Jana makes us laugh!

She's such a little mimic right now!

The other night, J was reading the paper while we ate dinner. Jana asked to "reeeead" too. It just so happened to be the day that there are pet pics in the paper (gotta love the quality of the journalism of our paper!), so she poured over the paper for the longest time.

So here's Daddy reading the paper.

Jana has to be just like Daddy!


And then, to ham it up, she decided to start playing Peek-oo (Peek-a-boo)with us. She never did this as a baby, but gets great amusement out of it now. My goofy girl!



And lastly, "Papa" was nice enough to drive the girls and I home after an extended visit with the family. Their fancy car has a DVD player in it, so Jana was extremely content on the way home to watch "Due-rah." (Sadly, I still have her "Come on, Vamanos" and "We did it" songs stuck in my head.) Ugh!

But, she insisted on Moosey" having a good seat to watch it too. This is the "Chocolate Moose" that my godfather and his wonderful wife gave Jana last Christmas. She didn't give much notice to it until lately, but now he has to go everywhere with her. (Pardon the mouthful of puffs.)

A fun morning with Jana

On Thursday, we had a somewhat quiet morning here. Kara was napping, so Jana and I got some one on one time. It was a beautiful, but cold, day so we even got some time outside.

We started the morning with some coloring at the kitchen table. Jana got fancy new crayons from Auntie Kaley for Christmas, so she's been very into coloring.

Because of the beautiful morning, we moved outside. We drew on the patio with chalk,

ran around the backyard, found lots of birds and planes to point out,

and she climbed up and down the brick wall in the back yard.

We ended our wonderful morning with a few laps around the cul-de-sac on her trike.

It was just a wonderful "Jana and Mama" morning. I felt so spoiled for such a beautiful day and such a fun time with my big girl!

Kara's 8 months old!

J and I were just talking about how we needed to put Kara in the convertible car seat. I was whining about the fact that will require the passenger seat to be knees to the dash board for the seat to face backward. I was lamenting about how long we would have to endure the uncomfortable seat during drives... then I realized that it would only be for 4 months. Kara will be 1 in 4 months - holy cow, where has time gone?

Kara is such a wiggler! Despite liking her swing, we've had to put it away. Why you ask? Just look and you tell me.

Sliding down


Trying to flip herself out.

Kara is getting the final wear of the Seahawk jersey.
One of the newest developments is Kara's ability to sit (and Grammy's generous donation of a bath seat), so now we are able to bathe the girls together. Jana loves dumping water over Kara and Kara loves chewing on anything she can get in her mouth and watching Jana.

Kara has also decided that it's fun to dump her toys out of her box. All you have to do is set the box in front of her and some days she takes them out one by one and others she dumps them all out at once.



Kara's a bit more of a picky eater than Jana was. She's not so happy about the veggies (except for sweet potato), but LOVES banana, applesauce and pear.



This isn't the best video because somehow when I view it, Kara's head is cut out of the pic (I swear I could see her when I took the video), but here is Kara's new favorite pass time. Jumping.

Jana's 23 months old!

Oh my beautiful, amazing, wonderful little girl!

You bring me to tears just thinking about you. I think about how sad and shallow my life would be without you...

and you also brought tears to my eyes yesterday when you flailed your arms in a fit and accidentally hit me on the nose with Daddy's phone. :-)

You've become two, oh how you've become two.



Jana's language is amazing me these days. She's really starting to put together sentences. "I see you Daddy." Her Jana-isms are starting to fade as she's speaking more clearly. New acquisitions this month have been: Dinosaur (Di-shore), Justin (cousin), awesome, Diego-go (ugh, another new show to watch), and, unfortunately, oh my gosh, oh crap, oh geez, and idiot. oops!

I doubt it means much to her except that everyone oohs and ahhs and says how cute she is, but we have a fun little exchange we like to do.

Me: "Jana, how old are you?"
Jana: One
Me: How old will you be in February?
Jana: Two.

I wish you could hear her inflections - it makes it that much better. I'll have to try to get video of it.

One of my favorite new developments is her singing. She tries to sing twinkle twinkle little star, abcs, and you are my sunshine. She'll say "sing twinkle" or "sing sunshine." There are only a few parts of the songs that are discernible when she sings : "T-U-V-W" and "take my sunshine away", but it is so incredibly endearing, nonetheless.

Jana loves to dance. She's starting to have different dances too. She has her "We did it" dance (Thanks Dora), she loves to "waltz" with Daddy, she spins around until she falls over giggling "dizzy" or she just runs in circles - all of which she declares as dancing.

(I have a video of this too, but I'll have to do some editing before I can put it up here.)


We thought (okay, I did) that it would be fun for her to "help" me in the kitchen. I pulled up our paint splattered step stool and let her help me put cheese on the casserole. However now, I'm questioning that idea. She now pulls her step stool up to the counters and does all kinds of entertaining things - like eat mama's food, push the message button over and over on the answering machine, and play with Mama's laptop on the island. ugh! Nothing is safe anymore.


And here is the look she sports when she's exclaimed "want!" and is reaching for something that she shouldn't have... like here it is the camera.


However, she's still such an amazingly sweet little thing and is just so darn lovable. As you can see, she's even won over my bro. Until this weekend Ryan was called "Dave" as was Dave and Patrick. We think she was getting confused and either thought that all uncles were named Dave or that the tall build and brown hair that all three have was confusing her. But, this weekend she seemed to have gotten it figured out and we now have "Dave," "Pat," and "Wyan."


The other clear indicator of approaching two, is that the "baby" slides aren't good enough any more. You can see that she has conquered the big slide at the indoor park. I can't same I'm a fan of this, but she thinks it's great.


And lastly, I'm so not looking forward to the teenage years. Here's my little girl, all punked out. Yes, that's a t-shirt saying "I don't do pink" and a stocking hat... inside. Walk down the halls of your average high school today and you'll see why I'm very very afraid. :-)

Family Pictures

Finding a time when both girls are up is a real challenge these days, so finding a time to get our pictures taken, was also a real challenge.

We had an appointment at 5:20. We had to wake Jana up because she had a horrible time going down for a nap. She was still trying to wake up when we got there. Some how we manged to lose one of the shoes that Kara was supposed to be wearing in the pics, so we had to make a quick stop to buy a new pair. In the end, we were late (oh well) and a bit frazzled. Jana didn't want to have her pics taken, but was a trooper, nonetheless.

Here are our family pictures we had taken this year with the girls in one of their Christmas outfits.

Here is Kara. we couldn't really get any smiles out of her timed correctly, but this one was turned out pretty cute!



This is one of my faves of Jana of all time, but she was having a little naptime hair!
Here was the best we could get of the two of them - not really cute of either one, though.


And finally, our family pic. Once again, not great of any one of us, but good of all of us - if that makes any sense. (I had no idea my hair was that dark, by the way!)