Stylish ladies

All 3 ladies got their hair styled with a bow one day last week & agreed to a picture!

Birthday weekend!

The last weekend in April we had a super birthday celebration. Grandma, Grandpa, Nana, Uncle Pete, and Natalia all traveled here to help us celebrate. We celebrated Elizabeth's 1st birthday on Saturday, Abby's 4th birthday and Anna's 6th birthday on Sunday, and Grandma's birthday on Friday night. AND we managed to visit Great Falls National park and Roosevelt Island as well as fit in Anna's soccer game and lunches at a Japanese restaurant and a vegetarian Asian restaurant. 

Anna & Abby's dually themed princess and Frozen party also included a princess bounce castle. We were lucky that the weather was beautiful not just for the party, but for a full day of bouncing!

Elizabeth's party:

Anna & Abby's party:

 adding sprinkles to her Elsa cake

all ready!

The birthday girls on the slide:

look who else hit the slide:

Great Fall National Park

Anna's soccer game

A belated: Happy Easter!

Happy 1st Birthday, Elizabeth Grace

Pictures from Easter and our triple birthday celebration weekend are coming soon. For now:

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth! In the past month Elizabeth has been very busy. She can now stand up without holding on and she loves to practice (and have people clap for her!) She discovered the kitchen cabinets this month, which sent Daddy on an emergency trip to home depot before work one morning to buy cabinet locks so Mommy could make breakfast! She loves to practice walking with her walker - or anything she can turn into a walker (kitchen chair, doll high chair, ect.). She also loves to climb onto riding toys - especially the new rocking horse she got for her birthday. She loved going to visit the Easter Bunny this month. Every time I carry her past the refrigerator she points to her picture with the Easter Bunny and yells, "Ba-ba, ba-ba!" She also yells "Ba-ba" when she hears Rory, the dog next door, barking in his backyard. She loves to go outside and see him. If I put her down on the grass she crawls right over to him yelling "Ba-ba, ba-ba!" She gets a little scared when she gets too close, though. At times she also referred to Grandpa as "Ba-ba," this past weekend. We also might have heard an "Apa." She has said "okay" and "kay" a couple times. This morning I asked her if she was hungry and she said a "b" sound (not "ba-ba"). I said, would you like a banana (her usual beginning to her breakfast) and she got so excited - as if she was so excited that I understood her.

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Grace! We love you so!

Great Falls National Park

I'm not sure how it took us 7 years of living in northern VA to check out this awesome park just 25 minutes from our house. I guess it would not be that great with a walking child who does not listen - so that does cancel 2 of the past 7 years, but still, what were we doing the other 5 years? 

After checking out the falls, we hiked the river trail where Anna & Abby did a lot of "rock work." (Meandering slightly off the trail to climb over rocks.)

Today was the first extended use of the back-riding ergo - it's great!

look who else did rock work!

The biggest adventure of the day was hiking down to this little creek and across it so we could get closer to the river. It took some tricky footing, but we did it!

 Lounging on some rocks for a snack and some entertainment provided by rock climbers and kayackers.

Some other cute pictures from this week:

The Ostrich and the Mysterious Rings

For the past few days Abby & Anna have been playing, "The Ostrich and the Mysterious Rings." I really don't know much about the game except that Abby is always the Ostrich (just tonight Anna announced, "Abby you are always the ostrich, I want to be the ostrich.") I also know that Abby made  up the game up and the name - which I love!

zoo!

Yesterday we went to the zoo. Except for the drive there (one too many roads closed in DC yesterday), we had a great time. Highlights of the visit were highly debated at dinner. Some would say it included the new elephant house. For others it was the otters, the macaws in the bird house, the gorillas, and/or the orangutans. Who do you think liked what?

January and February in Review

It's been a busy month! Somewhere between Elizabeth starting to crawl, 5 snow storms, 7 snow days, and my graduate school classes, I'm a little behind on the blog. So here's the last month's update as well as some pictures and videos from January that I didn't get a chance to post:

matching jammies!

Anna giving Abby a "piano lesson"

The Daddy train

ooooh - kneeling!

Nana came to visit!

And so did Aunt Mary!!!!

I'm 10 months old!

and now I can stand up!

When Elizabeth first started to crawl she still didn't venture out of the living room. Now she's got her speed crawl mastered and she puts it in place wherever she hears the gate open towards the bedrooms, the refrigerator open, or the dishwasher open. She has been VERY helpful with the dishwasher - ha! Elizabeth has also been busy communicating. One of her favorite new phrases is "bye bye" and she also waves good-bye sometimes. She likes to mimic motions like clapping when she is playing with someone. She has become more interested in books in the past month. She loves to bounce on the red donkey in the living room. When she wants to ride it, she crawls up to it and starts bouncing on her knees and making noises - it's so cute!

Anna & Abby had a great time watching the Olympics in February. They have hosted many of their own Olympics in the living room. After the latest event Abby declared, "We both got 100's!!!" Anna said, "Perfect, this is an event with 2 gold metals and no silver or bronze!"

We all had a great visit with Nana & Mary - who got to see our VA home for the first time :) Thanks for a great visit!

Elizabeth, the Entertainer

Today at lunch Elizabeth threw a piece of her food on the floor. This produced a roar of laughter from Abby and Mia. The entertainer decided that her whole tray of grilled cheese, peas, and blueberries could be used for an excellent show for her audience instead of sustenance for  her belly! I didn't have time to get the video camera before the performance came to a close.

9 months old!

Elizabeth turned 9 months old last Thursday. She has been busy with so many new things in the past month. She now has 5 teeth, she loves to eat table food with us, she's on the move with her new crawling skills, and she is communicating with us all the time. Besides saying, "mama" and "dada" we hear a lot of "lala" "vava" and "baba." I do think she is connecting the sound "baba" with sheep as she says it a lot while staring up at her sheep mobile above her changing table. She also does a lot of head shaking to communicate with us. It is usually a "no" shake, but it rarely means "no." When she gets up from a nap I usually ask her, "did you have a good rest?" A "no" shake in that situation means, "I hear my sisters playing and I'm ready to party!"

The other day I was making a little stuffed bunny hop around in front of her and saying, "hop, hop, hop." I gave her the bunny and said, "you do it." She held the bunny in one hand, grabbed my hand with her other hand, and shoved the bunny back in my hand. I think the message was clear, "No Mommy, you do it more!"

Here she is on the move:

First crawl!

According the definition of crawling Matt & I devised in November of 2008, Elizabeth had her first crawl today!

January visitors

Thanks for a great visit, Grandma & Grandpa!

Merry Christmas!

Christmas pictures - finally! We had a great Christmas season and great Christmas this year. The girls loved helping to decorate the house, helping to wrap presents, making gingerbread houses, making Christmas cookies, singing Christmas songs, and driving around to look at Christmas lights in our neighborhood. The weekend before Christmas Grandma and Grandpa came to our house to celebrate Christmas in Vienna. Then we had a wonderful trip to Albany to celebrate Christmas with our whole family, spend time with everyone, and celebrate with Briella on her 1st birthday. We are very blessed!

 Abby's Christmas concert - she just spotted us!

Christmas Eve :)

 Christmas morning - waiting for Abby to wake up!

Somebody is thrilled by their Belle jewelry set!

Posing in front of her newly constructed "Dolphin Cruiser"

(Yesterday I asked Anna a question about her "ship" and she said, "It's a Dolphin Cruiser, Mom")

 Lunch at Chipotle to celebrate Briella's 1st birthday!

Eagerly awaiting her first cupcake!

Nana and all the cousins!