Today was our last Family Place session of the year, and lucky for most kids, Santa stopped in for a surprise visit. Grae, on the other hand, was not nearly as excited as the other munchkins. This was her third encounter with the jolly old man this year, and she was less than impressed. And by less than impressed, I mean that she shook her head at him and even tried to give back the present he had just given to her.
She was much happier once Santa had left the room and snack time and our gym visit were next. Hopefully this was our last Santa encounter of 2011…
Well, this project has been a long time in the making (we started just after Halloween), but we finally finished making this year’s Christmas cards. Miss G was a trooper, but I’m not going to lie… I may have been a little ambitious when I decided that Grae would stamp each of the cards with 10 or more of her sweet little fingerprints.
Either way, they’re done! We’ll head out this afternoon so that Grae can deposit each of the 30 envelopes in the mailbox one at a time. :)
Today Gracen and I used my old trusty recipe and whipped up a batch of play dough. Despite getting flour EVERYWHERE, she was a fantastic kitchen helper. She even picked her own colour – this marvellous shade of puke green. Although it might not have been my first colour choice, she loooooved the finished product and happily poked (okay, more like stabbed) at her play dough pancakes for a good long while before wanting to move on to something else.
Check out this super awesome cowlick Grae woke up with this afternoon… Hahahahaha! Doesn’t get much better than this.
Have I mentioned lately how obsessed with books this little one is? If at any point during the day things get quiet around here, I almost always find Grae snuggled in a little corner with a pillow and a pile of books. Today she discovered my Mr. Man and Little Miss book collection and from that point on, she carried at least one of them with her at all times. This Mama couldn’t be more thrilled that she has a little bookworm in the making. :)
Well, today was G’s first day in big girl panties… And she did great! Other than one little piddle before making it all the way to the potty, she told us when she needed to go and used the toilet like it was something she’s always done.
Not to mention that she may be the only person on the planet that is able to baggy-bummed panties look this cute. :)
Grae’s been able to keep her diaper clean and dry for 8 to 12 hours for a couple of months now, but it was only this week that we realized she hadn’t wet or dirtied a single diaper for several days in a row. We’re not sure how this will all turn out, but today we went on a hunt for tiny little panties… Why wear diapers if you don’t need them, right?
Let me tell you, it’s not easy finding underwear to fit a 14 month old! The smallest size we ended up finding was a 2T/3T, but with a super hot wash and dry, they should *almost* fit. Baggy bum or not, I think this little lady is pretty proud of her new panties. Wish us luck!
Sunset, the community centre closest to our house, always hosts fun events to celebrate the holidays. We had registered for their very popular ‘Lunch with Santa’ event long ago, and today was finally the day that it took place.
There was plenty to see and do, and right away Gracen set out to visit each of the inflatable characters.
Since we arrived before the event actually started, it was calm enough for G to actually bounce inside the castle for once.
Soon after, things got WILD inside the bouncy castle (as they always do), so we resorted to our usual bouncing on the outside edge technique. Not to worry, Grae doesn’t mind one bit as long as she’s jumping around like a monkey.
After a sufficient amount of bouncing, it was off to the arts and crafts area to decorate a paper gingerbread boy. Grae loves crafts, and I think she would have cleared out the entire stock of pom poms and goggly eyes had I let her.
There was much too much excitement around to actually sit down and eat properly, but we gave it our best shot anyways. Santa arrived ringing his bell part way through the meal and we all went over to visit with him for a quick minute.
Although Santa wasn’t a hit with Grae, the band certainly was. She was completely and totally enamoured with these high school kids who played several carols for all to enjoy.
This was as still as she sat the entire time… What can I say? This little doodle loves music. :)
I’ve been meaning to figure out a way to get a family photo for our Christmas cards for a long while now, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Since they need to be put in the mail asap, we decided to just get it over with and use my camera’s self-timer today. We were dressed and heading out the door to a Christmas event anyways, so we pinned up a backdrop, propped my camera up on a stack of books, and decided to give it a go. About 2 seconds before this shot was taken, Gracen was a squirmy ‘not having it’ mess, so I knew that this could easily be a painful/unsuccessful process. Much to our surprise, as soon as the camera started flashing, she placed herself perfectly in her Papa’s lap, looked straight at the camera, and donned this irresistible little smile. I had set the camera to take 10 consecutive photos, and shockingly, the whole lot turned out to be fairly decent. Yay! As my ridiculously adorable little nephew would say, “Easy peesey lemon squeezey”. :)
It’s a well known fact that ‘Tupperware’ cupboards provide much more entertainment than any toy available for purchase…
And in our house, this cupboard is one of the two kitchen cabinets Grae is allowed to go nuts in.
After retrieving the necessary items from the very back, she set to work.
Building container towers is hard work, you know. :)
Looks like someone’s pretty stoked about the fact that Christmas is coming…
It’s beautiful, quiet, and there’s lots of space for little G to roam around. One thing’s for sure – this little lady is not a scaredy cat. She’ll bravely wander off without so much as a glance back. As a little experiment, we decided to hang back and see how far she’d go before turning around and realizing we were not right there beside her, but that never happened. She just kept on cruising away from us without a care in the world (terrifying, I know)…
Eventually, Papa had to go, rein her back in, and direct her attention to the little playground she coasted right by.
This playground is very unique in that it’s made of almost solely local driftwood.
Pretty cool, eh?
After getting our fill on the driftwood playground, we walked along the riverfront until we reached the next playground. Gracen loved this tube slide, and somehow she and Papa convinced me to go down the slide with her despite the fact that I could come nowhere near to sitting up inside. There are some photos of the incident, but let me tell you – they aren’t pretty. Rest assured that I’m doing you a favour by not posting them. :)
Last night Grae got to be a part of the lighting of the tree, but was in bed before we actually got to start putting the ornaments on. This morning she awoke to a fully decorated tree, and needless to say, she spent most of the morning visiting the tree and turning the ornaments over in her little hands. Despite the many sparkly, shiny ornaments, the ones she’s most drawn to are our paper maché ornaments from Kuwait. She proudly points out all of the camels adorning the tree and when you ask her what a camel says, she’ll say ‘t-puh, t-puh’, which is her version of a camel spitting. Hahahaha!
No, we don’t usually have a weird bistro table in front of our TV… It’s current home is by our front door (where it was put on Halloween evening to hold bowls of candy, but shhh… don’t tell anyone that). Apparently Grae was doing some furniture rearranging while I prepared her snack, because I came out of the kitchen to find this.