Emailing

Emma was wanting a little attention while I was emailing. She got it. :) Here is her dress up show. I love that her doll was part of the the show too...

Happy 4th Birthday!

Can you believe Emma is 4? Crazy. For her birthday, we surprised her with a trip to American Girl Place where she got to pick out her very own doll. Rebecca was the winner, a city girl from 1914. Here, Emma is super annoyed with me because I was making her wait to take a picture before she got to play with Rebecca.

All is good now though. (Sorry that some of these pictures are slightly blurry...our camera lens was unknowingly smudged.)




After American Girl Place we ate at Emma's favorite restaurant, Rain Forest Cafe. Awful food, but lots of fun fake animals for the kids. :)







Emma requested a strawberry cake and for dinner....







Lots of fruit! Emma really did have a wonderful day. As we were walking to the Rain Forest Cafe after buying Rebecca, sweet Emma looked at me and said "I'm crying because I'm so happy!" Sure enough, there were little tears. I had to stop myself from blubbering at that comment. And then later, when Tim was putting Emma to bed he told her, "Emma, I had a really great day with you today." Emma then said, "Daddy, today was perfect." :) Thanks everybody for making this birthday so special. Thank you Papa and Noni for helping Rebecca get her school outfit and school accessories. Thank you Grant Peggy for Rebecca's new dog Coconut and Rebecca's winter gear. Thank you Grandma B for Emma's awesome new monogrammed (oooo la la) outfit. And thanks to Aunt Lauri for the retro Nite Lite (my new favorite gift to give) and Uncle Rob G for the purse with the credit card (which Emma very seriously said that she will use to get a second American Girl Doll).

What does 20+ inches of snow look like?

We survived the Blizzard of 2011! A true thundersnow. It was pretty crazy having lightening and thunder in a snow storm. All these pictures were taken out our front windows. This picture was taken just as the blizzard arrived.

And here is the after picture.








As I write, the owner of the front car has been trying to dig it out for well over the past hour. He still has a smile on his face so I guess that's good.




This is a lot of snow!








The wind was blowing so badly that it blew snow in between our storm window and regular window. The windows are original and not exactly efficient (ie, 106 years old), but still, fairly impressive.

Biking in January

After being house bound for way too long, Emma decided she wanted to go on a bike ride.








Before: So excited!







After: Maybe not as excited anymore?







Thought you all would get a kick out of this story... A couple nights ago, after having a really good day of listening, Emma started not to mind as well. So I told her, "Emma, we've had a really good day of listening. Let's put back on your listening ears and start minding a little better." Her response, "My listening ears are on mom! They're just not working. They need new batteries." I can only imagine what the tween years have in store for us.

The cost of being a girl

Princess Emma. She loves this outfit and her heels, but has little patience when actually walking in the heels. :)

It's wintertime!

Well, there's no denying it. Winter is here. And I have to say, our Carolina bottoms are hanging in there. Emma's been a trooper walking to school in low single digit temps and has managed to not go too stir crazy in our apartment. Here she walking home from church last weekend.

We've gotten pretty creative inventing inside activities. Here we converted a box to a jeep...





Complete with instrument gauges and a working wheel. Notice the seat belt...always safety first! :)





We've managed to even go sledding with a real sled (if you recall, last year we had a random snow in NC and had to sled with a baby pool since we didn't have a real sled). And check out the video below of Tim and Emma sledding.


Only in a northern urban city would you see a bike like this being used in the snow...

Emma's screaming cracks me up every time I watch this clip...