I let the girls sleep in our bed for naps...this is how I found them yesterday. The cutest. Anna usually sleeps on the boppy perpendicular to Kara, but I guess she woke up and decided that she and Kara needed to snuggle. Anna pushes Kara away a lot of times when she tries to hug, so it was nice to see her being the loving one. Oh, and this made for a longer nap, too, which is always a good thing!
Though I have not been feeling it that much this week (we are having a lot of issues with eating and sleeping lately), we are both so thankful for our Pierce Best Babies, and I know they are thankful for each other, too. They are the sweetest and nicest and our loves. We are also thankful for the hospitality and love extended to us by dear friends from church, who had us over for Thanksgiving dinner (and were kind enough to share their pictures) and to play with some of their grandchildren.
Anna apparently held onto this prairie dog for quite some time...
Kara preferred hanging out in the block box, while Anna also tested out the piano.
You can tell by their expressions that we weren't at home...they take a good long while to warm up to people/new places, and everything/one gets a proper Pierce Best Baby staredown.
These are our Thanksgiving pictures - classic, huh? Crazy faces and no clothes, just the way we like it! They were getting rides after dinner (which was their 2nd meal of the day, since they refused to eat any, and for Anna, literally a single bite, of the Thankgiving lunch feast). Oh, our sweeties. I wouldn't trade you for anything, and wish you would just sit and snuggle with me all the time so I could kiss you as much as I want.
PS- The girls are secretly getting big. The last time they wore these dresses and pants the arms and waistbands had to be rolled. Since they still don't have hair to speak of and that doesn't grow, I don't really notice them turning into big girls instead of babies (oh, and they do spend a lot of time naked, too, which makes it harder to tell their growth).
We thought that a bubble bath would be a really fun idea. Well...
You can see Kara's uncertainty here (she's on the left). She soon started screaming, had to be removed and wouldn't calm down until the bubbles were all gone (hard since Andrew accidentally dumped in a third of the bottle). Anna was fine but lost it when sister started.
The bubble story continues: the girls are apparently obsessed with their recent unpleasant/scary experiences. Every time they see bubbles in a book or hear the word bubble (or see the bottle, which had to be moved), they point towards the bath tub with a squeal of displeasure, and have to be reassured (and often have to go see) that the bubbles are all gone. Then they show me everything that we did with bubbles. Bubble shoes, bubble hat, mom had bubbles on her fingers and shook the bubbles off, etc. Repeat over and over and over. The bubble incident happened almost a month ago...
Bugs: there was one small potato-type bug near their toy box 3 weeks ago. Again, if a bug is mentioned or spotted in a book, they point to where the bug was (near our entertainment center) and wince, then need to go see that he's no longer there. They then proceed to show me how you smash a bug and stomp a bug. The bug actually got away before I killed it, so they show me the exact path that he walked and the exact spot where he ran under the entertainment center. This too goes on and on.
Lastly, our friendly spider. They like him for some reason. He lives in the closet and they love to go look at him and blow him kisses (and tell me they're going to play with his toes - another obsession of theirs from a book we have - everything they like they tell me they're going to kiss and play with their toes, even if I tell them it has no toes). Kara will stand at the closet door and yell at him until I come pick her up to see him. If we mention the spider, they will stop whatever they're doing to run to the closet and let me know I need to pick them up to see.
Is this normal? I'm glad they have good memories (sometimes better than mine), but seriously!
When things get quiet, no one comes to find me, and I can actually accomplish (usually a very little) something, the girls have discovered something interesting. This morning a couple weeks ago it was some old shoes that had fallen off the shelf in the closet when I put something else up there to hide it from them. They independently decided to open the closet door, climb up into our basket of non-priority thus has been there for a while laundry, and just hang out with their shoes. When I found them they asked me to put the shoes on them a million times, regardless of the fact that they had shoes on already and that these shoes wouldn't fit them if I tried to put them on. The latest "things are too quiet" activity has been discovering a box of cheerios by the chair in their room (we eat while we read a lot) and shoving their mouths full, Kara feeding Anna, Kara spreading cheerios around the room, etc.
Later that same morning, Anna decided to knock over the CD tower and make it into a boat (after she cried from the crash - luckily not onto her). The girls for a while have been taking the CDs off the shelves they can reach and spreading them around the room, carrying around the ones that have pictures of kids/babies, etc., so Andrew had taken off all but the top couple rows - making it top-heavy. Oops! Don't our days look so fun, though? :) I have to take a picture of every new activity the girls come up with, since they are way more creative than I am and it's such a blessing they entertain themselves so well!
Andrew taught them to raise their hands when we say "raise your hand if..." - they raise their hand regardless of what the "if" is, but we haven't tricked them yet, we usually say pretty or sweet or something, though some other adjectives are equally true at times. :) I love Anna's very animated hand raising - pick me!!
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Dad and his girls. Kara was being a cutie (and silly) - her real smile is so much prettier than her fake one - and Anna was being a tired sweetie. My 3 best loves.
Just like everything else, right? They really enjoyed the double car shopping cart at the grocery store the other day...enough to make Andrew consider shopping at Dierberg's all the time, even though the prices are way more expensive than where we usually shop...I am, of course, more frugal than that. Dierberg's is further away, anyway.
Just a couple seconds - we neglected to get a memory card for the camera, so can't record much video until we get one. Anna was crazy about her driving and Kara was more somber, as the picture and video show.
After ring around the rosie, we tried this dad invention. Kara liked to run and hug too, but Anna didn't want to stand still to receive the hugs...she ran in place and tried to get loose. :)
Our Andrew-mandated family fun time came on Sunday this weekend - we went to the Science Center. There wasn't a ton that was good for little ones this little, but they did love, and I mean love, the life-size dinosaurs that roar, etc. Not only did they roar along with them, but they got a lot of kisses blown to them. Most things get a lot of kisses blown to them the past few days, guess the girls are going through a loving phase.
Look! A dinosaur. Oh, it must need kisses. :)
Just relaxing and looking at the dinosaurs - Kara, Anna with Mom.
This picture is really dark and Andrew put the camera on some weird panoramic setting for all of these - sorry, still trying to figure out our new camera. But here we are with their love, the T-Rex. Andrew loved dinosaurs when he was little too.
Anna walking on her toes - cutest thing ever - she can do it for a while - my ballerina in training, and Kara trying to walk on her toes...she just walks a little more deliberately and looks at her toes. Funny. Ring around the rosie, which is becoming an after-dinner tradition. Anna saying mama and then giving me huge grins after because she knows I love it (she said mama before, but I don't think put together what it really meant till this week). Kara saying baby baby and me me me me, which sounds cuter than it looks when I type it. Does she know her great grandma is Mimi? She does seem to know things I wouldn't think she would. For instance, the past few days they've been eating lentils, which they haven't had for months because Kara had started spitting them everywhere every time they ate them. They've been liking them, then the other day I mentioned to Andrew while they were eating, "remember how Kara used to S-P-I-T something they're eating tonight?" - I made sure not to mention spitting or lentils, just in case. Sure enough, Kara propelled her next bite of lentils out of her mouth. She hasn't done it since. She doesn't know how to spell, does she? Haha.
My BEAUTIES. Ha. :)
I have a few of these pumpkin photo shoot day ones left, and will release them slowly till we have purchased a new camera...
A while back my mom sent the girls strollers for their babies and they LOVE them (so much so that I had to hide them so that we could go to bed and the next morning the girls discovered my hiding spot and demanded them). It's really just another way to run around our house like crazy women, their favorite pasttime. :)
Anna quickly learned that the stroller, while not that much smaller than her own, was not for her to sit in.
Though Kara has a baby in her stroller in this picture, most of the time she prefers to stroll without a passenger (and will take out anything we or Anna put in there), reinforcing my belief that she really just wanted to run holding onto something for a change. And isn't our blue bathroom pretty hideous?
