Valentine's Day, Zoo Class & 14 months

On Tuesday, we went to Granddaddy's house for Emily to give him his Valentine. Through 10-15 takes, this was the best picture. Such cuties!

The Abilene Zoo has preschool class once a month where they learn about various things about animals. This month, they learned about big animals and made rhino horns. So cute!

Emily is so intense when playing using someone's phone. Here, I think she was playing a game on Pearlie's phone. I love her concentration.

My baby girl is 14 months old today. She now has 8 teeth (as of Friday) and eats fairly well. She has meat days and cracker days. Some days all she'll eat is meat (plus her muffin for breakfast) and other days all she will eat is crackers. I guess I still need to work on veggies, though. She won't touch those. She's about 19 pounds and 29". A growing girl!

Two Christmases down...one to go

As I sat in the quiet coldness of the house, I realized that it has been quite a while since I updated everyone on our family.

Yesterday, Emily started saying “dog.” Her version is “do” (just drop the “g”). It’s so cute! Still no other words to speak of. Right now her vocabulary consists of boo (boo), baba (balloon), do (dog) and ah duh (all done). One of these days, she’ll start saying sentences and surprise us all!

Yesterday, we also spent time with Phillip’s family.

Emily and her cousins

Emily and Great-Grandma Palma

Emily got loaded up on gifts...way more than Phillip or I imagined! We are so grateful to have so many people who love Emily.

Grandma & Grandpa have a Frosty that sings and dances when you push a button. I’m so glad it lives at their house because Emily loved it! She would just rather not push the button herself! (Sorry there's no sound...I didn't know the mic was turned off.)

She enjoyed “playing” Bingo with her cousins who are 6-8 years older than her.

Christmas Day was spent at home, just the 3 of us. Quite different from the way I grew up, always at grandparents' houses. We did enjoy the day, though!

Santa brought Emily a kitchen for Christmas and she loves it!

She’s poured herself tea from the kettle (and from the stuffed one that cousin Mia gave her!) and cooked things on the stove. But, mostly, she just likes making the stove make noise. The batteries may die a quick death. :-)

I cooked my first-ever Christmas lunch. It was so yummy! I bought a quarter spiral-sliced ham and we had corn casserole, Grandma’s broccoli & rice casserole, cranberries (for Phillip and Emily...not me!), honey-butter rolls and chocolate and peanut butter cheesecake. I’m pretty proud of the lunch and we have tons of leftovers!

On to Abilene for more Christmas!

Blinds and Halloween

I finally finished a project I've been working on for several weeks (and wanting to do since we moved in). Some of the windows didn't have miniblinds or the ones that were there were broken enough to warrant replacing. So, that's what I've been doing for the past several weeks...one window at a time. I finally got all six new miniblinds put up and I am so glad to have that behind me. If you ever need miniblinds hung, I'm your girl!

As I read about everyone else's Halloween's, I realized that I hadn't posted about ours. Well, that's because we really didn't do Halloween. When Halloween falls on a Friday night (football games!), you're not part of a church yet, and you live in an isolated area, there's really not much reason to do anything. But, Emily did have a couple "costumes." She had a pumpkin bib and a ghost onesie. So, she was our pumpkin ghost. (And, yes, we enjoyed our time at the football game, even though we lost.)

(I forgot to mention, the bear in the pictures above was a gift to Emily from my mom's cousin Kathy. Thanks, Kathy! Emily loves her bear!)