I switched to the new blogger yesterday. Now my vertical pictures will only post sideways. I've searched blogger help. No luck. Looks like it's a common problem with Blogger not acknowledging it. Anyone have any ideas?

Puddlejumping: It runs in the blood...

This morning, while Elisabeth napped, David and I went outside. The snow is finally almost all gone. Though when Davey got outside, his reaction was, "OH NOOOO!" Still, I'm glad we can finally use sidewalks and get out. Even more excited that the weather report for the next seven days is calling for dry weather. YAY!

It's been a long time since David could play in his clubhouse.



But he still didn't want to use the slide. Funny considering he's already soaked from the puddle jumping and sitting on the wet steps.


Ahhhhhhhh, PuddleJumping. One of my favorite pastimes too.

Visiting Old Friends

Yesterday we stole a car and drove to White Rock where my TWU friend Jamie and her brood of monsters live. Devin and David are only 6 1/2 months apart and Jordan and Elisabeth are 2 months apart. We did that pretty well considering we weren't even trying to have our kids be best friends!

Devin is such a clown. Here she is pretending she's trapped in this bucket. She was doing the 'screaming' and frantic clawing at the bucket. I think she quite scared David who immediately wanted to help her get it off. I thought it was pretty hilarious though.


Because I'm only capable of organising so many things, we had breakfast there. Here Tink is trying out Jordan's seat. I think she liked it. It was pretty cool:

That outfit by the way, was a gift from nicole and is SO incredibly cute. Dressing girls is FUN.
Here Jordan and Elisabeth are having a gab session.


And playing together at the exersaucer.

And now to Sunday

Today being church day, I actually did my hair and makeup. And so I thought I'd get a couple of pictures with my little sweetheart.


Can't you see the resemblance here? It's funny how much she looks like I did when I was a baby.


Only she doesn't mind getting kisses. I didn't like them one bit.

Here Elisabeth and David are trying out the new toy I got from Toy Traders. As I mentioned in my last posting, I'm trying to encourage more play between the two kids. Funny story: Today David stayed in the nursery for the very first time ever. Now, granted, we haven't tried putting him in the nursery for at least a year. He hated it so much I decided we'd have to get to church early so that I could come in with him until he felt safe, then let him stay. Well, then our church built this great little parents room where we could play but I could still hear the sermon...I finally tried again with the nursery and he LOVED it! The helpers raved about how well behaved he was, and that unlike the other kids, he doesn't push or shove to get his own way. I've heard a lot of horror stories about some of the other kids and they do try it on with him. But apparently he was great. Until he and Tinky were playing with this toy. Then he let out a great, "MY TOY" and a two handed shove. Luckily Dad was holding Tink!!

She really liked all the gizmos and gadgets on this thing.

And YO check it out!! She's standing ON HER OWN. And did for several minutes. Or at least a minute. Multiple seconds. Well it felt like a long time anyway!




Later, as I was making dinner in the kitchen, Davey fed Elisabeth "dinner". She liked that just fine until she realised she wasn't actually getting any food. Then she was mad as a bushel full of hornets that are really mad. Oh dear.


I have been going to the gym in the evenings. As often as I can go. I really need the solitude and the chance to burn off some energy. Andrew has been feeding and bathing the kids while I go. Obviously they're trying to persuade me to stay home since I found these lovely pictures of fully clothed bath time on our camera.


GRRRRRRRRR


Actually, it seems like the sort of thing I might encourage. And I also found these super cute pictures of my super cute girl:

Sometime Last Week...

I'm getting really bad at this blogging gig. It's 'cause I've found a new addiction. Boggle. Boggle, Blogger, not much diff. They're almost interchangeable. In more ways than one, obviously. But Andrew is starting to get better at it, and once he can beat me consistently I'll probably come back to Blogger.

Anyway, here's some pictures from Thursday to Saturday...

I was trying to get a picture of Tinkie in her cute red dress. It kind of reminds us of a Swiss Dirndl (I have no idea how to spell that word, so you'll have to try to guesstimate it on your own).


Here she is with brother davey after he woke up from his nap. He's still sleepy and not appreciative of how excited his sister is to see him.


A little bit of tickyticky-ing and everyone's smiling again.

Now that Tinky is getting bigger, she's enjoying playing more. Which is really kind of fun. Just like her brother, she's really good with her hands. And her balance is getting really good too. So here I've got her sitting in the rocking chair while she plays with Davey's puppy.



LOOK SHE'S SITTING UP ALL BY HERSELF!! I didn't even know she could do it till I sat her down. Wow. And chomping on Davey's firetruck. Yum yum.

When dad got home from work, the excitement continued. Here she is in one of my nice new baskets.

And again with the balancing. She thought this was great fun. If she sits on my neck, she can balance herself so she's pretty much standing. Though this was Friday. She's progressed waaaaay beyond this simple trick now (thank goodness. My neck was so sore after she'd finished bouncing up and down on it!)

On Saturday we drove to the States. I needed a Target fix and the kids wanted to play with food. Sort of. Tink enjoyed using these pineapple slices as a slide.

Davey mostly ran around pretending to eat all the food. But here he is jumping on a giant sandwich.

And we didn't even buy anything while we were down there. I had some parcels to pick up in Sumas, but when we got there the place was closed so I so totally could have splurged in Target. D'OH!



Tinky has been eating real food for almost three weeks now. She's progressed to eating 3 meals a day. I have to confess I'm not allowing so much time to test for allergies now that I know she's okay with cereal and bananas. So far she's enjoyed rice cereal, banana, carrots, potato, sweet potato and acorn squash. She seems to enjoy the veggies most which is funny since Davey is totally a fruitarian.

Mucky faced little boy singing songs to his mamma


Kathi showed up with this great hat for tink today. I think she looks like a cabbage patch kid in it. I'm going to have to find my pink haired cpdoll and take a picture of them side by side.


twins:

Twenty Three OH Two

Tuesday night in the tub. Do all children like to drink bath water? Out of any little thing that will hold even the minutest speck of liquid? Here Davey drinks from the belly of a lizard. MNNNN

That's gooooood.

Driving the lizard over tinkie's head. "it goes fast".


Force feeding his sister. Yah, I didn't catch that one in time. Look how trusting she is! I wonder if it's cause he saw me letting her drink from my water bottle? She is really good at drinking from a cup/bottle already.


Here she is today in her sweetheart dress. I 'specially love her chubby little legs in those stripey cupid tights. Not sure if she's still 'teething' but she wasn't herself again today. Lots of crying and wanting to be held. But since she's not a snuggler (at least, not by the standard of Davey who still loves to sit on me and snuggle) I enjoyed the opportunity to be close to her.



While Tinky napped, Davey and I read. Here he is telling his puppy, "daveyboy" a story about the warm sun.

And later, sitting in my rocking chair this time, reading himself poems. Love the crossed feet.

An interesting thing...you know how I was saying my stat counter is pretty cool? Well, I can also tell where people are coming to this site from. So everyone who visits from the Ens Approach or Salmon Speaks for instance. Well, yesterday two people did google searches for my nephew. One from Hamilton Ontario (where his grandparents live) and one from North York (where we think his dad might work). Funny thing is, they used his full name. We were the number one hit for that name even though we've never put our last name on this blog. So interesting. Even funnier, I wonder if the people who found this site realised who we are??

Blogs are so interesting. I've come across all kinds of old friends and acquaintances by randomly clicking in the link bars of people you'd never think were related. Such a small world.

I LOVE January!

The view through mum's living room window (though incidentally not the reason I love January.)

If you can see past the "Popsicles" hanging from the eaves, this is another view from her window. Nice.


Ahhhhhh yes. January. The malls are empty. Bleak. Or, even when they are busy (like on Saturday when everyone had cabin fever and headed to the malls) no one's spending money. And so there are great deals to be had.

I got a lot of gift cards for Christmas and I've spent the last two days shopping:

Tink's winter coat for next year. I'm SO getting the matching one.


And these overalls are adorable.

I also did some shopping for me, but that'll be on my blog sometime later. By the way, I'm disappointed more of you didn't delurk. I have a sweet statcounter that even lets me see IP addresses for where people come from. So I know that I have visitors from New York, Bellingham, Australia and Ontario who spend a significant amount of time on here. Australia and Bellingham visit regularly. I'm so curious to know who you are....

Anyway enough hinting. This morning Tink and I were playing in the living room and I heard a strange noise and a yelp from the kitchen. Curious I went to see what was going on. Davey had moved the cat food out of this drawer and was stuck like this:

Later we were upstairs. The kids wanted to watch a movie so Uncle Dave popped in Howl's Moving Castle and sat down to watch it with them. Apparently Davey was totally into the movie. Even craning his head around the cat's head to try and see what was happening. A wee bit distracted here, but...


Pretty soon he was right back into it.

Well, after all that we had to drive to Brookswood in Langley to pick up snow shovels. As mentioned in a previous posting, it took us almost four hours with both of us working to shovel our driveway last time it snowed. We had our neighbor's good snow shovel and a smaller snow shovel. Since there's snow forecast for tonight and Thursday, I didn't want a repeat of that.

Here's Tink all bundled up and ready to go out in the cold. I love this little cold mouthed smile she's been doing lately. She has a lot of my mum in her. Especially if you look at pictures of my mum from that age.

Davey wanted to be in the picture too.



While Andrew was in Alberta, Tink and Davey both had growth spurts. For Tinky that means she suddenly was waking up every few hours to nurse again. So I decided to start her on solid foods. First Banana and then I added rice cereal. In the past week she's built up to having some solid food three times a day. Sometimes as much as 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup of food. WOW! She really loves it and it seems to be working fine - no gas, upset tummies or elimination problems so I'm going to start her on avacado and some veggies next. I love this picture of her in her highchair because of how she has her feet. She's growing up so fast!


I mentioned Davey's growing too. I first noticed that a lot of his pants were falling down a lot more than usual. Silly me, I thought he was losing weight (his eating habits have been kind of changing. I thought because he was teething. There were a few days he didn't eat so much). Then I noticed that shirts were getting short. Last week I started to notice shoes not fitting so well. Then today mum and Kathi said that they think Davey is the same height as Jade. WHOA! There's usually at least an inch and a half between them. So I measured and sure enough he's grown almost two inches since his birthday (three months). He's just a hair under 38 inches now. And I had his feet measured...they've also grown from a size 8 to a 9. WOW. And these kids are vegetarians (sometimes even fruitarians). No growth hormones in their diets. Crazy. If only their hair would grow like the rest of them.