More Snow = Canceled flights

I just thought this was a cute picture of Natalya and wanted to share it! She loves playing with her big sister and wants to do what she does and so often wants to wear headbands and gloves.

With all the snow we had the first two weeks of February school was canceled for 2 weeks. I wasn't too sad about the snow and cold because I knew we were heading to Phoenix and warm sunny weather for a week while Mike went to a medical conference and we visited my parents. But then the snow kept coming and the day before our trip our flights were canceled because of the weather. I called to get them rescheduled but unable to get us out of the East before the weekend and it would mean Mike would miss his conference we decided to forget the trip and stay home.
Since we were planning on being gone for Valentine's day I didn't make my usual sugar cookies and decorate them. But we were home and so the girls and I made cherry chip cupcakes with pink frosting. I think the best part for the girls was getting to frost their own cupcakes and themselves too. We celebrated Valentine's day with heart shape pancakes and pink strawberry milk for breakfast and heart shaped peanut butter and honey sandwiches for lunch. Raquel loved the heart shape pancakes and asks for them most mornings for breakfast. Raquel was even able to make her own valentines for her preschool class and write her name by her self in all of them.

Frosting cupcakes and their faces!

On Saturday we took the kids to Winterfest, it is a fun indoor carnival like activity that VT puts on for the community. We brought our neighbors along for the fun and everyone enjoyed playing on inflatable toys, making sand art, eating snow cones and making their own sugar straws and playing games.

Making sand art

Getting ready to race through the bouncy maze with Tom & Kaitlin

Posing with the Hokie Bird!

Snow, Fire and Walking

Its been another long week with snow and more snow closing school for the week and canceling work. We have been stuck inside for too long and can't wait for spring. When you start dreaming about Wii games you have been playing almost nonstop for the last week because its too cold to go outside you know you have problems and need warm weather.

There are sometimes you should listen to your husband without questioning why and Friday night was one of those times. I was laying in bed reading a book and Mike calls up from downstairs for me to get my shoes on and come outside. Of course I'm warm in my bed and ask why he would want me to do such a thing. He calmly yells up that our neighbors house is on fire. Ok, so I didn't exactly believe him but I did hear him go outside so I thought I'd get up and take a look for myself before taking the time to get my shoes on and go outside for what I thought was a joke. It didn't take me long to see he wasn't lying and get my shoes on and race across the yard. Luckily it had snowed that day and was currently raining or it might have been a lot worse than the melted trash can and charred deck that was left. Mike quickly doused the 6 ft flames with the snow and I ran to tell the neighbors. I guess one of the neighbors had been burning documents in an old coffee can and had thought the ashes were out and then dumped them in the big blue city garbage can. Its amazing how quickly a big piece of plastic was reduces to nothing and thank goodness for Mike's quick reactions. I will quickly obey when asked to do something as simple as putting on my shoes next time I'm asked.

But the biggest excitement that we have had this week is that Natalya is walking! Its taken a while and she is still a bit wobbly and chooses to crawl most of the time but she can do it!

A picture of my little walking Frankenstein!

January 2010

January was a busy month filled with more snow, friends and good food. Because of the weather, snow, ice and such both Raquel's school and Mike's work were cancelled often in January which gave us plenty of time to spend together. We have been working with Raquel on learning to spell her name and now she is a pro and can also write my name and Mike's with a little help.

Raquel's first attempt to spell her name by herself.

On the 8th Mike took a trip up to Lynchburg to say goodbye to some of his National Guard unit that was deployed to Iraq. We are still very thankful that he didn't have to go with them this time since he hadn't even been home a month when they left.

The battalion took a few pictures at the D-day Memorial before heading to Mississippi.

We were planning on hosting a Turkish exchange student, Berfun from March until June. She had stayed with us for a few days while her current host family was out of town over Christmas. The girls and I had done quite a bit with her while Mike was gone and Raquel absolutely adored her and was so excited to have a big sister come stay for a while. Berfun had been very home sick and had thought about leaving to go home before Christmas but decided to stay. Then mid January we got a call saying that she had a ticket to go home. So we went out to celebrate with her at Zeppoli's. Poor Raquel was so tired that she fell asleep before dinner and didn't get to say goodbye. Berfun did give Raquel a beautiful bracelet to remember her by.

Finally in January it warmed up a bit so that we could take a walk to the park and play. We brought Raquel's friend Autumn. It was nice to get out of the house and enjoy warm weather. Little did we know that it would be the last time for a while and we would soon be snowed in for a couple of weeks.

Running to the park!

This month we also tried a lot of new restaurants and we were kind of on an Asian kick. We tried the Thai place in town which left us wanting our yummy place in Boise. Then we took our neighbors Ann & Wes to the Korean restaurant Kalbee in Pembroke which was good food but not authentic Korean that Mike was use to and finally we ate at Kabuki to celebrate Mike's partners birthday. We both loved the food but came home extremely stuffed. We had a good food month!

Lastly we had a fun visit with cousins. Anna, Lexi and Marilyn came to visit and play and ended up coming the day before a major snow storm and so we were stuck inside most of the time because of the cold weather but the girls had lots of fun playing with each other.

Christmas 2009

We had a fun low key Christmas at home this year. We spent part of Christmas eve with friends at their annual Feliz Navidad party where we pigged out on good Mexican food and birthday cake. The girls woke up early Christmas morning, and when I say early I mean early. We were done opening presents and had eaten breakfast by 6 am. We had yummy stuffed blueberry french toast with fresh fruit.

Santa brought Raquel barbies, barbies and more barbies. I think she ended up with almost 20, good thing Santa was smart and got them cheap on ebay. Natalya got lots of fisher price little people, a plane, carriage, castle and more. The girls had fun playing all day with their new toys, we talked with Grandma and Papa on Skype and had a yummy Christmas dinner by ourselves. Then for dessert later that night we made donuts and invited Ann and Berfun over to sample some. Berfun was an exchange student from Turkey that stayed with us for 4 days over Christmas and was going to stay with us for 4 months beginning in March (more about that later).

Getting ready to open presents!

Raquel and a few of her new barbies.

Natalya opening her presents!

Talking with Grandma, Anna and Lexi on Christmas morning.

Playing in their new play-hut. The girls have loved this new toy!

A couple of days after Christmas we found we had too many new toys and no where to store them so the girls got a belated Christmas gift, a toy chest. We picked it up and let the girls decide what color to paint it and then spent the afternoon painting together.

Priming the wood with dad!

Raquel picked pink to paint her and Natalya's new toy chest.

Mike also received a belated Christmas gift, a 1965 Mustang. I know we got rid of his other one so that we would only have 2 cars but some how we have began collecting cars and our house looks like a used car lot. He is really excited about his car and can't wait for the weather to be nicer so that he can drive it more to work. It will not be the new family car because we learned after we bought it that the back seat doesn't not have seat belts and no where to put some in.

Snow, Snow and more Snow

After being home for a week we had Mike's office Christmas party at our house on the 18th. Earlier in the week the weatherman forecasted a big snow storm starting Friday and so the party was moved up from 7pm to 1:30pm. I volunteered to make the main dish for the party, I made Cafe Rio pork (Mmmm!) and regular taco meat and all the fixing for the tacos. People came, everything was good, and then it started to snow and everyone got worry because most of them live out of town.

Within 1 1/2 hours the party was over and we were left with a lot of food. Not wanting major leftovers we called up all our neighbors that were within walking distance (because the snow had already made the roads extremely slippery) and had them over for a party to help eat all the food. It was great made food for one party and used it for two!

Enjoying the snow fall while daddy pulled them down the road.

A picture of our street during the snow storm.

The snow began falling Friday at 2pm and continued through the night and all of Saturday. We woke up to a wonderland of snow. Its the most snow that we have seen in one snow storm in a long time, our neighbor measured 16 inches! So what do you do when your neighborhood is covered in snow? Build snowmen and go sledding of course and that's exactly what we did.

We headed to our nearby park to sled, both Natalya and Raquel had lots of fun. We even brought the dogs in the back of the truck to come join in the winter fun. They had lots of fun running through the snow at the park.

Getting ready to go to the park with the dogs.

Sledding with daddy!

Sitting and enjoying watching the sledding, we only have one sled.

She did sled a couple of times and enjoyed it.

Next of course we had to make snowmen! We started out making one snowman, we rolled the bottom and then the middle. But when Mike and I tried to put the middle on the base it was too heavy. We decided to make it into another snowman, a mommy snowman to go along with the daddy snowman. After starting two snowmen Raquel wanted to make herself into a snowman and then we couldn't leave Natalya out, so we ended up making four snowman to represent our family. It has been fun having so much snow to play in for the past week!

Raquel with her snowman

Our family of snowmen!

Haircut, Daddy and New Truck

12/4/09

Once again Raquel got a hold of a pair of scissors and gave herself a new hairdo. This time she had ponytails in and decided to cut them out. When I asked her why she did it, she replied that she wanted to get the hair out of her face. I quickly ran down to the local little hair cutting place to see what they could do with it. The poor little girl was new and had no idea what to do with Raquel's hair luckily her boss was there to help out. Unfortunately it is now more in her face than before because the uneven sides are too short to put up in a braid or pony tail. She was able to model her new hairdo at Leah's birthday party Sat. and at church on Sunday.

Raquel showing off her new haircut after we took her to the hairdresser.

This is what I found on the floor, the pony tail holder was

still in her hair holding it together.

12/7

Natalya had her 12 month visit. She was 21 lbs and 28 1/2 inches long. She still isn't walking but making progress.

12/11

Mike finally made it back to the United States and then home. While in Afghanistan he purchased a 1967 GMC truck on ebay. The truck was located in Georgia, where he was at Fort Benning and so picked it up to drive home on Thurs. After a late start from checking out from Benning and meeting the guy to pick up the truck (which he found out had no heat and the lights wouldn't work properly) he decided he was going to spend the night in Atlanta and drive up the next morning when it was light and maybe a little warmer. We were all a little sad that it would be another day before we would get to see dada, so we all went to bed. At 3:30am Friday I was woken up by the doorbell, and when I opened the door I found a very frozen Mike. He had gotten the lights to work and decided that it wasn't going to be that much colder driving at night and so drove home instead of spending the night in Atlanta. The poor guy was a block of ice, it took him an extra 2-3 hours to get home because he would have to stop every 30-40 minutes at a gas station where he could sit and warm up. We were sure happy to see him, we woke the girls up and they were able to see him and play with him for a little while before heading back to bed. Raquel was super happy to see her dad. It took Natalya a few minutes to warm up to him but now loves to have fun with him just as much as Raquel.

Later Friday morning Mike dressed in his uniform and took Raquel to school and did a little presentation for her class. He told them about what he does in the Army and let them practice doing it too. First he told about how if a soldier gets hurt they have to go and cut off their uniform to see where they are hurt. Mike had an old pair of army pants that he let the kids practice their cutting skills on. Next, he told them they would have to bandage of the soldiers and let the kids practice wrapping each other up with bandages. And finally he told them how if the soldier was really hurt and couldn't walk they would have to carry them. The kids all gathered around the stretcher and helped lift each other practicing. Mike was so good with the kids, he keep their attention and I think they all enjoyed it. Raquel was sure proud of her dad and it showed on her face.

Raquel looking so proud of her dad!

Practicing cutting up a uniform

Playing with Daddy at school

Raquel's teachers made a welcome home sign for Mike

when he came to school.

Taking a ride with dad in his new truck.

The truck

Mike

The most exciting news is that Mike is on his way home. It is taking him a long time but at least he is coming in the right direction. He left his FOB on November 24th taking a flight to Kabul, where he spent time out processing and waiting for a flight to Bagram. He finally made it to Bagram where he was sleeping in a tent on a cot. Finally today he made it to Kuwait after a long night ride in a c-17. A friend he meet while at Fort Benning hooked him up with a friend and Mike gets to be out of a tent and cot and in the nicest bed he has slept in since leaving home. He is scheduled for a flight to Benning on Saturday. If all goes well he could be home late next week!

Birthday Girl!

While in California Natalya had a birthday and turned one. Its amazing how big she is getting! She is getting close to walking, and her little personality is beginning to show. If she wants something she will make sure you know it and will not take no for an answer. She got a new pair of shoes from Gram for her birthday and won't take them off after the first day I put them on. One day when I was dressing her I took off the socks that she was wearing and just put on her shoes. She did not like it one bit and picked up the socks and held them out to me and then held them to her feet. She wanted those socks back on and she got it! We will go for her 12 month visit to the doctors on Monday to see how she is growing. Since we were in California on Natalya's birthday we decided that she needed to have a little party with cake when we returned to Phoenix. So I made her a bunny cake and had some friends over (Juile, Paul, Coleman, Donna & David) to help celebrate. Natalya was super excited that she was able to eat M&M's off her cake and loved eating the cake, unlike Raquel who would hardly touch her cake at her first birthday party. I guess its tradition after 2 kids having their first birthday's in Phoenix we will have to do it for any other kids we have.

Natalya and her pink bunny cake

Enjoying picking M&M's off of the cake.

Mmmm Cake!

After another fun filled week at Gram & Papa's house with cousins (who were amazing entertainers for the girls, Raquel was sad the next day when Charlotte, Claire, Sophie and Henry left, she walked around the house asking where all her people were.), swimming in the pool, shopping, good Thanksgiving food, great movies and picking oranges we headed home to Virginia.

The girls did great on our cross country trip, sleeping on both plane rides, letting me run them through airports and a 2 hour car trip home arriving at 2:15am. Its good to be home and sleep in my own bed for the first time in almost a month.

Picking oranges in a neighbors backyard. We made fresh squeezed oj with them!

Natalya collecting oranges.

Playing at the Phoenix airport waiting for our flight.

Heading home!

California Dreamin!

Last week was a fun filled California adventure, my parents took the girls and I to Disneyland! After church on Sunday we packed up and headed out on the road. We drove about half way to Indio, CA and spent the night at my parents timeshare. We woke up in the morning and had a great morning in the pools. They have all sorts of pools, hot tubs, a lazy river and kids play area. Raquel made friends with a couple of kids and had fun playing until it was time to check-out of our room and head to Anaheim.

Natalya soaking up some rays in Indio.

Playing in the pool

Floating down the lazy river with Gram.

My little monkey's climbing on the luggage cart at the hotel in Anaheim.

Tuesday was our first day at Disney! We arrived at Disneyland at 10am and didn't leave that night until 7pm. Both Raquel and Natalya were real troopers and had lots of fun. Disneyland was all decorated for Christmas and the rides were transformed with holiday decorations. Its a small World sang Jingle Bells and The haunted house was A nightmare before Christmas Characters. Raquel's favorite things to do were riding on the carousel, seeing the Disney princesses and getting a new Little Mermaid Polly Pocket. I was amazed at how brave she was on some of the rides and how tall she has gotten to be able to ride on most of the rides (she is up to 40 inches). We went on Thunder Mountain railroad and she didn't like it but didn't cry or whine the whole time we were on the ride, she just calmly said when we were done that she didn't want to go on that ride again. Raquel loved seeing the Disney princesses! We had to stand in line for quite a while but it was worth it to see the look on her face. We were able to see Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother and Belle. We first came to Aurora and Raquel took a picture with her and then Cinderella and took a picture with her, but when we got to Belle she just hugged and hugged her for a couple of minutes. It was so cute to see her with her favorite princess. The girls were able to see Santa and get their picture taken with him. As we were leaving Raquel asked Santa to remember to bring home her daddy for Christmas. It was so cute but sad, we had to Raquel that Santa would bring Mike home for Christmas since he left to give her a timeline that she would understand for how long he would be gone. We ended the day watching the Christmas Parade and heading back to our hotel to watch the fireworks from the park. It was so decadent to be able to lay in bed at our hotel and watch the fireworks over Disneyland every night we were there.

A picture of Thunder Mountain after Raquel braved the ride.

Well, at least Raquel is smiling! Doesn't look like Santa is having much fun either.

Eating some lunch at Disneyland with Papa & Gram

Teacups with Gram

Cinderella, Fairy Godmother and Raquel

Belle with Raquel

Raquel & Aurora

Watching the Christmas Parade at Disneyland

Wed. we headed to Laguna Beach and met up with my sister-in-law Natalie. We all had lots of fun playing in the sand and running from the waves. Raquel loved playing with Natalie and I loved being able to catch-up on whats new with her. My mom thought it would be fun to feed the seagulls and so she gave them some of the kids snacks from my purse. That was fun to see all the birds come flocking around but then we left our bags on our towel and went to play in the water and I turned around to see all the seagulls pulling everything out of my purse trying to find more food. I ended up having to hide my purse rolled up in our towels where they couldn't get it. When we were sufficiently cold from playing in the ocean in November we packed up and headed back to our hotel where we met up with Gavin (Natalie's husband) and went out to dinner at Bubba Gumps. We had fun talking and eating good food, poor Raquel was so worn out from the day that she fell asleep at the restaurant before she had anything to eat. After dinner we went back to our hotel and had a fun chat with Gavin and Natalie, it was fun seeing them again and I wished they lived closer so that we could hang out more often.

Raquel testing out her Baywatch run.

Gram, Natalie and Natalya

Natalya feeling the ocean, she didn't like it much, a little too cold.

Gram & Raquel right after Raquel fell in the water.

Raquel and Natalie running from the waves.

Margaret, Steve, Natalie, Natalya, Me and Gavin (Raquel is asleep in the stroller) eating at Bubba Gumps.

Natalya crashing after a long day on her favorite Aunt Natalie.

Thurs. day was our second day at Disney and we headed to the California Adventure park. I us as adults (my mom, dad and I) enjoyed California Adventure more than Disneyland. We started off the day on a ride where you soar over California and see all the beautiful landscape and they mist you with pine tree smell when you fly over pine trees and orange smell when you fly over groves of oranges. Raquel also love this ride because they had Tinker bell right at the end flying or Disneyland. We then watched a live performance of Aladdin which we all loved, fun costumes, singing and dancing. I think my favorite over all ride was Toy Story where you are in an arcade shooting everything that pops up on the screen. Raquel met a little boy who was standing in front of us in line at the Toy Story ride and they were fascinated with one another from the start and about half way thru the line the little boy grab Raquel's hand and they held hands the rest of the time standing in line. Did I mention that the little boy was dressed in a complete Pirates of the Caribbean outfit, wig and all and every so often he would yell out Yo Ho, Yo Ho a Pirates life for me! It was quite cute to watch the two of them interact with one another. After more rides, a 3D show, a tortilla demo with fresh hot tortillas to sample and a bit of shopping we called it a night. Poor Raquel fell asleep again before the fireworks, so I made sure that I filmed some of them to be able to watch. They had some cool ones shaped like faces and hearts.

Raquel wearing her 3D bug glasses. She was a little afraid of the movie, I think I would be too at the age of 3 if giant bugs were flying at me and poking me in the back.

Natalya looking oh so happy on a ride. After she spilled a whole cup full of water down her front.

Papa, Gram & Raquel going for a ride.

Cody and Raquel holding hands while waiting in line.

Sitting waiting to go on the Toy Story ride.

Friday morning we packed up and headed back to Phoenix. We had such a great week with Gram and Papa and the weather was perfect! Thanks again mom and dad for taking us to Disneyland!