january in pictures

well, it's not quite as sparse as november, but it's pretty close. here are the few pictures i took in january: 

cute boy with a new haircut. 

we got a little bit of snow. thankfully, this is about as much as it stuck. did i mention one of the reasons that we moved from utah was to avoid the snow?

our library has a monthly lego builders club on one saturday each month. i think this may have been the first one we went to and we stumbled upon it accidently, but you'd better believe that my kids know the schedule now.

because it turns out that they really love building with duplos right now.

diane's birthday was at the end of the month, so we went out to dinner at din tai fung to celebrate. i can't believe she's six!

we sure love this sweet girl.

madeleine's baptism

madeleine turned eight in december, which means that she was old enough to be baptized a member of our church. she has been very excited about this decision for a long time and it was good to see her take it so seriously. 

in november, when my cousin, lucy, was here for thanksgiving, i had her take some impromptu pictures of madeleine in her baptism dress (it's the dress that i wore for my own baptism, which my mom made) so that we could use them with her baptism announcements. i'm glad that i thought to do it then because on the actual day of the baptism, i completely forgot to get a single picture of her in her dress. i wish i had some of her with the people that were there for the actual day, but these are pretty great to have.

this is the only picture that we have from the actual day. randy's dad asked to take a picture of us after we got home and that's when i realized that i hadn't taken any the rest of the day. i blame it on pregnancy brain and everyone else there being too sick to help me remember (both of our parents came to town and both of our moms had terrible colds that put them in bed for pretty much everthing other than the baptism itself).

december in pictures

jonathan was very excited about decorating the house for christmas and it was all we could do to make him wait until after thanksgiving. it's probably a good thing because i'm not sure how quickly it would have been done in my pregnant state if he hadn't been such a  strict taskmaster. this is him "helping" randy with the lights on a rainy morning. because that's how much randy loves him, and that's how persistent he was.

diane lost her first tooth. i wish it hadn't been because she and madeleine were playing soccer in their bedroom and a ball knocked it out and she swallowed it, but hey, milestones come in all different forms. it was probably already pretty ready to come out on its own because she had another tooth already poking through and she lost her other bottom tooth soon after, but still, no soccer in your room.

we went to the seattle asian art museum one rainy weekend when the kids were dying to get out of the house. they didn't do so well with the actual art, but they loved the kids' room, where they had puppets, blocks, and other things for them to play with.

madeleine and randy doing origami together:

we went over to my aunt cheryl's house to decorate sugar cookies, one of my kids' favorite christmas traditions.

i was trying to be sneaky to catch this scene between the girls. madeleine does a lot of reading to diane, which i love.

jonathan insisted that i take a picture of him in front of the stockings. i was happy to oblige.

oh, the ways i find my children...

our annual attempt to get a family picture in front of the tree on christmas eve:

the end result:

diane was very into posing that night and wanted me to take one of just her. goofy girl.

my parents came for christmas and madeleine's baptism and we tried to get a picture of them with the kids, but this is how that went:

here are pictures of actual christmas day (not pictured: me feeling sick from being pregnant, randy on major medication from bronchitis, and my mom dealing with a nasty cold of her own). it was a pretty quiet day for us, hopefully the kids didn't feel too abandoned by the sick adults.

happy birthday to my eight-year old:

this is from later in the day when we switched into birthday mode and madeleine opened her birthday presents.

we love this girl and i can't believe how old she's getting!