Do you think she was tired?

This is how Elizabeth fell asleep for her nap today

And this is Amelia loving popcorn!

Amelia was just falling asleep when the sirens went off

Bit of an interesting afternoon/evening yesterday. We have had almost no rain in forever...to the point where we actually broke down and started running the sprinkler regularly just to get some green in our yard. Well, yesterday it started raining and we were happy. Then the quarter-size hail started and we weren't so happy. The weather sirens went off and we turned on the TV to see we were under a tornado warning and surrounded by indications of rotation.

So we all got dressed down to our shoes and were ready to bolt into the storage closet if needed. James drove the van under a tree as that is the only protection from hail that we have. Through all of this the power was going out repeatedly. Fun, fun!

It all turned out fine, however. No damage and a LOT of rain to soak our soil and bring down the extreme fire danger just in time for Memorial Day BBQs!

Oh, and the price went back down on the flight we want to Charlotte this summer, so I put a hold on it and we'll be buying our tickets today! Quite a relief. I was just sick when prices went up.

Finally...Scarborough Faire

Ok, so I held off as long as I could, hoping James would blog about it instead of me, but I guess I'll go ahead and tell my version of the Ren Faire experience since it's been a month! It started off with Amelia's first time in the stroller. We'd actually never used more than an umbrella stroller outside of the neighborhood with either of the girls, but I wanted the big stroller to carry the diaper bag and hide lots of water bottles. That was a great decision, even if most of the day it carried more gear than girls.

Elizabeth very quickly took off on her own agenda of exploring anywhere and everywhere we would let her, not really stopping to look at anything, just going, going, going!

Amelia, on the other hand, surprised us by staying in the stroller for quite a while, content just to play with her sister's container of gummy bears and take in all the new sights and sounds.

It soon became apparent that the stroller was only the second best decision we made that day; bringing the grandparents was definitely number one! Having 4 adults for 2 children (and an occasional Uncle Darren) was a great luxury. James and I actually got to watch a couple of shows. Isn't he handsome in a beard?!

Amelia had a great day and loved drinking water from a horn and just generally hanging out with Mommy. She also liked the fact that Mommy designed her costume with a shawl so that Amelia could escape from all the excitement and fill up her tummy.

Elizabeth...where to start? She basically took turns running Daddy, Grandma, and Grandpa ragged. Daddy spoiled her rotten by letting her do all of the "extras" that cost more than the admission price (my siblings will understand how hard it was for me to let him do that!) multiple times. She basically had the run of the place and yet just about every transition involved a meltdown...she's very much a 2 year old! Here are a bunch of pictures.

The END of a fun and tiring day.

Move over, Cinderella....

.... Elizabeth has a new favorite. And she can say his name (almost).

"Bob Boe."

Elizabeth has really started talking lately, adding more and more words to her English vocabulary. Included is her favorite set of DVDs from Grandma: Bob the Builder. She'll ask for him by name, wanting to watch one of the two DVDs my mom found at a garage sale. The DVDs supposedly give you the option to either watch once or set it to loop continuously, but ours always end up looping. So Elizabeth can play the same video for several hours straight. I have the theme song stuck in my head. I have no idea how Christie doesn't go crazy. It's a cute show, and Elizabeth really loves things with wheels.

But in all fairness to Cinderella, Elizabeth did decide to watch her DVD this morning. It was stored in a Bob the Builder case, but she chose to put it in the DVD player. Cinderella is still a favorite, but not as much as "Bob Boe."



And lest anyone think that we just park Elizabeth in front of the DVD player, she does go outside quite often (when the weather isn't bad). She asks to go out quite often ("Go outside?"). When the weather is nice we tell her to go get her socks and shoes ("Shoes!") and she goes running to her room and brings back her shoes and tries to put them on herself. She's played in her pool several times this week, and has even convinced Amelia that it is fun to play in the water. Would you believe she got Amelia to enjoy baths now? We're going out for walks more often, and we usually end up at the playground when we do. She can climb on the spring horsey by herself and can even get it rocking by herself, but the slide is still her favorite by far. "One, Two, Three, Whoa!" She wants either Daddy of Mommy to go with her, but that's not a bad thing considering how tall the slide is. She'll join us in the counting (my dad got her started on that at the speilplatz in Copperas Cove) so she's getting a start on her numbers. She still knows "up" and "down" from the teeter totter.

Oh, and the DSL filter showed up yesterday while Christie was playing outside with the girls. They stayed out playing for a few more hours before they went in a Christie hooked up the internet again.

D'oh! Random Rambles from Withdrawals

Christie broke the internet. More specifically, she broke the DSL phone line filter. It was an accident while vacuuming the house yesterday, but the end result is the same: internet down. I ordered a replacement filter at work (where I'm posting from now) but the shipping costs were ridiculous: $10 for 3-7 days, $19 for 2 day, and $45 for one day. So we'll have about a week of no internet from home. I think we might accidentally rediscover the world before internet, but we'll need the net back to pay bills and such about the time the isolation out here without the internet starts to really sink in...

When things are working again, we'll (finally) put up the post about the Renaissance Festival trip back in April. We had a blast. More precisely, we had a blast watching Elizabeth have a blast. Definately worth the trip. Probably even worth being sick for about a week after (not because of the festival, though, we just caught a bug that was going through Copperas Cove at the time).

Elizabeth has two new friends. A 2 year old girl (2 days younger than Elizabeth) moved into the house across from us. They're getting along great. And last night at Mutual a new family came in from San Diego unexpectedly with 4 Young Women (ages 12-15) who had a blast playing with Elizabeth, plus they have a girl who just turned 3 years old on Saturday (So she'll be in Nursery the rest of the year). They've been inactive back in California, but our recently returned missionary Janet Witcher found them and invited them to come back shortly after they arrived here. We're also expecting another family to move in with a 2 year old boy as well as a 6 year old girl, a 5 year oldgirl , and a baby girl(?). Our branch also has 2 baby boys due soon, so we're growing suddenly. We just tripled our nursery, doubled our Young Women, and doubled the Primary (and balanced the boys and girls). We're getting at least one solid priesthood holder, so maybe we'll get some of our priesthood leadership callings filled again.

Our temple district goes live on the 13th, and Christie will be even busier (especially when the DSL filter arrives). She went to training last Saturday. This Saturday she's going to help some members get signed up (we can start the process on Saturday). She's speaking in Sacrament on Sunday about the new program. This Tuesday she's teaching the new program for Enrichment!. Whew!

I'm still trying to get my scouts ready for summer camp. We have 10 going from 3 branches, all folded into our troop. One boy is a Blazer scout, so that makes things all the more complicated logistically.

Elizabeth is talking a lot more lately, now that she has friends she can play with. Amelia really loves table food and eats everything we'll let her. Sooner or later Elizabeth will figure this out and start giving her the vegetables she doesn't want (you should have seen her pick apart my Subway yesterday... took a bite, then starting pulling the veggies out and dropping them on the floor, then took another bite, repeat, until I caught her and swapped sandwiches back).

Job keeps getting worse. Christie found a few job postings for me to apply for that look decently promising. Of course, she found them right before we found out about Elizabeth's new friends (one of our reasons for looking to move elsewhere is for Elizabeth to have kids her age to play with at home and at church, but it seems we don't have that problem anymore). If we're supposed to stay here, either the job situation will get better or we'll find something local worth switching to. I dunno.

Well enough rambling for now.

YoMommy

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