Thanksgiving Day

For Thanksgiving Day we went to Ryan's parents house and had a delicious meal courtesy of Margaret's hard work (she brined the turkey for a day or two ahead of cooking it and it turned out amazing).Audrey loves to help whenever she can. She was put in charge of filling the vegetable appetizer tray with precut veggies. She was also in charge of making sure all the veggies were still good by taste testing them for us :).I think Audrey's favorite part was decorating sugar cookies. She helped me make them the day before and was extremely excited to decorate and eat them. Audrey wanted "traditional" blue frosting for the cookies. She also wanted to help mix it.
She concentrated very hard while she was decorating. She decorated a penguin and a present (my way of using the rest of the cookie dough without having to reroll is to cut squares/rectangles and call them presents).

After she finished decorating her two cookies, she was ready to eat them. We told her she could only eat one, so she picked the penguin which was much larger. She took one lick of the frosting and dropped the cookie frosting side down on the floor. So she ended up eating the present cookie very carefully.Genny, put her artistic talents to good use and basically frosted the rest of the sugar cookies, which were mostly ginger bread men.Ryan and Grandma Margaret being very cooperative for a Thanksgiving picture. :)

We also had a good game of ping-pong and watched "Get Smart" while Audrey took a much needed nap. A great Thanksgiving for all!

Flyaway Audrey

We recently (October) borrowed a book from the library called "Flyaway Katie".

Audrey loved that book. She was absolutely captured by the little girl who decides to paint herself all kinds of bright colors and spend the gray day in her picture.

Shortly after we read it several days in a row, guess who decided to paint herself on a gray day.

I had my suspicions when she looked out the window in the morning and said that it was a gray day and not long after that asked to do a painting "project". Sure enough, flyaway Audrey was even proud enough of her paint job to pose for the camera (which is a feat these days).

I also loved all of her hand prints all over the paper. :)

Decorating the Xmas tree

Audrey woke up so excited to decorate for Christmas. I have been telling her since Halloween that we can't decorate for Christmas (like the stores do) until the day after Thanksgiving.

This morning we put away what was left of our fall decorations, and started to pull out our Christmas decorations only to discover that we no longer have a tree. I forgot that the base of our broke last year when we were dismantling it.

I had big plans to avoid black Friday shopping by decorating my house and instead, realized that I would be thrown right into the thick of it. I looked online to find out where the Christmas tree door busters were, dressed Audrey in record time and took off to fight the crowds at Walmart. I love Walmart because of the cacophony of humanity that assembles there regularly. Today that cacophony wasn't as bad as black fridays of past years, and I was able to score the $25 6.5 foot tree of my dreams. :)

We decided earlier this year that we were going to do a "fun" tree instead of our usual matchy-matchy fancy tree. With that in mind, I bought the multi colored lights (to Ryan's horror) and we were off. Neither Audrey nor Ryan were very cooperative with getting their pics taken mid-decorating, so the only picture worth posting is Audrey smiling proudly in front of the tree at the very end (holding her curios George snow globe).As for the actual decorating, Audrey got very excited about it. We put on the Nat King Cole Christmas album - a classic if ever there was. Ryan held Audrey up for the high parts and she had a great time doing all the ornaments. She wasn't thrilled about doing the ball ornaments until she got to put the hooks in them and then it was very exciting too.

Happy Thanksgiving message

Audrey told me she wanted to do a message and so I recorded her on my camera.

You can hear in her sweet little voice how she is still pretty stuffed up. Poor girl is recovering from double ear infections.

Halloween trick or treating

Audrey has a little friend named Alexa who lives two doors down and the two of them went trick or treating together on Halloween for much longer than either of them would have alone. It was so adorable to see the cute little kitty cat princess and the monkey holding hands from house to house. The moms ended up holding the pumpkins as they ran from house to house for miles and hours.Also, in case people could not tell what Audrey was, all of her accessories were black cats too - the flash light and the whistle/blinky light necklace.

Audrey loves books

And I finally got around to organizing her "book shelf" (those lovely plastic shelves leftover from my college days). My favorite part of this pic is her crossed legs - so funny and so cute.

Summer Pics

Playing in the sprinklers at Grandma's house.

At one of Audrey's first "Grandma/Audrey days" (where Grandma watches Audrey basically all day every other week - thank you Grandma!!), Grandma took Audrey to the toy store and let her pick out a prize. Audrey picked the squirty animals set seen in the pics and they are still a favorite for all water activities (the bathtub).