Baby Girl is not so baby anymore!

Guess who has a wiggly tooth!  Last night at dinner I noticed one of Athena's teeth looked a little crooked.  I checked it out and it's totally wiggly!  Baby girl has her first loose tooth:)   It's pretty wiggly and I think it will probably be out in the next few weeks. 
I have to say, I'm surprised she has a loose tooth already.  In my early years of teaching when I taught 4K, I never had a 4K-er lose a tooth. She first turned 5 in December!

It's the bottom middle right one (her right)

I was further shocked when I looked closer and saw that the permanent tooth is already showing through behind this wiggly one!  See it back there?  

Here she is showing off the little wiggler, pushing it with her tongue. 

She's constantly wiggling on it now and feeling the new one behind it now that I pointed it out to her. 

She's pretty excited and has been asking a zillion questions about the tooth fairy now:)  I have several cute books at work about the tooth fairy that we use during our Dental Week. I'll have to borrow some to bring home to read to her. 

Playdough. Who knew?

As an Early Childhood professional I know what a great tool playdough is for helping to improve the fine motor skills of preschool and kindergarten age children.  When Alton's daily note the other day said that he had a great time playing with playdough at daycare that day though, I though "Yeah. Right.  Playdough with 1 year olds?  If I gave Alton playdough to play with right now all he would do is throw it and try to eat it."  Athena heard me tell John about it on the phone though and wanted to give it a try with him.  Alton's big sissy is always looking out for him:)  We gave it a whirl and I was pleasantly shocked!   


He had a great time ripping it all up into little bits.  Talk about a good fine motor exercise!  Expecially for a boy!

 


We had minimal eating attempts.

  


Of coarse banging the container on the table was great fun. 

 


Looking adorable while trying to get the lid back on the can:)

 


Dumping the pieces out of the can...

 


...and then loading them back in again and again  turned out to be tons of fun too:) 

 Now I"m a believer and realize you can do playdough with a rowdy, 'high energy' one year old boy.  He sat nice and played with it for at least 10 minutes!  We'll be doing it again very soon:)

Sledding!

This is a very picture heavy post:)   We went sledding today and I took so many fun pictures it was so hard to decided which ones to put on the blog!  Both of the kids did great!  Athena jumped right in her sled and flew down the big hill all by herself as soon as we arrived.  She jumped off her sled at the bottom screaming "I want to go again!!" 


Here she is on the inaugural run:)






Alton started off a little more slowly with his excitement.  He had a prety serious look on his face for a while just taking it all in as we pulled him around on his toddler sled. 






Athena got daddy in on the action.  Check out her beautiful smile-precious!

 


We crammed them both into Athena's sled for a few trips down the hill  from just half way up. 

 


Always the mother hen:)

 


She was such a trooper and pulled her own sled back up the big hill almost every time. 

 


Everyone started to get tuckered out after a while though and started to rely on some daddy mule power to get back up the hill. 

 


As it turns out the thing that Alton liked the most was just sliding down the hill on his butt. 

 


Ena got in some snow angels before we left.

 Now most normal families would have headed home for some hot chocolate.  The after sledding treat of request in our household was straweberry shakes.  We used some of the awesome frozen berries from our strawberry picking extravaganza last summer.  A little taste of summer after an afternoon in the snow;)

Just hangin around

 Not too much excitement around here since winter break.  Just been hanging out and doing our normal things.  Athena got a really cool 12 ft. long floor puzzle from us for her birthday in December. She put it away in the cabinet and didn't show any interest in it until tonight. She decided to bust it out and put the whole thing together in the hall way.  It's an alphabet puzzle that makes a long alphabet line and she did great at it:)

Had a little bit of coloring fun.  Alton usually lasts a few minutes with coloring-just long enought for me to snap a cute picture:)

Christmas 2011

We had an awesome first Christmas as a family of four:)  We started with Christmas at my parents house on the 24th where the kids were happy to be able to spend the day with their cousins from Ohio! 

All 5 of the cousins together:)  So cute!

Christmas Day we spent at home just the 4 of us.  It was such a great day!  I hope we can manage to keep a day to ourselves at home every year for Christmas.  We slept in and got up to the excitement of discovering that Santa had visited!  It was so magical to see the excitement on Athena's face to wake up on Christmas morning at home and see that Santa had come:)  We woke up Alton and then the kids opened presents in their jammies.  Such a fun morning and day! 

Alton got a big red wooden barn from Santa!  He loves it and immediately rounded up all of his tractors and started driving them into the barn and parking them all there. 

Still loves the tractors.  The big one in his hand was a Christmas present from grandpa Ralph and grandma Janet. 

This melted my heart.  I knew she was up to something because a couple of days before Christmas she asked me for boxes and tape.  I gave them to her and she disapeared into her room and when she came back she put the boxes under the tree.  She had wrapped up some of her dollie clothes to give to her dollies for Christmas so they would have presents to open too:) 

Last summer Ena and I read Charlotte's Web together one chapter a night and then watched the movie.  So for our next mommy and Ena book and movie adventure we're doing Mr. Popper's Penguins.  She got the book and movie from us for Christmas.   

For her Santa gift, she wrote a letter to him asking specificly for a blue, Columbia fleece jacket.  Santa made it happen! 

Alton was so cute opening his gifts.  He would tear off one little piece of wrapping paper at a time and hand it to John before tearing off more. 

Since Athena is constantly sneaking into the office and taking envelopes we thought we could remede the situation by giving her her own box of 175 envelopes.  She plays 'work' all the time and writes tons of notes and letters and sticks them all in envelopes. 

After 9 months of using all of his sister's princess stuff Alton finally got a new 'boy' snack plate.  He was pretty excited and immediately carried it into the kitchen and pointed to the pantry.  Smart boy;)  We put a little snack into his new plate for him and took a snack break before opening more presents:) 

Our sweet girl Amber taking in all of the excitment:)

Three piggies in a blanket snuggling after lunch. 

Of course a huge part of our special Christmas Day at home including lots of great food.  We made lots of yummy things throughout the day, but I focused on pictures of the kids this day:)  No foodie pictures in this post.  I will say that a certain little boy was happy to gorge himself on home made swedish meatballs though!
We're traveling up north for this coming New Years weekend to celebrate Christmas with John's family:)  So we have even more fun and celebrating yet to come!

Party Weekend #2

Athena's friend birthday party went great this weekend!  We went with the rule of having as many kids come as how many years old you are.  Though we needed a minumum of at least 6 to have it at the pottery studio she wanted it at, so we invited 8 to make sure we had at least the minimum number of kids.  As it turned out, exactly 5 of her friends were able to make it:)  They all had a fun time painting their projects, eating cupcakes and watching Ena open her presents.  The hour and a half flew by!  In a few days I can go back and pick up everyone's projects when they are done being fired and then we can take them to school and deliver them to her friends along with her thank you cards.  It works out pretty slick;)     

Such concentration!  Artists hard at work:)

She went with a horse theme for this party.  We had fun finding these little plastic horses and decorating the cupcakes with green sprinkles to look like the horses were hanging out in a grassy field. 

Happy 5th Birthday sweet angel baby!!!

Party weekend #1

December is usually a pretty fun & busy month around the zuge zoo:) In addition to all of the Christmas celebrations, we also have Athena's birthday. This weekend was the kick off! We had the family celebrations for Athena's birthday this weekend. Grandpa Jim came to spend some time visiting for her birthday on Saturday and then Grandma Kathleen, Grandpa Mike and my family came to celebrate her birthday on Sunday. Seriously can NOT believe she is turning five! Yeash!

Here she is with her cupcake tower fit for a Birthday Princess:)

Oh my goodness, a huge box of baby dolly clothes! This is one happy little girl:)

Next weekend is her friend party at a neat pottery studio here in town. Should be fun!