A Budding Artist and a Silly Willa

Violet has been drawing up a storm lately! Here is her first alligator:

And below are two girls (check out their cute flipped-out hair and HANDS!) and above them in a baby camel in a mommy camels tummy:

She also asked to help me sew the other day (YAY!). She helped me take the pins out of my bibs after the fleece back was sewn on. She did such a good job and even folded each one very neatly after she was done!I am definitely finding that these two play GREAT together for the most part. BUT we're running into the "scary silences" stage. If they are too quiet, you may very well find them in Willa's room with an entire box of oyster crackers smushed into the floor :) At least they're cute! And it was pretty funny because while Violet helped pick them up, Willa just kept grabbing handfuls and throwing them in the air shouting "YAY!"
She is a Silly Willa. I laugh out loud at her antics about 10x a day.

She also LOVES to eat! She'll eat pretty much anything, but her favorites are black olives, sour cream and black beans. What do you call it if you like salty stuff instead of sweet? A "salt tooth"? Whatever it is, her and I have it! We keep joking that when we potty train her we're going to use a spoonful of sour cream and a black olive as her treat! We literally have to hide the sour cream container if we have it out for dinner or that's ALL she wants to eat.

This picture was taken after her dinner of black beans the other night. She is NOT a neat eater, which is fine and rather funny. Her and Violet both polished off a whole can of beans together.
Here is Violet trying on my glasses. Doesn't she look OLD?
Last weekend I was SUPER excited to visit my brother and sister-in-law in Montana (kid free!) for the weekend. We had so much fun and it was really great to be able to celebrate their new baby girl (due at the end of April) with them! We also got to see my brothers band play AND soak in the hot springs where he works (my mom and sister and I were pretty proud of ourselves - it was FREEZING with super high winds, but we put on our suits and jumped in the pool with everyone else. My sisters suit froze while she was wearing it and my mom's hair froze!)
In "house news" we FINALLY got a room finished in the basement so I was able to move all of my Hip Violet sewing stuff down there! I now have an actual sewing room! Check out my blog post here for pictures.

The best part about it is that we were able to move a lot of toys around and now we have a playroom in the dining room. Yippie! Pictures of that to come!

Happy (Late) 4th Birthday Violet!

Violet celebrated her 4th birthday at the end of January!
She got an "American Doll Girl" who she named Sweetie Pie. Of course she is a ballerina!
And we had a little party during our regular playgroup time. Violet helped decorate her cupcakes.
They turned out pretty cute!All dressed up and ready for her party!
Happy Birthday!
Willa was a ballerina too :)
Sweet sisters!We've been doing a whole lot of arts and crafts this winter - here are Violet and Willa painting:
Willa loved the finger paints! She even got some on her forehead. Good thing it washes out really well!
Painting with a brush.
The weather has been really nice so we went to the park one day and got some cute pictures!

The girls' favorite dinner - rice and beans at Wahoo's! I love Willa's face! She ate the WHOLE BOWL!
We celebrated Valentines Day by having pink heart-shaped pancakes for breakfast and (drum roll please) pink mashed potatoes and pink gravy for dinner! Ha! I love my pink-loving girls! Now I have to think of something fun to dye green for St. Patrick's Day!

Just a typical January week...

Whoa! Looking back on these pictures, we had a BUSY and FUN week! Last weekend we ventured out to the zoo with our favorite neighbors. The weather was pretty warm (in the 50's) and all the animals were out having a great time. Here are Violet, Willa and their friend Ella.
The girls watching the giraffes.
Our little ray o' sunshine!
Pretending to take a nap. Aw.
Violet also got to celebrate her birthday at preschool today, and I got to volunteer. It really is so fun to hang out with all these amazing little kiddos! Here is Violet making play-doh cookies with her friend:
For how much she wants to paint at home, I'm surprised she doesn't spend all morning at the painting easels at school!
Song time! I think this was during the "If you're sad and you know it..." part of the song :)
She got to wear her special birthday crown for snack time. Later we had pink cupcakes with pink frosting and *gasp* pink sprinkles. She decorated them herself.
After school we headed down to the Stock Show with Uncle Trent. She got to take a ride on Dolly the paint pony:
And use dry-erase markers on a van (hopefully she doesn't decide to do this again on our cars with a Sharpie) - among other things like watching lots of cool animals!
No wonder she fell fast asleep on the ride home!
In other news, she wrote her NAME today!!! I am so proud of her! Funny: for the last 3 days when she says "I'm going to write my name!" she writes T O E. Those three letters are in her name, but just so funny that she really did think she was writing it! Luckily she also seemed excited that TOE spelled out a word too :)
And some more artwork. I showed her how easy it was to make a skateboard, so now all her people are skateboarding. Here she is skateboarding with her Grandpa Rich. If you knew her Grandpa Rich and how much he "loves" that all his boys skateboard, you would know just how funny this is! We're sending it to him soon!

Winter Fun!

Snowman time! I built this thing in 2 minutes flat... it was perfect snowman snow! Here you can see Willa grabbing for the carrot nose - she couldn't figure out why we had to stick it in the giant snowballs!
Trying to make a snow angel!
All bundled up!
Winter also means it's STOCK SHOW SEASON! We made our annual trip downtown to watch the Stock Show Parade.
Willa really loved it! Of course my kids are required to love parades :)Long horns!
In other news, Violet has been doing such a great job drawing lately and it has been SO fun to watch! She is now drawing little scenes instead of floating people - this is one of my favorites. Please note that what might look like EARS on the side of this person's head are actually SLEEVES.
And here, obviously, is a camel.
Speaking of Violet, she is going through a band-aid phase. She had an owie on her lip and insisted on this one:
I have been taking the month off from sewing for my business so I can get some projects done around the house AND sew some new things that I haven't tried before. I got a great skirt pattern and made this for Willa - you can also see an outfit I made for Violet in the first snowman picture. I'm really loving making them!I'm also attempting to repaint the kitchen... of course that SOUNDS easy but it has included scraping wallpaper, scraping wallpaper GLUE, removing a built-in desk, and chiseling out tiles and parts of the wall. Crazy! Hopefully I will actually get it done by the end of the month - we'll see! It would be great to at least have ONE room that wasn't beige!

Christmas 2010

We headed to Florida this year for Christmas (a tradition of my families for years!). It was chilly but so fun to hang out with my family!

Willa has never been to the beach before so she LOVED investigating the sand and water. It really is the hugest sand box!
Christmas Eve we went to church with everyone - Violet even dressed up as an Angel for the Unrehearsed Christmas Pagent. Here she is with cousin Claire and Willa.

Christmas Eve dinner!

Violet and Claire were GREAT playmates. Here is Claire as a reindeer and Violet as Santa driving her sleigh!Christmas morning!

Violet and her new ballet slippers and fairy princess dress.

The annual Christmas Day walk on the beach. Willa was super sandy and you can see how much Jon enjoyed having her little hands on his face! :)
Willa and Violet both LOVED the pool! We have got to get them some swimming lessons. They both spent many hours in their rings floating in the water and spinning around. Willa also loved getting dunked under water. Who knew?
Both the girls like to pretend to go on a trip in the sea kayak.
Willa's favorite part of the beach was rolling around in the sand.

Both girls in their matching Tutu Swim Suits.
Playing on the beach with cousins Anna and Ethan.


Violet's new monster face that we get the pleasure of seeing ALL THE TIME.


Out for dinner at a Japanese Steak House. Violet wasn't too sure about the fire at our table!
We had such a fun and tiring trip that Violet decided to take a little nap at the Atlanta airport on the way home.

Violet showing off her Christmas Tree she decorated at preschool.The girls freezing at the Christmas Parade in Golden.

One of their favorite games - NAPTIME!!!
Hope you had a wonderful Christmas 2010! I can't wait to see what 2011 brings!