Christmas

We had a great Christmas - as usual! We are so lucky to have great families and wonderful traditions. We spent Christmas eve at Jared's parents with the family. Case and Ellie were clearly inseparable. Carter loved his new Wii and got Nick Nick's help driving his monster truck. We had Christmas at my parent's including a big dinner with John's friends and their families. Ellie loves all her new gadgets and is slowly trying out her new bike from Santa.

Winter Activities

We had a busy, busy December. It started with a trip to Moses Lake right after Thanksgiving to celebrate Carters 4th Birthday! What a big boy he is these days! Hard to believe he's already 4!! His party was at the bouncy house - Ellie was unsure at first and didn't want to go in to the inflatable houses by herself, but loved jumping with mommy, Ashley and Case, and then sliding down the big slide with mommy too!







We also spent a couple days making cookies - Ellie is a great helper. She always says "I do it!" so she helped make all the dough and decorate the sugar cookies. She even cut a "Mommy and Hammer" cookie as I call it.







One of the really neat things that Spokane has is sleigh rides through downtown in the month of December! These are even FREE rides! All the family friendly activites is certainly one of the many reasons I love Spokane!





We didn't get much snow accumulation in the month of December this year - certainly not anything like last November/December. We've maybe had a total of an inch or inch and a half over the month and two different snowfalls. However, we had a cold spurt for about a week which produced some freezing fog. It was really beautiful.





One of final things we did before Christmas was a nice holiday dinner with Joel and Cailin at our house, followed by driving and looking at lights while drinking cocoa and eating cookies in the car! Ellie loved it! We found some really awesome houses nearby that sync'ed the motion of the lights to music! A must do for next year too!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Well not a lot - we still haven't decorated the house or put up the lights, but we did decorate a gingerbread house! Ellie got her fill of candy last night as she was decorating. We had a lot of fun together.

Ellie's Birthday Party

On Ellie's actual Birthday, Saturday, we made cake batter pancakes with sprinkles and glaze frosting for breakfast! Yummy!





On Sunday for her breakfast party, we had all sorts yummy breakfast treats and owl cupcakes!



All the kiddos (big and small) got a yummy owl treat bag filled with sweets to take home!





Ellie couldn't wait to grab herself a cupcake after we sang to her!



Ellie and Jillian enjoying their breakfast sweets!

1st Snow

This post is late, but we had our first snow a couple of weeks back. Ellie was pretty excited, til she felt it on her hand - "brrrr, cold" as she shakes the snow off. :)

Happy 2nd Birthday Ellie!

Happy 2nd Birthday to our baby girl - who's not so much a baby any more! Every day she doesn't cease to amaze us with her little personality.

She's been a busy bee lately learning all sort of new things. She has quite the vocabulary these days and is learning to speak in sentences. Her favorite? "NO! I'll do it!" As many of you know she's pretty independent. And bossy - she loves to tell mommy and daddy what to do - "sit" pointing at each of our chairs at the dinner table. She's also working on learning her colors, currently most colors are either Yellow or Orange - I am guessing those to be favorites.

And we are learning to potty train.....slowly. She's not 100% there, but just Wednesday this week, she wanted to go 'pee pee' so I plopped her on her potty. She generally likes to be alone, so I left, but she kept getting up and didn't want to put a diaper on, continuing to say 'pee pee', so back on the potty she went. Finally after 4 of 5 rounds of this, I stayed in there with her - a minute later she stands up and announces 'pee pee' but it wasn't - SHE POOPED!! We were sooo proud.

Her 2 year check up was Wednesday - and I am sure nothing here will surprise most of you! Weight - 22.5 lbs (yes, still tiny;) Height - 33 inches tall (not much taller than her 18 month check up) and slightly below average for 2 year olds. She didn't flinch with her flu shot and had to have 2 tubes of blood drawn for her bee allergy test (which results so far are normal) - she was a trooper through that too.

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone! Ellie loved her Super Girl costume this year, especially when Daddy made her fly around the house. She still doesn't get "trick or treat"-ing, but she loves the candy that she gets.






We carved pumpkins a week before and Ellie wasn't too interested in the carving part, but loved Daddy's carving of Mickey Mouse.





We spent Halloween weekend in Moses Lake with family, particularly Ellie's super hero cousins - Carter, aka Batman and Case, aka Superman. We made a couple of stops at Great Grandma and Grandpa Beierman's, Jessica and Dustin's, and Nana and Papa's.

Pear

Ellie: Pear.
Daddy: Take a bite.
Ellie: Cut it.
Daddy: Ok.
Ellie: Wash it.

Well isn't someone just a little smarty pants these days....not to mention a bit bossy.

Ellie's Art

Ever since the boys were her for pumpkin picking, Ellie has been really into coloring! She went to town this week making this masterpiece! She's gotten pretty good at naming some of her colors - specifically yellow.

Stealing Jelly Beans

Today we came back home from Moses Lake - Ellie was short on nap time today, only sleeping a little over an hour on the way home. Subsequently she was quite the pill this evening. Jared and I set out to carve pumpkins despite her attitude. During our carving adventure, I left one of the drawers open in the kitchen, that happens to have the bag of jelly beans in it. A little while later, we can hear her, but can't see her. I asked her what she was doing, and asked Jared what he thought. We both heard the sound of a bag rustling and jelly beans. Quickly after, the bag stopped making noise and the drawer shut. I walked over there, and she had about 7-8 jelly beans in her mouth, which I made her spit out. The temper tantrum followed, but we were both surprised by her intelligence to get in to the bag and put it away.

Big Girl Bed - Almost

Well Ellie's hit yet another milestone. She's transitioned in less than 1 day to a toddler bed. Yesterday Jared converted her crib to the toddler bed before her nap - she loved it. She did great at nap time, didn't try to get out of bed, but only slept about an hour. However, night time was a even better success! She went to bed, no fussing, which really doesn't happen all that often since we took away the puggy, slept through the night and even slept in til 7 am this morning. We're so proud of our big girl!!

Two Beers

So we don't drink a lot. Clearly right now I am not drinking at all. But due to having company and it being football season, we've got a pack of tall boys in the pantry. So Ellie kept trying to play with them earlier this evening and Jared told her no and that she could hurt herself. So just now we are sitting on the couch watching TV and Ellie disappears and comes back with two tall boys. She hands one to Jared and one to me and is saying Mommy and Daddy to us as she hands them over. Guess she wanted us to have some drinks. :)

Ellie has some exciting news....

....she's going to be a big sister! Probably not a shock to most of you that read this blog, but maybe a few of you still don't know. I'm about 19 1/2 weeks along - putting our due date at the end of Feb or beginning of March. The original due date based on timing is Feb 29 (yes leap day), and based on ultrasounds is March 2. I'll take March 2nd over a leap day baby. :) Also, we are fortunate enough to know we are expecting a baby BOY! We had our first ultrasound at 12 weeks and the tech at that point thought it was a boy and last Thursday we confirmed it at 99.9%.

Pumpkin Pickin at Green Bluff

This weekend Pop Pop, Grandma, Becky, Carter and Case came up to Spokane to go to Green Bluff to get our pumpkins for carving - not to mention all the other fun things we did. The weather was perfect! After an entire week of cold and rain, (literally Thursday's high was 48 degrees) we got 60+ degree weather, with sun and very few clouds! We headed up reletively early and missed the bulk of the crowd.

We started off at Knapp's farm where the kids picked their own pumpkins - notice how Case and Carter picked approrpiately sized pumpkins for them to carry and Ellie picks a big pumpkin. :) We also got to watch them shoot off the pumpkin cannon for pumpkin chunkin! And Carter ran through the hay maze with lightening speed.
























Then it was off to Walter's Fruit Ranch, one of our favorite farms on the bluff. Walter's has fruit trees, pumpkin patches, like all the other farms, but they also have a dried pea box - a non-messy sand box, play set, rides, live music, and the best frozen pies ever. Carter enjoyed the pea box, while Case and Ellie enjoyed the play set.






Thanks for a great weekend guys!