Things to do on Snowdays

Take your baby grocery shopping..

Have a dance party...

Play pretend Halloween and dress up like a bumblebee...

Make brownies...

Day Six of Snowmaggeden

I laughed when we bought our house and our friends from Michigan couldn't believe we had no driveway and no garage. "What do we need those things for?" I asked. "It only snows here maybe 8 or 9 inches in an entire winter." That is until this year. I think we're up to 72 inches now - about 48 inches of that in the last six days. Schools are closed and the Federal government is closed for the fourth day tomorrow. We are all going just a little bit stir crazy...

Here's our backyard before the additional 10-12 inches of snow that fell today.

Playing in the snow on the street


Sadie is the happiest of all of us about all this snow.






Kate back inside and warm - she's not a huge fan of the snow and cold.

Kate's snowsuit from the consignment shop circa 1985. Paul says all she needs is a side ponytail and some Olivia Newton John tunes.

More Holiday Pictures

The Marsiglia cousins (Aidan, Jacob, Noah, Lucas and Kate) - this was seriously the best shot!

Kate and Noah on Christmas Eve

Kate and her cousin Lucas

Kate with Grandma Gray and Kamdeyn, her second cousin


Kate and Paul playing Barbies

2009 Holidays

Christmas was really fun this year because Kate seemed to really understand what was going on for the first time and even spent lots of time carefully selecting her desired presents from the Toys R Us catalogue. However, she was not at all thrilled about Santa Claus himself. This picture is from the Santa Claus visit at our neighbor's house. Notice you do not see Kate in this picture. That's because she was clinging to me for dear life and screaming hysterically.

However, she was more than happy to take the coloring book and candy cane that Santa left :)

We stayed at my parent's house in Michigan over the actual holidays. When we stay there, we stay in the basement (which is, incidentally, much more spacious than our entire Silver Spring house :) Anyway, Kate made us leave a note for Santa Claus instructing him "not to come downstairs, but to just leave the presents and leave." :) Here she is opening one of her desired four presents - a Pillow Pet. She learned about the Pillow Pet from an Informercial. I wish I was joking here - the first time I saw the Infomercial, my first thought was "Who buys these things?" A couple weeks later, it was me. The other items on her wish list were, in this order:

1) A piano you can step on;
2) A Pillow Pet;
3) Hungry, Hungry Hippos; and
4) A Christmas candle (yes, this also seems to me to be an unusual request from a preschooler..)

Anyway, in the end, I wish we had only gotten her those four things, because as she was opening all her gifts on Christmas, her first comment was "I only asked for four things." Somehow, I think this similar sentiment will not be repeated in future Christmases.

Catching Up

It's been a long time since I updated this! I can't believe that it's already January of 2010. Here's a quick update on what we've been up to over the last couple months:

We moved Kate to her new bedroom to make way for the (gulp!) new baby, who will be here in less than 3 months (bigger gulp!) Kate had a pretty easy time adjusting to the new room, and I'm only slightly bitter that my 3 year old has a bed with an actual headboard, despite the fact that my bed still doesn't have a headboard. The big problem now is that we no longer have a guestroom, which is a really big problem when all your family lives out of State and stays with you when they visit. Paul and I have been looking into either buying a bigger house or adding a second story onto our existing house. Then we added up the cost of daycare for 2 kids and decided that the basement couch will be our new "guest room" and we will be living in the 1,100 square foot rambler for all of eternity :)

Kate is really enjoying preschool this year, which is good because she had some problems initially adjusting to the bigger class size. This picture is of her class Thanksgiving play. Despite repeated attempts to try and correct her, to this day Kate believes she was a rabbit (versus an Indian) in this play.

Leaves!

Pretending to be a scary monster

Homestead Resort in Virginia

In mid-October, we spent a weekend at the Homestead Resort in Virginia - it was a beautiful resort, but we had terrible weather and a cranky kid, so we essentially drove 4 hours each way and spent lots of money to swim in the hotel swimming pool...



Practicing the swimming skills she's learning in her swim class at the YMCA