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.

Grandparent party!

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This stuff cracks me up!

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It just isn't Christmas without...

making yourself into a crazy looking elf! My sister-in-law showed me this last year and I died laughing every time I saw it. So for your viewing pleasure, here it is again! (It plays music so you'll have to stop our little music player to hear it properly.)

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