Family Portrait Day

Meet Little. Little likes to play pretend and to organize things. She has a big family.


Meet Littler. Littler is little. Er. Littler lives in a confusing world and often gets caught in Little's schemes.

Meet Bunny. Bunny is Little's sister. She is twins with...

Piggy. Piggy and Bunny are pretty much interchangeable. They like to share clothes.

Next comes Panther. Panther likes to wear his red flight suit and goggles. He never takes them off. Sometimes, he'll cover it up with a pink jumpsuit.

Then there's Pinkleberry, aka "Ponkle-bye". She's the oldest after Little. She has some big shoes to fill!

Bunny and Piggy pose together.

It's been a long sitting. As you can see, Bunny is the only one still in good spirits.

They also have a younger brother and sister named Kenai and Atigun, but they spend most of their time in bed.

Occasionally some cousins, like Monkey, Dolly, or Doggy Backpack come to play, too, but mostly it's the 6 of them. They like to spend their time sitting in the buzzy chair, the bumbo, or the swing. They take turns. They are one happy (most of the time) family!

Beautiful Babies

Princess for a Day

And the dragon, too...

Littler Takes a Ride on the Swing

Our Vacation

Well, we're back. It was a great trip, but we're glad to be home, mostly because Little got very very sick in Montana with her first high fever and her first illness that fully incapacitated her for a few days. Even with that, we had a blast at Aunt Martie's, where Little was able to spend lots of time playing with her cousins, including dress-up for the first time with her three year old cousin. I've got to say, those kids are great! They really went out of their way to try to engage my girls and play with them and help out. No matter how infrequently we visit with them, I think Little will always remember them. She loves all of her cousins so much--one of her favorite things to do is look at pictures of them on their mommies' blogs. Peter and I also really enjoyed getting to know Aunt Martie (Peter's sister) and her kids all over again. It's been a long time and we loved it. It's so sad to leave when you're not sure when you'll see someone again... Aunt Martie is doing an incredible job keeping things together (more than that--keeping them at a level that far surpasses my own day to day level), with a husband in Iraq and several children. I really admire her for that.

After visiting with Aunt Martie's family in Montana, we flew to visit Grammy and Grampy in Anacortes, WA. With them we went on a couple of little birdwatching excursions in Skagit Valley, where we saw numerous bald eagles, rough legged hawks, Northern harriers, snow geese, trumpeter swans, etc, etc. We played Seafarers of Catan and cards and ate fondue, and Little and Littler stayed up really late every night, much to everyone's diappointment. They still have not recovered from this schedule change, which is mostly a result of Little's illness. Then we spent two days driving home and following in the wake of the biggest storm to hit the west coast in a long time. Somehow we missed almost all of the storminess, which is a blessing. Unfortunately, that storm dumped over three inches of rain at home and we missed it. I've never seen that much rain in that short a period of time in my life.

So, now we're back, and we finally got things most of the way back to normal yesterday and today, thanks to the person who needed to drop by to borrow something from me, which kicked me into high gear for about 30 minutes making the house decent enough for a visitor who has never been here before. Whew! All just in time for Littler to be really grumpy with me today. Being a stay at home mom is surprisingly time intensive!

Beautiful Girls

The lens saga continues, but it's almost over... There was a new estimate for the lens while we were on vacation, which is more than we bought it for, so we went on ebay and bought another one for $100 less than the repair would have been. Hopefully we'll get it next week and you'll be inundated with pictures.

But, these girls are so beautiful that it's worth posting the pics, even with a bad lens. You can really tell how bad it is in the pic of both of them together, but they're so CUTE!

Matching outfits--I couldn't resist!

"Kicking, kicking, kicking!"



Littler's first ride in the swing

She likes it!

Isn't she beautiful?!

Terri-(ble, fic...?) Twos

Little, who is not quite so little anymore, has reached a new stage in her development. Although she has a couple more months until she is officially 2 years old, I think we can reasonably say that she is in her "Terrible Twos". You know, the boundary testing and pretending like she doesn't hear a word you say, tantrums, screaming, etc? She had a period of about 3 weeks where she went to bed like a champ! Not a single tear, authentic or crocodile, for both naps and bedtime! We were amazed! Terrific! At the same time, during the day, she decided it was fun to test her boundaries out on her sister, with hitting and other not so nice sorts of things. Tonight she almost B-I-T her... Dare I say it? (Terrible!) Not that she is terrible, but the action feels terrible to us. Sometimes I turn my back on them for two seconds and come back to see Littler screaming at the top of her lungs with Little nearby and I have no clue what happened. Today we made the mistake of trying to start potty training with her. It would have been a good idea were it not for her terrible/terrific twos. She actually pooped in the potty today! We were so proud of her, and she got to call Daddy! Unfortunately, she also peed on the floor/chairs/couch approximately 10 times. It seems some muscles were more prepared than others to start with the potty training. The biggest reason we stopped though, is that she said "No," everytime we suggested she sit on the potty, after she had her big success. I don't really think it's worth it if I have to force her to sit on the potty, so I didn't even try. Oh well. Some other time. It's not a big deal and she's younger than most potty trainees these days anyway.

On to the most exciting parts of her Twos. Little can now recognize at least 19 of her letters! And several numbers too. She is a sponge when it comes to things like this, and I feel bad for not working with her on it more often. (Because it's Daddy who does most of it. I help but he is the driving force. Well, really SHE is.) She can STILL read longer than either of us has the patience for, too.

Another Little feat is her voracious appetite for pasta. We went out to dinner for our anniversary (yes, we took the kids with us--the people they know well are on vacation already), and got two dishes, one which was pasta, and she ate more than half of the pasta dish. It worked out fine for me--I had room to order a vanilla bean cheesecake! (Woah, that was RICH.)

And she's really cute in pigtails. As long as I remember to put her in pigtails, I think I can look past the other stuff.

Our Lens

We finally took our broken camera lens in to the repair shop to be fixed, so we should be able to take pictures again, finally, sometime after New Year's. Ouch! To add insult to injury, it's costing what most people pay for their cameras (non-photographers), if not more. It really stings. You know that scene in Spiderman 3 when bad Spidey knocks the photographer's camera away and breaks it, and the dude surreptitiously pulls a point and shoot out of his coat pocket? Yeah, I'm almost there...

Under Construction

Please bear with me while I jiggle things around on this page--things will probably keep changing for awhile.

My Girls and Their Friends