Blinking

We went to the library storytime for babies the other day and sang "jump jump went the little green frog one day..." and at the end of one of the verses it says "and his eyes went blink, blink, blink." So Rachel is trying to imitate me when I blink and it is so funny! She can't quite figure out how to blink, but she gets a really good angry, scowling face when she tries to blink. I tried to get it on video this morning, but she mostly wanted to do pat-a-cake, though I did get her to "blink" once or twice. I edited out the first minute of doing pat-a-cake over and over again, so you just get the last half.

She is quite the chatterbox these days and is pretty good at trying to imitate a lot of the words we say. No one else has any idea what she is saying, but I'm a pretty good translator. That's what moms are for, right?

Christmas fun

We went up to be with Jacob's family in Provo for Christmas and had a really great time. Rachel loved it up there, especially the snow and the cats even though they spent most of their time hiding from her. She had lots of fun with all the people around--so much better than being stuck with only me all day every day. We spent almost a week up in Provo, then back in Tucson we had our Christmas here with my family on New Years Day, since we had all been out of town on Christmas. Here are some pictures showing our fun Christmas.

If you click on it you can see the captions telling a bit more about our Christmas fun.

butterscotch chips

The other day I was making dinner while Rachel was entertaining herself in the kitchen. I heard "mmmmm" and looked down to see that Rachel had gotten a bag of butterscotch chips out of the pantry and had managed to tear it open and was enjoying it. You'll see her sign candy in this video (which she thinks is anything sweet--she also thinks fruit snacks are candy).

And no, my floor was not clean enough to eat off of, but Rachel doesn't seem to care much. It builds up immunity, right? :)

On a different note, we're headed up to Provo later today to spend Christmas with Jacob's family. We're looking forward to it despite the cold. It's our first time driving that far with Rachel, so we're going overnight, hoping she sleeps the whole way. We'll see how that goes....

We don't have many warm clothes so we'll be spending most of our time in a nice heated house, but my very nice neighbor just gave us a bunch of her daughter's old clothes that she was going to get rid of, so we actually have a few semi-warm clothes. Isn't Rachel cute in this outfit. The hat is from Target, but the clothes are from our neighbor.
I'm guessing we won't be posting on the blog while we're in Utah, so everyone have a wonderful Christmas!

The Front Fell Off

If you haven't seen this you need to:

hide and seek

Here's a video of one of Rachel's favorite games of all time: hide and seek and peek-a-boo rolled in to one. I apologize for the bumpy ride. I hope no one gets motion sickness from watching this video. The part towards the beginning in the hallway where Rachel all of a sudden gets really interested in the camcorder is when I turned the viewfinder around so she could see the picture of herself, which captivated her for a bit. Rachel was actually watching the video with me today and was waving and saying hi to herself on the computer screen, and laughing when her computer self laughed. It was really funny.

Joy to everyone

I love Christmas time with all the decorations and yummy treats and music and everyone so happy and maybe a little more Christlike than the rest of the year. A friend emailed me a link to this song called Joy to Everyone. Check it out if you get a chance. I think you'll like it.

What I've been up to

I've been working on a few projects lately. Here's some of the partly finished projects:

An advent calendar. I still have to finish some of the ornaments, but other than that it's pretty much done.
Blocks. I found a few pieces of wood that my neighbors had set out for the brush and bulky pick-up (one man's trash is another's treasure, right?). So I cut the wood, sanded the blocks and still have to paint most of them. Rachel enjoys stacking them, but mostly ignores the unpainted ones, unless they're the ones I don't want her to touch because I still haven't finished sanding them . Lastly, we got out all our Christmas decorations (not that we have all that many) and put them up on Thursday and Friday. We still have a few things to finish up, but mostly our house is decorated. I love Christmas!
We have our little Charlie Brown 3 1/2 foot tree up on our console table so Rachel can't reach. She loves the tree, though, and whenever it's all lit up she goes and tries to climb up the table to get to the tree, then comes and finds me signing tree so I'll pick her up to look at the tree and she can try to pull off a few ornaments.
And see all those presents under the tree? The smaller ones are another project that I'm a little more than half way done with. Maybe after Christmas I'll show what was in them. If I remember.