The Ranch

We missed out on Dewberry Farm this year, but got an opportunity to go to Gordon Ranch with the girls' school.  There wasn't as much to do as Dewberry Farm, but it was a nice afternoon.

 Addy with her classmate Alex.  During the hay ride we learned that Addy was one of Alex's girlfriends.  Apparently he has multiple.  Addy didn't confirm the relationship and last I heard William was her boyfriend (she's moved on from Ethan apparently), so who knows.

Pony ride

Addy has come a long way from her original days in petting zoos.  I think that it helped that these were the most gentle petting zoo animals we'd ever seen.  Normally if you have food they practically attack you.  Addy had trouble getting rid of all the food because I guess everyone was full.  

 Ella could have cared less about feeding the goats, but she walked around pointing to each one saying "goat" over and over again.  She also has no fear and just walked right up to all of them.  I think that the little black one was her favorite, just her size!

Ella is really into animal noises right now, so this was a great excursion for her.  We saw goats, roosters (her impression of "cockadoodledoo" right now is priceless), a small cow, pony/horse, and sheep.  

Ella was not sure about the hay ride.  She was a little confused about sitting on hay and being pulled in a wagon by a tractor.  

Have vertical surface, Ella will climb.  Our little monkey!

Playtime

 Such silliness - Ella especially loves Star's bed.  Addy is just a wee big for it, otherwise I'm sure she'd be in it more!  We always know when Ella is getting tired because she'll just go and lay down in the dog bed.  Fortunately Star doesn't mind!

Addy rarely dresses up these days, but when a friend comes over, it is almost guaranteed that one or both end up in dress-up clothes.  Here is the ballerina and rock star.  Note Addy's shoes, turns out princess dress up shoes also double as tap shoes.  We enjoyed several tap performances during Emily's visit. 

Pumpkin Patch

So, rewind a bit back into mid-October, there were tons of Jewish holidays, so school was closed and the girls got to enjoy some Grandparent daycare time.  And of course it only seemed fitting on their day off from Jewish school, that they go to church!  Actually it was to the pumpkin patch at St. Luke's, but there was also some playtime on a "grown up" Jesus statue.  It is important to specify grown up Jesus because most of the talk around our house is about baby Jesus, especially around Christmas!  But Addy does understand that he did make it out of the manger.  So, the pics...

 This one may go down in the record books, not sure what Dad was doing on the other side of the camera, but both girls looking at the camera with natural smiles is nearly unheard of these days.

2011 Feast with the Beast

Another great night at Feast with the Beast at the zoo with our friends Mark and Melissa! 

The B52s performed this year and while we were all kind of excited to hear them (since it has been probably close to 20 years or more - yikes!), turns out we only knew 2 of their songs and all the rest kind of sounded the same and not so good.  Still a super fun night and way too much to eat!

50 Days of School

 Friday, November 4th was the 50th day of school, and the pre-k classes celebrated with a 50's themed day.  Everyone was told to wear 50's attire and they had milkshakes for a snack, hot wheel races, a mummy wrap and more that I'm sure I didn't hear about.  Addy of course needed a poodle skirt - thanks to an easy to follow tutorial on the web, it turned out to be a quick nap time project.  She looked pretty darn cute if I do say so myself!

Mamma

Recently Ella has finally started saying "mamma".  It started when Addy had one of my old drivers licenses out and Ella pointed to the picture and said "mamma".  She still says "dada" more, but I'm excited to be in the cool crowd now.  And it is very cute when she actually says it!  She is pretty much a myna bird at this point and repeats almost anything you say.  New words I can think of that she uses regularly are

• Sissy for Addy
• thank you
• airplane, she has crazy good hearing and any time she hears a plane in the sky she starts saying "airplane"
• bike ride
• milk
• wawa for water
• night night
• meow for cat, plus a wide array of other animal noises
• Meme, Mary picked a good name, the other grandparent names are a bit trickier!  Tonight we were looking at a picture of Dad and she called him "meme".  Hey, whatever works!
• Heidi, this one is rough, but we've been practicing for Heidi's visit this month
• Elmo
• nana for banana
• apple
• apple sauce
• snack, this one is said A LOT as she opens up the cabinet and pulls out boxes of snacks
• buckle, either when she wants us to buckle her in her chair at the table or anywhere there is a buckle that she wants to play with
• all dum which is her way of saying all done - my favorite use of this was when Ella opened up the snack cabinet and pulled out a box that was empty (not sure why we had an empty box in there) and she brought me the box saying "all done"

Halloween Craziness

This was a big Halloween year.  Addy was of course super excited about it all, but Ella got into the spirit as well. 

It all started with Zoo Boo on Saturday!  Fun time again this year

 Strawberry Shortcake

 The pink puppy costume wasn't zoo friendly, so Ella wore her Halloween dress.

 Ella had quite a hard time picking just one pumpkin.  She must have picked up and put back a dozen of them!

 Paint pens and toddlers are not a good combination.  Fortunately not too much on the dress.  

 Both girls looking at the camera and smiling = impossible

This was Ella's first time on the carousel sitting by herself.  Exciting and a bit scary at the same time!

Celebration continued with some pumpkin carving.  Addy really got into this year

 She even stuck her hands in the goo!! 

Ella on the other hand was not a fan!

Then at 6:00 Aunt Jean's Halloween Carnival started.  Unfortunately Aunt Jean was out of town this year, but we still had a great time.  

 The Sesame Street booth was a HUGE hit with Ella this year.  She is Elmo obsessed at the moment.  She is pointing at the booth b/c Elmo was gone and she wanted him back!  We spent a lot of time here and she finally got the knack of giving Elmo the ticket and getting candy.  Only problem was that she always tried to give the candy back to Elmo.  

 Daddy and the pink puppy.

 Cute as can be!

Pink puppy became candy obsessed.  Not because she knew what it was, but she LOVED her green pumpkin basket (or bucket depending on Addy's choice of words - trick-r-treat bags don't exist).  When you took her bucket/basket away, Ella would start screaming "snack".

And finally the big day was here! It was a long night with trick-r-treating in the neighborhood and then trips to the grandparent's. 

 A picture with the puppy smiling if you look close!  She actually liked her costume OK and once I made it so that she couldn't pull it off, she was fine with it.  Even left the puppy ears alone!  I made an adaptation after the carnival and moved the ears from a headband to clips, which worked much better. It is such a homemade looking costume, I laugh every time I see the pics!  The tail is my favorite.  I am proud of Ella for putting up with my desire to make her a costume.  Figure she'll have more of an opinion next year, so had to do it while I could! 

 Anxiously awaiting Mr. Larry to answer the door.  Addy liked going door-to-door but wouldn't say "trick-r-treat".  I was talking to her about it and she said she was just shy and didn't want to say it!  Another funny comment of the night was about Jewish people celebrating Halloween -- at school they don't celebrate Halloween, so we had to talk about not wearing her costume to school because it isn't a Jewish holiday.  Then a lot of the houses in the neighborhood had their lights out, so we were explaining that you don't knock on those doors because those people maybe don't celebrate Halloween or aren't home.  So the rest of the night she was saying that the people with their lights off must be Jewish because Jewish people don't celebrate Halloween.  We of course clarified, but it was pretty funny to hear her spin on things! 

 One of my favorite pics of the girls is from Halloween last year.  Unfortunately we were not able to recreate the scene this year.  Ms. Ella was not a fan of the camera.  On multiple occasions she would laugh and smile as soon as the pic was over.  But never when we were ready to snap a pic!

I've never seen so many people walking around Bellaire!  No lie, we had to wait in line to get into Dad's house because there were so many people trick-r-treating.  Ella thought that it was ridiculous and just tried to charge through the people, and Addy thought that it was funny along with the rest of us.  Once we got in Addy got to help pass out candy, which might have been one of the highlights of the night.  Too bad they ran out of candy because Addy could have done it all night!  And I think that Ella was getting in on the fun too.  

Fun but tiring times.  I'm ready to take the Halloween decorations down and move onto Thanksgiving. 

Silly Girls

Just some fun pics from an afternoon at home.

 Ella is buckle obsessed.  Big time.  There are times when she doesn't want to get out of the car because she wants to sit in her carseat and play with the buckles.  Fortunately I didn't get rid of her carrier, so I pulled it out and now she loves playing with it...buckling the buckles, just sitting in it.  Her she is hanging out in the carrier playing with one of Addy's dolls.

 A rare moment with Ella smiling and looking at the camera.  

Addy has gotten crazy good at blowing up balloons.  Here she is showing off her handiwork.

Afternoon in the Park

Oops, this is out of order (pre dead bird), but the afternoon of the big race, the 23rd, our neighborhood association hosted an afternoon at the park. They had a petting zoo, inflatables, crafts, face painting, entertainment from local school bands and performance groups, all kinds of fun things. Due to nap schedules we didn't make it out until close to the end, but we still had a fun time and ran into a lot of Addy's friends from school. 

This was Ella's first real petting zoo experience.  She was fascinated, but unsure about it all. 

Addy at the end of the inflatable obstacle course.

Swinging in action - Addy is great at pumping her legs and swinging herself, although if you are paying attention at all she pretends she is completely incapable of making the swing move and she wants you to push her! 

Kamikaze Bird

Last week, Michael came home to this scene - a window in the garage door had been broken.

 

Seemed pretty strange because if someone was trying to break into the garage to steal our brooms, this would not be the window to break.  So, after looking around and noticing that nothing was missing, Michael noticed something new in the garage...feathers scattered all around and a dead bird.  Below is a very artistic photograph of the dead bird.  Note the distance from the garage door.  We aren't real sure how this happened or how the bird came to lay to rest at nearly the back of the garage.   Quite a mystery, but clearly this poor bird had a really bad day.

And normally I wouldn't put a pic of a dead bird in the blog, and the story would generally not be  blog-worthy, although it is kind of fascinating, but Addy's fascination in it all makes it worth documenting.  She immediately came inside and began drawing a picture to depict the scene.  You might think that she'd be upset by the dead bird, but I guess we talk enough about Michael's hunting and shooting birds that she was relatively unphased by the bird aspect of things.  I think that she was more concerned with the glass all over the garage floor.  This might be one of her best pics to date

And one of my favorite things is the writing at the bottom.  Sure, it is backwards, but she spelled out "ded brd"  (a.k.a. dead bird).  She did this all by herself and she wrote the words based on the sounds.  I'm pretty proud!  Oh and I also like that she drew our car to look more like a tractor.  It is an impressively accurate depiction of the scene of the crime (minus the fact that we don't drive a tractor). 

13.1

On October 23rd, Michael ran in the  Houston 1/2 Marathon.  13.1 miles before 10:00 am is pretty darn impressive (I rarely drive that far much less walk or run that far!)  He had a great run, and all the training that he did definitely seemed to have paid off.  Here are his stats...

Chip time first half: 58:50.18
First half pace: 8:59 / mile
Chip time second half: 57:57.30
Second half pace: 8:51 / mile
Overall time: 1:56:47.48
Overall pace: 8:55 / mile
Overall rank: 756th of 2733
35 - 40 Age Group rank: 94th of 224

Dad, Mary, Helen and Dick all set up chairs along Memorial and were there to cheer him on at the 5 and 10 mile marks.  Then the girls and I met him at the finish line.  It was lots of fun and we are all super proud.  He claims that 13.1 is as far as he is going to go...but before you know it he is going to be preparing for a marathon!

Here are the girls anxiously awaiting Daddy's arrival!

All the runners got a finisher medal, but it might as well be a first prize medal, Addy is quite enamored by it.  I must say it is a pretty snazzy medal, but it is also a bottle opener which is probably the coolest feature!  Here is Addy's rendition of Daddy's medal and I scanned the medal itself so you can see the real deal too!