Photo Shoot and No Heat

I woke up this morning a little more reluctant to get out of bed than normal. I soon realized why. At some point over night our heat stopped working. After several attempts to fix the problem myself, I ended up calling the mechanic.

We then spent the day trying to occupy ourselves to take our minds off of how cold it was. Well I did anyway, the girls didn't seem to mind the fact that they were cold. So what did we do? We did all the ponies hair and then had a photo shoot. I realized that I haven't done one of those with the girls in a while. They were actually really cooperative, so were the ponies, and we got some cute shots. You can check out the rest of them here - Pumpkin Seed Photo

Our heat did get fixed, thankfully.

Twos

Somedays I wonder if -

a. Hazel will ever get over the stage of putting everything in her mouth.

b. If she will ever get over being two.

Today over the course of the day we dealt with at least 10 tantrums, oh . . . wait . . . 11. She also tried to consume a tiny plastic pellet that must have come out of a beanie stuffed animal.

It was actually, over all, a good day for her.

*sigh*

I try to remember that cute, chubby, always smiling, happy baby. I'm hopeful she will revert back to that temperament someday. At least she still is cute, well, when she's not screaming "NO!" "BUT MOM!" "MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY!" or any form of the above in her best whinny two year old voice.

New look

I've decided the blog needed a new look. I know if any of you are like me and only use google reader, you probably don't even see the blog. Meaning your probably saying, who cares. Anyway, I got tired of looking at it so here is the new version.

Things in our life have been busy lately. We are gearing up to go to Portugal in a few weeks. It kind of snuck up on me but I'm so glad it's coming. Bryan and I haven't had too much time sans kids lately so it will be nice to get away. I'm sure they will have an equally nice time wearing out their grandparents. Thank you, awesome grandparents for putting up, I mean spending time with them ;)

What we are up to now

It's a new year, and has been for a whole month. When did that happen? I feel like I haven't been blogging enough on what's going on in our lives. What the girls are up to, etc. So lets start with a little interview. I asked Clara these same questions New Year's Eve 2009.

Clara Feb 2011

Age 4

Favorites:

Color-Pink

Food-Dessert

Drink-Pink Milk

Toy-Sparkle Bell (An old school style Pinkie Pie-My Little Pony she renamed because of her sparkly hair.)

Game- Mouse Game (Chateau Roquefort)

Book-Fancy Nancy

Animal- Dragon (Figment, her purple stuffed dragon)

Song-Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

Favorite thing to do- Craft

Where would you like to go on vacation this year? South Carolina because there are nice trees.

What do you love the most about . . .

Mommy - gives hugs

Papa - gives hugs

Hazel-I don't know

Eli-gives kisses with his slobbery tongue.

Hazel Feb 2011

2

Favorites:

Color - Green (Really because she LOVES Orange)

Food - Rice (?)

Drink - Juice

Toy - Fishies

Game- Iron Man game (which is actually a hard 100 pc puzzle)

Book - Charlie and Lola

Animal- Fishies

Song- Fishy song (What's with the fishy obsession today? I thought it would be My Girl since she insists I sing it every night)

Favorite Thing to do - Color

Where would you like to go on vacation this year? The beach

What do you love most about . . .

Mommy - glasses

Papa - glasses

Clara - sun glasses

Eli - Nose

What else have we been doing? Clara's in early stages of sounding out words and trying to read. She's also crafting, crafting and crafting. Which includes drawing prolifically and cutting up things into miniscule pieces all over the house. Hazel is working hard at her pronunciation of words. Just this week she started saying Lara instead of Dala which is closer to Clara. Other words are getting better too. She's also drawing a lot and has become somewhat of an obsessive puzzler. She has become quite good at them and we are pretty proud of her new found interest.

We've been working on our basement. What once was the shop, an unfinished mess, is now slowly turning into an awesome comic room. This means an awesome upstairs sewing/ photography, whatever room (basically a Tasha room :) ) I'm very excited to have a room of my own. Yes, I feel slightly guilty that our kids are sharing a bedroom and we each will have hobby rooms. However,to be totally honest , they love having a room together and when the time comes that they don't, we have plans for them to have more space all to themselves.

I'm also chugging along with my photo business - www.pumpkinseedphoto.com and now a cake business too - Cakery on the Boulevard and Bryan is still doing the CGS thing. Hopefully, one day it will pay off and he can retire from the 9-5 world of computer programming. Ok, probably anyone who actually reads this blog already knows all this stuff. I write it mostly for my personal agenda. Now that I'm a mom, honestly before that, I have no information retention. I like to look back and say, oh yeah, that's right we did that :p

Monsters, Monsters, Monsters

Hazel has become monster obsessed. She talks about them all the time. I can't tell if she likes them or hates them. She always wants to watch Monsters, Inc. She loves Sully and Mike. However, now she's been waking up every night screaming for me. I go in and half the time I'm not sure if she's awake or still asleep. She refuses to talk to me. If I ask her about dreams she doesn't say anything. I feel like the monsters are what is causing it but she won't tell me that. Griffin has this little gorilla truck, she is both fascinated and petrified of. If you push buttons on it it moves around and "goes ape", the arms move, etc. She talks about it everyday whether we've been to their house recently or not. If you mention Griffin it's the first thing she talks about. I remember Clara going through a brief monster phase. It's a tad frustrating since no matter what you say to them it doesn't help much. Hopefully, she gets over it soon. I'm getting a little tired of waking up in the middle of the night.

More Artwork

I think I posted a person Hazel drew on the white board but here are a few more. These first people, I like to call "crosshair" people, since she mostly uses one line for a body, hair and each arm. Since these first attempts she's already changed her style to adding more hair, sometimes bodies and legs. She did one last night of me, her and Clara and she gave me glasses and a belly button which was located right below my mouth (since I had no body) such a little cutie.

A few of Clara's from the last few months, I finally got around to scanning in.

Reindeer

Starsong, Pinky Pie and Rainbow Dash - My Little Ponies, a favorite in our house right now.

Dragon (During her brief dragon obsession.)