Testing...

I can post to the blog from my new phone!

Happy New Year!

Back to reality this week. We had such a great holiday; relaxing but lots of fun too! Brian was off for two weeks, Grace was on break from school, and I took the two weeks off from babysitting as well. We didn't have many solid plans and it was lovely.

I decided that today would be the start of my new year. January 1st has always been a lazy day for me and this year was no different. The four of us hung out in our jammies all morning, then went to Zilla and Bampers' for the afternoon and had supper there. Since Brian and Grace were both off from work and school until today, it seemed a good day to get back into the swing of things.

I am not normally one to make resolutions but I do have some goals in mind for this year, one of which is to post on this blog more often. Looking back now, I didn't post much at all last year. Since the whole point of this blog is to act as a baby book/scrap book for the girls, I really want to make more of an effort to post here, even if it's just a short post of something funny one of the girls said or a photo.

So, here's a little something. We often wake up to the sound of Anna chatting to herself in her room across the hall. Yesterday morning, I heard her talking to herself about the fireworks that Brian and Bampers set off on New Years Eve. I laid in bed just listening to her:
"Daddy and Bampers made pink, and Daddy and Bampers made purple, and some geen! and some lellow! And dey were noisy! And some did a whistle! (then I could hear her trying to whistle with her fingers in her mouth, the way Zilla does) but I can't do da whistle! It was a good fire show!" 

Such a great sound to wake up to in the morning!

She's Back!

Our elf is back! The original plan was for her to come the day after Grace's birthday, but as I was wrapping the girls' Christmas books (for them to open one each day leading up to Christmas, a tradition we started last Christmas) I thought it might be fun for the elf to bring the books!

The elf was waiting for us on the window ledge when we got home from picking Grace up at school yesterday. Grace was so excited! We opened the first book right away, the Elf on the Shelf book, and read it several times yesterday. Grace was calling the elf Sparkles all day and insisted that was her name. I kept reminding her that we named the elf Fancy last year (after suggesting at least 50 names before Grace agreed to that one) and eventually found out that one of Grace's friends at school has an elf named Sparkles at her house. Grace was adamant about changing the elf's name, and Brian admitted that he wasn't a fan of the name Fancy either! I ended up telling Grace that if she really wants to change the elf's name we can, but she needs to think of a new name herself and we can't use the name of her friend's elf. She was still talking about changing the name this morning and we threw around some different names on the way to school. We'll see if she actually decides to change it in the next couple days!

I don't really care what the elf's name is, the girls like her and love to look for her in the morning. Grace likes to remind Anna that the elf is watching, and did so while Anna was throwing a tantrum last night when she didn't want to come upstairs for supper. I had to try not to laugh, Anna couldn't have cared less about the elf at the time.
Maybe we'll start a tradition that each year Santa sends a different elf, so we have to name him or her each time... that could be fun!