Happy Holidays! Go Tigers!

This has been quite a weekend in our household. We started getting the house switched from standard messy kid-zone to slightly cleaner holiday mode. While Daddy was helping with the big Missouri football game coverage, the kids and I set up the tree in our Mizzou outfits. I also took the kids to a local restaurant for small burgers and real milkshakes. Jordan wasn't that interested. She was really interested in decorating the Christmas tree.

Of course, in Jordan's world, decorating means putting on ornaments and immediately taking them off to put them back on the tree again. That means almost half of the tree has a sparse number of ornaments to keep me from needing to police her all the time.

By the way, I think the Mizzou outfits worked. We won the big game!!

The holidays are here

After the big storm, we've been delayed on decorating... But yesterday we turned on the holiday music, put up the tree and turned on all kinds of lights outside in the front yard. Jordan seemed to have a lot of fun pulling ornaments off the tree. She won't keep a santa hat on... But I caught this picture at the right moment.

I've been getting nostalgic about Jordan since her birthday is coming up soon. For some reason, her first birthday feels like a huge accomplishment... But in a different way from Cam's. I think it's because I know what happens after the first year... She's days or weeks away from becoming an official toddler. She's already growing a personality that fits a toddler: She knows what she wants, but she doesn't always know how to explain it beyond grunts and whines.

Then there's the standing... She's trying so hard to stand up. Almost every time she's on the floor these days she plants her feet and sticks her butt in the air. We just have to get her to improve her pulling up skills. Balance? She has some of it. It's a process that we'll just keep working on day after day.