Mariele and the laundry baskets

These are the progression of photos documenting Mariele's experiences in the laundry baskets throughout her young life. She loved to nest in the warm laundry as a small baby, and now she loves to play in the empty basket as a toddler. She loves laundry day (at least someone does)!

Sister bond and teamwork

Tonight after dinner I assigned Analese the task of picking the Leap Frog magnets up off the floor and putting them back onto the refrigerator. I was scurrying about in the kitchen cleaning floor messes and loading the dishwasher. I was not paying the girls very much attention, although they were on the floor at my feet. Analese looked up at me and said in the sweetest little voice, "Mommy, Mariele is helping me! We are teamwork!" I stopped what I was doing to observe. And sure enough, Mariele was handing each magnet to Analese and Analese would put them on the refrigerator. The following video clip is one minute long. I could not resist sharing this. Even if you only watch a few seconds, I just think this is the sweetest thing I have seen in a long time!

The development of this precious sister bond is one of the things I was most looking forward to when I found out that Mariele was a girl. It is really playing out lately, as Mariele has passed her one year birthday and her little personality has just bloomed so much. I can tell that both girls really delight in each other's company. And it warms my heart. So very very much.

2010 - Perhaps the year of jet-setting

Analese used to be a frequent flyer. She had logged 50 something flights by the time she turned 2 years old. We were living in Colorado at the time, pretty far removed from our families and other close friends. Colorado is just far enough away from our usual stomping grounds to warrant air travel. Now, I don't love air travel, or even necessarily like it. It is simply a necessary evil to get to cool places sometimes.

2009 will go down in our family history as the year that we never even stepped foot on a plane, or even went to an airport. Having Mariele in early 2009 slowed us down considerably. I did not have the energy or the inclination to do any extensive travel with a newborn. We are now living much closer to our usual stomping grounds, so we have taken some car trips, but no plane trips.

But 2010 is shaping up to be a more exciting travel year for us. We already have 5 trips planned (besides trips to Arkansas), three of which are going to involve airplane rides. This morning I was asking Analese if she knew where all we are going on cool vacations this year. She responded, "We are going on a BIIIIIIIIIG ship and we are going to see Diego and Dora!" I knew where she got the big ship comment. We are planning a cruise in December. But the Diego and Dora comment had me scratching my head. She noticed my confusion and said, "Mommy, you said we are going to see Diego!" That's when it came to me. We are going to SAN DIEGO in October! She may be a mite disappointed that Diego won't be there.

A Visit from Grandpa

We enjoyed a short visit from Grandpa this weekend. We partook of another birthday cake on Friday evening. It was a homemade chocolate cake. It was the great tasting cake, whereas the teddy bear cake was the "cute" cake. I have not yet mastered cute and great tasting in the same cake. We took a day trip to the Houston zoo on Saturday. The girls really enjoyed riding the train. The Houston zoo has the longest zoo train route of any zoo I have visited, although technically the train only goes around the zoo, not in the zoo. But there was a neat tunnel and it was a nice, relaxing ride. I got this surprisingly good iPhone photo of Mariele on the train.



Analese likes to pose by the sea lion.



The girls were having fun with their Grandpa before bedtime on Saturday night. Notice the thing that Mariele does with her tongue when she is really happy. She likes to stick out her tongue and twist it sideways. It is just her little cute quirk!

Analese and her jeep

Analese still loves her jeep! Here she is taking Tee-ta for a spin. We are fortunate to have a playground just a few yards from our house. There is a sidewalk around the periphery of this playground, making it an ideal circle for jeep cruising. She is not on the road, so I don't have to worry about cars. She can just circle around in her jeep to her heart's content. She thinks she is hot stuff, let me tell you!

Mariele and her tunnel fascination

Mariele just loves tunnels. I took this iPhone photo of Mariele crawling through the tunnel at the park a couple of weeks ago.



Yesterday at the zoo, she had a wonderful time crawling around in the rhino's mouth in the children's play area. It was also a type of tunnel.



So I decided that she would love nothing more for her birthday than to have her own play tunnel. She loves it, and as an added bonus, her big sister loves it also. They play together really well in this tunnel. It is warming my heart how well they are playing together, especially since Mariele started walking. I am reaping the benefits of having two children now! They are officially play mates!

Exclusive - Pants on the Ground!

Just for all of you American Idol fans!

Mariele's First Birthday!

First let me say that I have no idea what happened to the videos! The same thing happened when I tried to upload another video. I'm hoping this is a temporary issue.

Today was my baby girl's first birthday!





Here is the cake in all it's...um....glory (or something like that!)



Great kids that helped us celebrate:



And the progression of cake photos - from "This is a little interesting" to "I've had enough!"

Mariele's new push car

Mariele's new Step 2 push car came yesterday, and since it was a huge box and needed to be put together anyway, we went ahead and gave it to her early. I mean, it's not like she really cares. Analese was super excited about getting to push her around in it. They both love it. In fact, I was able to push her around the neighborhood today while Analese drove her Jeep around. It was a beautiful 74 degree day. This little car is great! It pushes very easily with the handle, and Mariele thinks she is driving. And the seat belt holds her in, which is very important for Mariele, because she is Houdini baby. She can get out of most seat belts.

I took these pictures and the short video clip yesterday while Analese pushed Mariele around the house. Mariele is holding the end cap tool that came in the box. She loves it!

Mariele is officially walking!

It is hard to put a finger on the exact date that Mariele started walking. She began a few steps at a time, always reverting to the default crawling mode. This is in contrast to her sister. Once Analese figured out that she could walk, she literally never crawled again! In fact, I had Analese in a baby swim class, and one of the exercises was to do the "alligator crawl" in the zero grade baby pool. But Analese never would do that exercise. She was thinking, why, oh why are you asking me to crawl? That is so yesterday. I can walk now! But Mariele still drops to her all fours when she really wants to get somewhere quickly. This past weekend she started significantly walking across the room. Here are a couple of short video clips. Mariele walked shortly before her first birthday (which will happen on Wednesday), and Analese walked a couple of days after her first birthday.

Breakfast Ice-cream

I got this idea of breakfast ice-cream from my high school buddy, Brandie. She makes it for her daughter and it is a sneaky way to serve up lots of vitamins, anti-oxidants and good omega fats. So I decided to try it this morning. We all love my fruit smoothie, so I knew they would love the breakfast ice-crean too. Brandie makes hers with avacado, frozen strawberries and yogurt. I did not have frozen strawberries, but I did have frozen blueberries. So I took out my Vita-mix blender and added two ripe avacados, almost an entire bag of frozen blueberries, and one carton of Dannon blueberry yogurt (with fruit on the bottom). I did not add any additional liquid, because the idea is to make this thick like ice-cream. It turned out great and we ALL liked it. The avacado adds the fat that you expect in ice-cream. So this ice-cream just "feels" fatty in your mouth from the avacado. All you taste is the blueberries, though. Delish!

Blurb tips

Since a couple of you had some questions about the "Blurb" process, I thought I would tell you what I remember here.

If you slurp your entire blog, telling it to autopopulate, it will give you a message - something to the effect of "Whoa, that's quite a blog you have there. The maximum number of pages that can be published is 490. Do you wish to continue working with the big blog?" If you say "yes", Booksmart is going to put your blog in a strange order. So the best thing to do, is to slurp all of your blog, then use the "add to book" button to add the blog posts to the book a few chunks at a time so that you never exceed that 490 (I think) page limit. The autopopulate feature will put one blog post per page. This is obviously not the best or most efficient way to do it. I did do autopopulate, but then I cut and pasted to get more than one blog post per page where I could. Count the number of photos in your blog post, then choose a layout on the left side of the screen that works best with your text and photos. You can then delete unnecessary and duplicate pages along the bottom of your screen, and you will see your page count decrease. My final page count was 295. I ordered the image bound book, and I am very pleased with the quality. I hope this helps those of you who are trying blurb. Booksmart was good for me once I figured out the quirks. It went really fast once I knew what I was doing.

And another one started...

It seems that I am just not content unless I have some ginormous looming project to occupy my time. This week has been "retro week" on Facebook. A couple of my high school buddies have posted some really fun retro photos that I am in. In fact, I was laughing until I was crying reminiscing with my best friend from high school last night. Anyway, all of this made me realize that I totally need to scan in some retro photos. All of my retro photos happen to be in a big giant plastic storage container. So I set out to start the huge scanning project of the century!




In fact, just for grins and giggles, and for the sake of the vast minority of my blog readers who are not on Facebook (you know who you are), here are some of the retro photos that I have already scanned in!

I was in Fiddler on the Roof when I was about 9 years old. I played the youngest daughter (the one held by Tevye there). Here is the newspaper article about it.



Here I am pretty tiny.



This one is first grade or so.



I was the flower girl in my Aunt Judy's wedding.



Me with my cousin Jennifer.



Junior High. Me with my friends Telese & Mandy. Notice my Coca-cola shirt and my poufy bangs (and mullet style hair) - all the rage back in the day!



Me and my friend Brandie. I think this was taken at Six Flags over Texas. We had just graduated High School, and we thought we were a couple of hotties.



Anna and I had this cheesy button made at the beach one year. She is the one that was making me laugh until I cried last night. My family seriously thought I was touched.



It is great to have all the memories. It is fun to dig through the photos and take a stroll down memory lane. In fact, Anna and Brandie and I are planning to meet up in Arkansas soon. It has been many years since we have seen each other. I have not even met their kids!

One big ginourmous project completed....

Look at what the Fed-Ex man brought me today!



It's my blog book! I'm a published author now!

Here is the back cover.



Here are some sample inside pages.








I created the book using Blurb's Booksmart software The software is downloaded for free. Once I figured out all of Booksmart's eccentricities, I was able to complete the book staying up super late a few nights. Of course, the staying up late part may be a contributing factor in the cold that I am just now starting to shake. But all of my efforts were well worth it, because I am pleased as punch with the book. It is very beautiful, the colors of the photographs seem to be accurate, the paper is a nice, high quality, glossy paper. They did a beautiful job printing this book. And I'm sure that the hard-core scrapbookers out there are spending at least the same amount of money per year on scrapbooking supplies that I paid for this book. Notice that this is Volume 1. I plan to publish subsequent volumes, one per year! It is a bit like having a yearbook for the family. Analese had a lot of fun flipping through it.

Show Day at The Little gym

Analese had another great show day at The Little gym this past week. She was very excited about the show, and she was super eager to show off her dancing and her skills. She did a fantastic job.

Here she is sitting down and waiting to start the show.

The teachers came around and put sunshine and rain cloud hats on all of the dancers. Their tap routine was to "Weatherman" and their ballet routine was to the Hawaiian version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

She did a great floor routine.

She also did a great beam routine.

She was just as proud of her medal as an Olympic athlete would be receiving the gold!

I had brought the Gerbera daisies to give to each girl after the show was over.