Christmas pictures

I'm FINALLY going to post our pictures from Christmas. Our morning started off with Rosalee and I sleeping in and Jesse making breakfast. We woke up to the smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen. Rosalee sat up in bed and loudly said, "meat!" I started laughing but then realized she was serious. I took her into the kitchen for some bacon and then I made her go to the bathroom. She kept standing up claiming to be "all done" just so she could have more bacon. Finally we went and then I promptly took her to the kitchen for more bacon. I attempted to show her what Santa brought but she wanted nothing to do with anything unless it was bacon. As you can tell from the below video she could not be bothered. Maybe next year Santa will just put a slab of bacon in her stocking!

After being stuffed on bacon, toast, and scrambled eggs Rosalee was FINALLY ready to care what was under the tree. We started by opening stockings and as soon as Rosalee saw that her fruit was a bunch of bananas she had to eat them before moving on to the presents. So while she continued to eat, Jesse and I took turns opening our stockings.
This year Santa brought Trouble a bag of pig ears which kept her busy for most of the morning.

Here is Jesse and his goodies. The funny thing about his apple is when he saw it he thought it was a chocolate covered cheese ball. I'm not sure that those exist or if they do if people would eat them, but that's what Jesse thought he got. I almost felt bad telling him it was an apple.

Good ol' Santa! Somehow he always knows exactly what to give me.


We couldn't get Rosalee to stay still with her stocking gifts so we just put them next to the ball toy and took a picture. I think the half eaten banana adds a bit of class to the photo.

After Rosalee played with the ball popper several more times we got her to open some more presents. The masking tape on the present was from when she tried to open the gift a week early. When we finally let her open the presents she was so delicate about it. She's really funny about things sometimes!

This year Rosalee got some toys, books, and a few outfits. She kept kissing the box of this toy and calling it a "gwin". We tried to get her to say pen-guin but I guess it'll come in time.

As soon as Rosalee opened her gift from Angie and Brett she had to stop and read her books. She refused to open anything else until her dad read to her. Thank you Angie for the GREAT animal books! Rosalee really likes the frog book with the real frog photos.

Rosalee opened more presents just to find out she got more books. These books kept her busy enough that Jesse and I could open our gifts. Jesse claims we have too many pictures of him so I wasn't allowed to get any pictures of him. But he was more than willing to take tons of me!

Thank you Angie and Brett for thinking of us this Christmas!

What makes Marie happy? Beautiful funky shoes from Santa. I love that I can send Jesse to the store and know that if he returns with a shoe box that I don't have to worry.

After a busy morning we got dressed and headed to our friend's house for a wonderful dinner.

Rosalee's heaven

What happens when a baby is left alone for just a few minutes? She goes into the kitchen, gets some cereal, and feeds herself. Excuse me for having to use the bathroom! Oh well, she had fun and it made me vacuum the living room.

Christmas came early

The first reason I feel this way is because last weekend it was FREEZING. We had temperatures in the negatives. Then came the snow, mixed with ice, just ice, a little more snow, finished off by ice. Now it is raining and according the weather man it will be sloppy wet, a little icy, but not white for Christmas.

The second reason is Jesse got one present early. I had to give it to him early or we would have missed out on the event. Some people may not know, but Jesse is a HUGE fan of basketball. So I bought him some tickets for last Monday nights game. They played a smaller school, Indiana University Fort Wayne, but Jesse didn't care. He was just excited to get to go to a game. I also thought it might be nice to go to a game against a smaller school because our chances of winning would be greater. Well, Purdue won!!! They beat the other team by 15 points so Jesse was very excited. Rosalee had a great time at the game too. She loved all the attention from the people around us, getting to yell, eating (of course), and the half time show. The "gold girl" was tossing batons in the air and shaking all over the place and Rosalee kept laughing and clapping. She clapped every time we clapped after Purdue made a basket. We even got her to say, "woo woo" a few times. I'm not sure if she was cheering or trying to say Purdue, but it was still cute!

They both were very focused on the game. It was great to see them having such a wonderful time. I'm pretty sure neither of them even knew I took a picture!

A true Rosalee photo! We bought a hot dog for Rosalee to share with Jesse, but (as you can see) she savagely attacked it and claimed it for her own. The couple behind us kept laughing at Rosalee's determination to eat it despite the fact she still has no teeth.

The people behind us took a picture of us. My auto flash didn't go off for the first picture but I wanted to show it so you can see how we pacify Rosalee. She started to fuss if we took the hot dog away so Jesse let her eat it. When the flash didn't go off, I asked if they could take a second picture. This time WITHOUT the hot dog! So in case you're wondering, Rosalee is looking at the man with the hot dog and pointing at the camera. My hair looks gross in the pictures but I believe in wearing hats, unlike some people I'm married to. :)

All bundled up and ready to go home after a great game!

Queen of cuteness

Here are some videos that I took of Rosalee today and yesterday. I love that neither video are of anything too incredible but at the same time they show how much she's learned. At times when I think she's so young she amazes me by understanding and doing SO much! She knows A LOT more than she can express to us but she's getting better at using ASL and copying words. Today, for example, she walked into the kitchen and grabbed a box of crackers. She brought them to me and signed "eat" and then said "more please". Well it sounds like "Moe pees" but I know what she's saying. :) I love that I'm able to be home with her and capture these fun little moments.

Rosalee gets better at walking all the time. She pretty much has stopped crawling and toddles around the house now. She'll only crawl when she falls and then she gets right back up on her feet. She's fallen hard a few times but it doesn't seem to stop her from taking off!

Ward Christmas party

Last Saturday was our ward (church for the non-Mormons out there) Christmas party. They had a ton of food, family pictures, cupcake decorating, crafts, and various musical and theatrical productions for our entertainment. My favorite was the children acting out the nativity story and the girl holding Jesus with a choke hold around the neck.

Rosalee ate a freakish amount of food. She seriously ate more than I did! She would ask for more from anyone willing to offer her some food. I think she loves that her dad has a sweet tooth because she gets a lot of sweets when he's around.

Some babies (Mia!) decided to steal and eat Rosalee's shoe instead of the ham and potatoes.

This is Rosalee's new best friend Nelly the seeing eye dog. I think Rosalee was ecstatic to see a dog at church. The first picture is of Nelly helping clean ham juice off Rosalee's cheek. The second one is my favorite because both of them were begging for ham from Jesse and I just laughed the whole time. Thankfully Nelly's owner is really nice and didn't mind us spoiling her.

Remember to laugh

Both Jesse and I laugh a lot. We need to because if we didn't we'd go mental. Sometimes life can be down right awful but as long as you remember to laugh it doesn't seem as bad. So today has so far been one of those laugh or go insane type of days.

I'll start with the potty issue. Rosalee uses her toilet every morning like clock work. Today was no different. She sat, she went, she stood up informing Jesse that she was "all done". Believing this innocent child he took her into the bedroom to change her. She now only wants to use the toilet so sometimes she won't go poop as long as possible... today was the breaking point. In the few minutes between when they left the bathroom and came running back Rosalee had pooped on the bed, inside my slipper, on some dirty clothes and one sneaker (all next to the bed), on Jesse's slipper (she did this as he ran back to the bathroom), on the bathroom floor, and then again in her toilet. Seriously, how can one tiny person have THAT much inside of them!? Instead of being mad about the ridiculous amount of poop we had to clean up we just sat there and laughed.

Ice issue- sometime between 10 last night and 10 this morning ice fell from the sky. The roads are covered, my sidewalk is covered, and the car doors were all frozen shut. I had a very small window of time to drop something off at Purdue (for my Saturday school teaching job) before the little boy I baby-sit would be dropped off. So we bundled Rosalee up and headed out to the car. The driver side of the car was covered in ice. The passenger side was not as bad so after body slamming my door twice I was able to get in. Then with Jesse pulling on the outside of the door and me kicking the inside, the driver door opened. I turned on the car so we could get the heat going and Jesse proceeded to scrape the ice off the windows. Since Rosalee's door was still frozen she stayed in the front seat. She had a great time standing and playing with the steering wheel while Jesse and I were body slamming, pulling, pushing, kicking, etc. the back doors. When we finally got her in her seat she was mad, not because it was 10 degrees, but because she couldn't drive anymore. I think the frost bite had moved into our brains because all we could do was sit there and laugh hysterically. Our hands were bright red (neither one of us were smart enough to grab gloves), our noses felt like they could fall off, our shoulders were sore from slamming the car, and yet all we could do was laugh.

I guess either than wanting to remember silly times like this I just wanted to share our opinion on laughter being the best medicine. I really think that only when you can truly laugh at yourself for silly, or even stupid, mistakes then you're happy with who you are. Plus it's SO much easier to enjoy life by laughing instead of crying or yelling. Try it sometime. :)

As requested

Last September Jesse's family came to visit and Jesse took his dad to class with him. Jesse just NOW got the pictures from his teacher so I've been asked to post them. So without further delay, here they are!

My other request came from my mother who asked that I put some pictures of Rosalee in what she's wearing today on here. For Rosalee's blessing my mom made her an overcoat/dress/kimono/bathrobe like outfit. When she wore it over a year ago it was HUGE on her, as you can see if you click the link above. Today I asked Rosalee what she wanted to wear and she grabbed the blessing outfit out of the closet. Out of curiosity I put it on her and surprisingly it still fits rather well!

Winter wonderland

Okay so I've been slower at blogging these days, but Rosalee (as of Monday) is now walking most of the time. Which means the monkey stage has begun. If you're a praying person I would ask you start praying for my sanity now. :)

It's warmer today than it has been in a few weeks but here are some snow videos from last week when it was FREEZING outside. Before you go call PETA on me you need to understand that after 3 years of hating snow Trouble now is fascinated with it. She finds it fun to run around and bite the snow as it falls.

It's taken us almost a week, but our tree is up and fully decorated. We usually put garland on the tree but we decided not to this year because string+Rosalee=the tree falling down and everything getting smashed. Plus I think the tree would look too busy with the garlands. (It's nice to FINALLY think my tree is looking full!)

This is how the tree looked from Thursday until Sunday...

Rosalee has several Christmasy outfits so we're going to put her in one every Sunday up to Christmas. She looked so cute in her hat and clothes that I insisted that Jesse take some pictures of her. The only drawback... I had to be in the pictures too. :( My favorite is the second picture where Rosalee is half smiling half laughing looking. She was actually trying to say, "love you" but it comes out as "uv oooooooooooo" most of the time.

Seriously this kid is just too cute!

Rosalee got to help us last night with putting the decorations on the tree. I'm not sure why, but our ornament from Russia is a baby magnet! She would walk over and try to grab it every time. Needless to say, that one was placed higher on the tree this year. We made sure that the bottom 1/3 of the tree was full of dog and baby safe ornaments.

Rosalee actually behaved better than Jesse and I expected. There are only 3 ornaments that she wants to play with so we left the 2 plastic ones on the bottom and hid the other 1 up high on the tree. When I saw a Purdue ornament at the store I just HAD to get it for Jesse. I wish it said 2009, since that's when he graduates, but I guess we'll just use it as our "last Christmas in Indiana" ornament now.

Surprisingly it took Jesse almost 10 minutes to get the star on. He can be such a perfectionist at times!

The final product!

And, of course, a silly picture of Rosalee posing by the tree.

Your address is needed

I'm trying to send out my Christmas cards this weekend so if you'd like one make sure I have your address. You can either post it here, email it to me at skittlez85@hotmail.com, or call me. I hope everyone is having a GREAT time getting ready for the holidays!

The last week

Here's some photos and an update of what we've been up to the last week. The first thing is Thanksgiving, which means I was busy cooking, cooking, eating, and stuffing myself. Jesse and I made dinner for our friends and some of the teenage boys from church who had family out of town. (I'm one of those people who can't stand to see someone eat a frozen meal on a holiday!) We ate dinner at the church, played basketball, dodge ball, and then watched a movie. It was a lot of fun but sadly I don't have many pictures. :( My camera will flash the low battery sign and then die after you take one more picture so I got some cooking pictures but none of us eating and playing. Our friend got some pictures but she has 3 small children so maybe I'll get them within a month or two... You'll have to excuse the EXTREME mess in our kitchen but Rosalee had the flu leading up to Thanksgiving and I had the flu coming out of Thanksgiving. So a lot of dishes were used and pretty much none were cleaned.

My mom taught me that you can never have too much stuffing! There is our 24 pound turkey filled with easily 10 pounds of stuffing. I take my holidays seriously! What the last picture doesn't show is the look on my face as I tried to put the 35ish pounds of food in the oven. I'm still not sure why I didn't ask Jesse to do it...

Jesse is the dessert maker of our family. Here is he making some chocolate cream pies. The one has peanut butter chips on it and the other is topped with whipped topping.

Apparently we have a tradition of traveling across towns with Thanksgiving food. The first picture is of Jesse taking my homemade eggnog on the subway in Moscow. We got A LOT of weird looks and even had a smelly hobo laugh at us. Well this year Jesse got to carry a VERY warm VERY heavy turkey with stuffing on his lap as I drove to the church. Even with 3 towels on his lap he said his legs were pretty warm feeling by the time we arrived. Ah, memories.
Another thing that started happening is Rosalee is trying to walk. She'll take several steps and then fall down or squat to a crawl. It's really funny to see her face because she looks scared or surprised every time she walks. It also never fails that when she walks the camera is nowhere to be found! I did catch her once... or maybe I forced her to walk, but regardless I caught it on film!

More on Rosalee... she now wants to label everything she sees, touches, eats, etc. She'll hold out a toy and I'll say, "ball" (or whatever it is) and then she tries so hard to copy what I've said. Every time she eats I'll ask her if she wants more of whatever it is. Then she'll sign "more" and then say the word. Mashed potatoes are now "tatas" and scrambled eggs are "ehs". Along with wanting to talk about her food Rosalee has now decided that she wants to feed herself. Rosalee also is doing great with potty training. She knows tells me "peepee" as she's going to the bathroom. A few times I've been able to catch her and put her on the potty so she can finish her business there. She's such a great kid!

Another development this week is we had our first snow of the season. According to the weather guy it should snow more later this week into the weekend. I'm really hoping he's wrong.
I applied for a job teaching Saturday school for gifted students at Purdue and got it! I'm going to be teaching science to 1st and 2nd graders who are at a 3rd or 4th grade level. My class is called "how does it work" and I already have TONS of ideas already.