Pre-Christmas

December has flown by. Here's what we remember of it up until Christmas time:

My mom finally ran in the Rillito River Run that she was supposed to run last year when she got hit by a truck while training for it two days before the race. So here one year after her accident she's back to running 10Ks. We're glad to have had a MUCH better December than we had last year with no hospital visits, and no unexpected run-ins with any trucks. We're so thankful to have her alive and healthy. We don't know what we'd do without her.

Rachel and I went out to cheer for Grandma. I love how she looks all chipper about 10 seconds after finishing running for an hour straight, and the woman behind her looks like she's about to die.

Rachel stretching with Grandma afterwards:

We've also been enjoying our December weather. It was pretty cold and rainy for a little while, but thankfully the lovely December weather we love returned and we normally go on at least one walk each day and spend a while playing in the back yard. Annie loves walks. We say "walk" and she does her sign for walk, says "aaahh" (walk) and runs to the front door or the garage door, whichever is closer. Thankfully she also still is content in her stroller (as long as it is moving at a decent pace), and when I pull the stroller out she tries to climb in on her own.

Most of the walk this is what we see:

Rachel is getting pretty good on her bike that she got for her birthday. She's not anywhere near getting rid of the training wheels, but she no longer needs boosts to get moving and is getting a lot more confident on her bike. Annie also loves Rachel's bike and is happy with her daily ride from the bottom of the driveway to the top at the end of our walks.

The week before Christmas my mom had vacation, so we spent a good bit of time in at Grandma and Grandpa's place. They even had the girls stay over night one night. It was a much needed full night's sleep for me. (The girls seem to take turns having bad dreams, or teething, or just random wakeups, so it feels like more than half the time I don't get a full night's sleep.)

Annie thinks she's so cool in Grandpa's glasses:

I also managed to make some gluten-free Christmas cookies that we decorated for FHE one night.

Rachel spent a lot of December so excited about Christmas. She really wanted a pillow pet and we took advantage of the fact that she was finally catching on to the "he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good, for goodness sake!" part of Santa. She was excited every day to put a new ornament on our advent calendar and to get a piece of candy from the candy advent calendar after she was dressed and had her hair done. (We had almost a whole month of no fighting over having her hair done!) Annie was oblivious to our Christmas tree advent calendar, but definitely as excited, or maybe even more excited than Rachel about the candy advent calendar. That girl LOVES candy!