Grace at 11 Months

This girl has gotten a lot faster at crawling lately. I guess I can't really call it crawling. She has mastered the one legged scoot. She pulls up on everything and tries to go from each piece of furniture to the next. She has had a few good tumbles, but she is getting tougher. She still takes 2 naps a day and is sleeping about 11-11.5 hours at night. 

She loves to eat. I swear she is most happy when she is eating. She loves bread, cheese, grapes and blue berries the most. We have gotten her to eat chicken a little bit. She still mostly gets her veggies and meat through baby food. She likes oatmeal and eggs and cherrios at breakfast. She will beg for cheese pretty much every time she is in her chair. she tried whole milk for the first time and loved it. She guzzles water. We try to feed her whatever we are eating and I would say she does a pretty good job.

 She loves to follow Vi around and scoot under the kitchen table. She loves cows. Any book that has a cow she just loves. That is the only animal noise she has really mastered. She has done dog and horse a few times, but cow is the only one she really knows. She is getting more into books these days. She will sit and look at them and really loves to be read to. She still loves to chew on everything and her 2 bottom and 2 top teeth are fully in now. She likes to follow me around a lot. She is much more clingy than Vi was. She has become my little shadow. She likes to play with Vi, but every since Grace started moving Vi has been a bit of a rough sister. She loves to squeeze grace and pull her places. It's loads of fun for me. We are working on it. 

Grace can point out your nose and belly button ( bee bo is what she knows it as, thanks to the Sandra Boynton book) She has started to pretend to tickle people and she will play peek a boo with you. She still claps a lot. She has started to rub her hand down my face when I say be soft.

 The other day we were driving and Violet was singing really loud. We started hearing Grace made this funny kind of singing noise. We really think she was trying to sing along with Vi. She has started doing little dances when she hears music. She has also really started to love giving stuffed animals hugs. She likes to copy me when I tilt my head from side to side. She is getting pretty sturdy and can take a few steps before she lunges for you. She is starting to chunk up a bit and is nice and squishy just like Vi. Her hair is filling in everywhere except the sides of her head haha. She understands a lot of what we say to her. We will ask her if she wants things and she will look at us with a smile and give us these funny little nods and kind of try to say yes. She is a funny little things and we just love her to pieces. I can't believe she is almost one. She is such a joy in our house!

WORDS: moo, cheese, please, mo(more), bre(bread) daddy, mama, tate (kate) no(nose) boo(book) 

Halloween

For our ward party, we all dressed up as characters from The Little Mermaid. Obviously, our costumes revolved around Vi. It was super fun. It is always pretty time consuming to pull it all together. This year we got lucky and we had pretty big items that were all done and ready to go. I made Violet's mermaid tail in August with my grandma. That one was tricky because we were trying to make sure that she would be able to walk. My mom had a lobster costume for Grace to be Sebastian. I found a pretty sweet dress at the thrift store as the base for my Ursula costume. Mike had a long white lab coat from school. We had to add a lot to it, but in the end this Halloween wasn't too bad in the costume department. Grace's costume was not very warm and it was a bit big on her. I decided she needed her own real costume for actual Halloween. So she was the cutest little lamb there ever was. We had dinner before with our friends and let the kids play a bit before we headed out. It got pretty cold and rainy on Halloween and Vi had a nice melt down about half way into our night. She still had a lot of fun, but after 2 days of full sugar and terrible naps, we cut trick or treating short, got our kids in the tub and in bed early. I really can't stand being in the cold that long either when we are trick or treating. We have not lucked out on good Halloween weather the past few years. I really love this holiday and I hope our kids always have as much fun as we do. I think we might have one more year of family costumes before our kids have more of an opinion.  

Violet Turns 3

Yea, I feel like a bad mom for totally missing this one. Like I said this past fall was nuts. Miss queen Vi turned 3 on October 30th. She was all about everything fancy and there were sparkles galore. It is always tricky with this girl's birthday. With it being the day before Halloween, it can sort of get swallowed up in all the Halloween activities that we have going on. Since I did 2 bigger parties for her the last 2 years, I decided that we would just do a more low-key family party this year. She woke up and opened all her presents. We got her a balance bike, books, a frilly cloak and play food. My mom and dad got her more play food, the new Cinderella DVD, an apron to wear while cooking and Aqualiscious. Mike's mom sent her 2 new books with a flashlight that you use to look at hidden pictures in the book. She got so many fun things that she was thrilled about. We also got her the sparkly dress she is wearing in all the pictures. She got to have donuts for breakfast and dad even blocked out his day so he could hang out with us. We got all bundled up and went trick or treating downtown with some friends. Vi was of course loving all the candy and costumes everywhere. Then we went and grabbed lunch at Blue Tractor. That night was our ward Halloween party. So we got all dressed up and spent the evening there. It was a very full day, but full of lots of fun for our spunky 3 year old