Eee Eee Ooo Ooo! Our Little Monkey turned 2!!

Alton turned 2 this month!  Can't believe what a big boy he's turning into:)  He moved into the 2 year old room at daycare last week.  Since he's moved into the new bigger room he's been starting to talk more:)  Might be a peer motivation thing.  Whatever it is, I'm happy about it!  He loves cars, tractors and anything with wheels that he can push around.   He's still a daddy's boy and is smitten with his daddy!  He loves mama, sissy and Amber too but we all turn invisible when daddy gets home from work and Alton sprints to the door to meet him and is glued to his side for the rest of the evening.  It's adorable to watch:) 
Alton's favorite foods are fruit, cheese and any kind of meat!  I can't get him to eat a single vegetable.  Not even corn on the cob which barely even qualifies as a vegetable.  Just last week we stopped giving him bedtime bottles and it was sad for me.  Bed time bottle routine is one of the only times that he sits still and lets you cuddle him.  We kept up his bedtime bottle until he turned 2 as part of the bonding process, just like we did with Athena. 

Here is a picture of him on his actual birthday morning:)  Looking handsome as usual!

His monkey cupcakes that mommy and Athena made.

He thought they were pretty delicious.  He mostly just licked the frosting off of his though because he loved all of the food we made for his party and he just ate and ate and was pretty stuffed at this point.  We had all his favorite foods-fruit salad, home made macaroni and cheese and brats. 

Him and daddy headed out the morning of his party to pick out some balloons and came home with this huge monkey balloon:)

This isn't the best picture, but the look on his face is hilarious. "Aww Yeeeahh.  You know I'm gonna look handsome in this;)"  He really likes clothes and each shirt he got he held it up to himself like this to show it off:) 

Trying on his new hot red car puddle boots. 

Very serious about his gift opening. 

He LOVED the car he got from Athena.  She picked it out for him by herself. 

He was pretty excited for the new John Deer wagon he got to go with his tractor too:)
Happy Birthday  Alton!!!!

Pancake art and a snowman:)

Athena and John had a great time building a snowman this morning.    She's been wanting to make a snowman for weeks now, but we just haven't had any decent snow on a weekend when there was time to go outside and build one.  With the snowstorm yesterday there was plenty of wet, thick packable snow today.  The snowman turned out so cute!

When I came outside to take a picture of them I brought Alton along and stuck him in for a picture:) 

Isn't it the cutest?  The eyes are charred chunks of wood from the outdoor fireplace.   The  arms are cat tails and the nose is a great big carrot.  We've had so many deer in the yard again lately, we're curious to see if the carrot is going to still be there tomorrow morning!

The father daughter snowman building team. 

We also had some fun today doing pancake art for breakfast.  Ena LOVES doing this.  I make a batch of home made pancake batter and we dye some of it different colors.  I put the colored batters into these piping bottles and let Athena 'draw' pictures on the griddle with the batter.  I didn't get any action pictures of her doing it though because I'm always busy hovering over her making sure she doesn't touch her arms to the griddle as she's drawing. 

Check out her flower pancake creation!  She was very proud of it and ate the entire thing!  It was pretty huge!  She also made some Packer colored footballs for daddy and Alton. 

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!