpses back into December. I'm behind, I know...

We made gingerbread houses with some pals at our place towards the beginning of the month. Nathan kind of "won" so we took an official picture of him and the amazing creation he and his mom made (Jack looks on enviously and/or hungrily).

Evelyn was all about the red sugar sprinkles with her house (note the entire jar was dumped on top of her house). :)
December was a very cold month last year, so here we are, huddling for warmth... :) They were so cute together in their pj's! :)
This picture is to demonstrate a funny little habit Evie has picked up of taking AJ's thumb out of his mouth. She does it, of course, because she tries to suck her thumb (something she only started after observing her brother), and Justin and I immediately pull the thumb from her mouth. We keep trying to tell her that it's ok for babies to suck their thumbs, but not big girls (with some varied success). She's such a mommy!
Again, we'd been spending a lot of time indoors. :) Evie was so cute after her bath I decided to capture it for posterity.

Spoiled!

Our precious wanted to eat blueberry pancakes with syrup and watch a movie at the same time, also while still in her jammies. We adjusted her eating space so she could do so. Yeah, I'm such a pushover! :)

AJ's Teeth

So I know I'm late with the news, but AJ has teeth! Three of them! The first two popped out in December, when he was 6 1/2 months old, and then the last one came a month later. All on the bottom. :) Our kids generally have good teeth and good hair: good qualities in horses and fun factoids in kids.

Is it a disgusting, smarmy-marmy thing to say that he gets cuter every day??! I'm sure it is, but I don't care! :)

Funny Library Incident

Justin took Evie to the library last Saturday while I overcame procrastination and finished our taxes. He reports that Evelyn found a statue of a little boy reading in the library (not unlike the statue picture below), and started not just talking to him, but also kissing him, stroking his hair, telling him stories and reading the statue-book aloud to him. Many onlookers passed. She was a hit. :)