Caught up on Pictures

What's better than a Holiday in a box?



A Holiday and a kitty in a box.

Holiday and Hiloo at his birthday party.



Holiday loved this balloon.

Holiday loved Hiloo's balloon that was tied to him.

Then she came back to this balloon.

This must have been the exact moment when the balloon came off its string and floated away.

So Daddy got Holiday a new balloon.

Holiday coloring at Grandma Claudia's house.

Daddy and Holiday coloring at home.

 

I've just updated the link for our home videos.  Let me know if you have any issues.

Pictures of Beach Vacation

Holly tried out the bed right away when we got there and played "night-night".

Then next day we hit the beach and we had our gear ready to go.

Daddy got to work on the sand castles.


Mommy helped too.

Holly, of course, liked knocking them down.

"Daddy...what you doing?"

Holly wanted to sit with Daddy with the fortification of sand castles too.

Holiday really enjoyed the sand castles.

She generally likes playing in sand, not enough to eat it. :)

The little bumblebee swimsuit.

Holly wouldn't come in the pool with Mommy.

She just wanted to play with a water noodle and pretend she was an elephant with it.

She had a lot of fun being an elephant.

There's Daddy in his slippers playing with Holly with our neighboring guests' toys. We were that comfortable, they were really nice too. Holly liked playing chase with the other kids.

Back at the beach the next day. Here's Holly "coloring" in the sand.

Playing legos with Daddy.

This was at the playground on site.

Big hugs for Daddy in our guest room.

Our view from the patio door.

Holiday in the bedroom.

Anderson video update: we're going to drop YouTube and use a new site to host our videos. I'll establish a link once the kinks are worked out.

Next installment of Pictures

Here's Holly and Mommy at Folklife.

And then Holly with Daddy at Folklife.

Holly and Mommy playing "night-night" before bedtime.


Holly with some cool shades and the best hat ever. She's had a million compliments for it, mostly from middle aged women.

Holly likes to incorporate her little chair into a game of "catch-ball". The daycare lady has said she has a thing about chairs. The other kids will sit on the floor but Holly will pull up a chair. We are civilized human beings after all.

Here's Holly at Daddy's new favorite game store, Card Kingdom.

She's pretty good at the game Perfection.

This store has lots of room for her to run around in but she still likes the kids games area the best.

Look! Holly got some gardening gloves.

Holiday in a box.

Holly has gotten much better on her tricycle.

Here's Holly playing on Daddy's drums in the basement.

An FYI for those who watch the videos. David said there has been some strange unknown persons frequenting Holly's YouTube videos so we are going to password protect them. I will be contacting you all through email or phone with the new login information. Please note that you won't be able to see all the videos right away, David needs to go through each one, one at a time. He's hoping to get to it tonight.

Catching up on Pictures

Here we are at Point Defiance Zoo. This is the aquarium portion where Holly enjoyed touching the star fish.

Holly with her cousin Sammie.

"It's a peacock." I think that's Holly's cousin Kaelie in the background.

Snack time. That's definitely Kaelie there.

Daddy and Holly with Chris and cousin Ayden.

Nice shot of the Hello Kitty track suit. Blue's a good color for Holly.

With daddy at the play area.

Holiday loved the slides.

Goats are always aggressive when it comes to food, aren't they?

Here's Grandma Claudia with Holly and all the cousins.

Holly helping mommy fold clothes. She has one of daddy's socks on.

Sometimes it takes a great deal of effort.

David did a mass download of photos and videos last night, so I'm starting with the oldest and working my way forward. The videos are already posted to the YouTube link.

Been Partying

We went to Hiloo's birthday party yesterday (I really have no idea how to spell that). He turned 2 his older sister turned 6. Hiloo and Holly go to daycare together. There over 50 people there, half were kids. It was held at Wallingford park and there was good weather so it turned out very good. Holly accidently turned the birthday girl's balloon loose so David bought her another one. We got Holly one too so she would leave the other kids' balloons alone. Holly liked to explore the landscape with all the big rocks and trees just as much as the playground. Then when it came to the playground she liked all the stuff that was underneath the play structures. That might be a mommy-tendency. She also made a run across the big open grassy area while happily screaming. It was cute to see Holly plunk herself down next to Hiloo because they're little friends. While I was trying to get Holly not to throw bark on other kids while yelling 'surprise', Hiloo dumped a handful of bark on Holly's head. I laughed out a sigh. Holly didn't seem to care, she needed a bath after going to the park anyways after all the digging around she did. All that exploring acquired quite a bit of dirtiness.

Little Chatterbox

It's kind of funny what words Holly has picked up. 'Elephant' is at the top of the list so she's always really excited to see one. 'Bicycle' is popular as well. 'Dinosaur' is working its way up the charts. Let's see...kite, bucket, shovel, toys, doggie, kittie, golf ball, hat, jacket, shoes, pants, panties, mananos (bananas), snack, sandwich, apple juice, milk, colors, brush, rain, snow, sky, moon, bed, sleep, her friends names at daycare including the cat and on and on. She's had her ABC's and numbers 1 through 20 down for a while now. Holly loves Sesame Street enough to ask for it by name. Her favorite part is the intro to the show so she can yell out all the muppets' names which of course continues through the entire episode (though it's always better with an elephant in the show). She's starting to sing songs now, we can't always tell if it's one we know or if she's making it up. Holly also has a couple sentences. A common one is "Mommy...what you doin'?" not exactly shouting but louder than her regular voice. Then there's "That's funny", "It's okay", "It's a (fill in blank)". Oh yeah, she likes to laugh like Ernie and eat like Cookie Monster from time to time.

Post vacation/holiday/birthday wrap up

Well we got to Copalis Beach and back just fine. The only beef we had was that the mattress was really uncomfortable, but the rest was great. We basically stayed in a one bedroom apartment with beach access, playground, rec room, pool, hot tub and solarium all on-site. There were several families staying there too, so Holly had other kids to play with. She wouldn't go into the pool but liked pretending to be an elephant with a water noodle. Holly also liked to crush any sand castles that mommy and daddy made. She "colored" in the sand with a stick. Holly would grab handfuls of sand or gravel in the playground area and throw them in the air yelling "surprise!" Vacations with kids are very different than before we had kids. Before we would have some sort of time driven agenda and pack in as much as possible. Now it's like we got to be back by 1pm so Holly can have her nap and making sure we're always stocked with snacks if we can't sit down and eat right away. Having that break in the middle of the day makes it so we can't do anything too ambitious, but it also means we are making time to relax which is the whole point of vacations really. So we were glad to get away and relax, we realized had we stayed home we would have probably done chores the whole time. Yesterday was my 35th birthday and I thought about it and I really don't feel as old as 35. Elle babysat Holly while David took me to see the new X-men movie (which I really liked) and then we went out for sushi afterwards. Now it's back to work and working out.