The week before Christmas we went to see Santa at the mall. Emma enjoyed looking at all the decorations while we waited in line. When it was our turn, Emma ran up to Santa and gave him a giant bear hug. She sat with him and told him she wanted cookies and a yellow race car for Christmas. Then I grabbed the camera, handed Ashlyn to the big man, and snapped a picture. The picture seemed fitting, since Ashlyn is pretty strongly opposed to anyone but Mom or Dad holding her.
Later in the week we had a slight warm up in temperatures. Dakota and Emma went out to play in the snow before it melted. (Melted? Heh... like that will happen before June!) Emma wanted to build a snow-tree, so that's just what they did. And here's my little tree hugger! :)Next in the week came our frantic packing, as we moved our trip to Chicago up a day. It was a good thing we did. We missed a pretty nasty storm by leaving a day early. We ended up coming home a day early too, to avoid another nasty storm on the way back. We were thankful for flexibility on everyone's part, and for clear roads in both directions. We were also thankful for the sleeping spell Iowa put on our girls, as they both slept almost the whole way from the IL border to Des Moines.
We enjoyed our time in Chicago quite a bit. We received lots of good presents, and ate lots of good food. Emma loves to play dress up, and she received a Snow White dress up set from her aunt Jess. One night, she decided Snow White should pretend to be Sleeping Beauty. So she fell asleep and refused to wake up until her uncle Andy kissed her. Not even some serious tickling would wake the sleeping princess--only a kiss. She also received a tool box full of all sorts of kids power tools. So each day for the remainder of our trip, she dressed up like Snow White and tried to find things to "fix" with her tools.Oh, and the food... for dinner one night, my mom made a turkey. Emma somehow got the idea in her head that she would enjoy eating a drumstick--not the ice cream kind, but the turkey leg kind. So after she had eaten some other things, she was given a turkey leg to try. We all got a kick out of watching her try to pull meat off of the big leg and eat it. I couldn't believe she actually liked it! Or maybe it was the attention she liked.
Ashlyn, on the other hand, did not care for all the attention she got. She continues to be a mommy and daddy's girl through and through. We know it's just a stage, but it would be nice if she would let someone else hold her, or we could leave the room occasionally without her crying. On our second or third day there, she decided that she could sit on other people's laps, but usually only if she had a toy to play with or a pacifier to chew on.
A couple of funny stories from when we were there... it appears the "math gene" has indeed been passed onto Emma. One morning she was trying to figure out how old people were. She guessed that my sister was 8 years old, to which Erin replied, "I'm eight plus twenty." Emma thought about that, looked at her fingers, and asked, "Are you 28?" What's more amazing, is she then moved to my step dad and tried to figure out his age. Her initial guess was 6. He told her he was "ten times six" years old. Again, she thought about it and then asked if he was 60! I don't know how she figured those things out. We haven't been doing any drilling of math facts, and my sister swears no one was helping her. Lucky guesses or math genius--you decide.
The other funny story came from a game we gave my sister. It's a word game called, "In a Pickle." And there was just something about the idea of a stone laying on the street, in the middle of a traffic jam, that was enough to send my sister into fits of laughter, with tears rolling down her cheeks. It's definitely a great game to play late at night, when your abilities to make sense of things are seriously in question. Or maybe after a few too many Mountain Dews, when everything seems hilarious.
When it came time to leave Chicago, Emma was so sad. She said she wished she could stay there forever. Ashlyn, I think, is more of a homebody. She was the happiest baby when we got home. Her own house, her own toys, and her own crib--she was thrilled to be home.
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