Special Person Day

Emily's school has a neat annual tradition called Special Person Day. Each student gets to invite someone special in their life to join them for the afternoon at school. They have cookies and punch then do an activity in their classroom. This year Emily invited Grandma Holly to be her special person.

Fun in the Snow

Since snow does not come to us, we must go to the snow each year. We decided to forgo our annual trip to Big Bear (which would have been spectacular this year BTW!) and go to the mountains on the Ventura/Kern County line with Grandma and Papa. We drove in the back way through Ojai and were a little worried that the warm weekend meant that there wouldn't be much left to play in. But our persistance paid off. We finally found a perfect spot that was hilly enough to slide on, remote enough to have no footprints until we arrived and big enough to play on for a few hours. The girls loved sliding of course. They also made snow angels, threw lots of snow balls (and "caught" a few too), made a snow man and generally had a great day. The snow sure is a lot of fun but we couldn't imagine living with it!

New Friends and Old Friends

Mommy and her friend, M, have known each other since the first day of 8th grade. In the past several years as we've both been busy starting our families, we haven't seen as much of each other as we used to. This year after exchanging Christmas letters and realizing how similar our girls' personalities are, we decided to get them all together. They all bonded as only 4,5,6 and 7 year olds can. Shy for a moment then BFFs from that point on. They tore up the playground then spent a sunny afternoon searching for rocks at the bottom of the creek.

Here She Is...

A future Miss America in our midst? Back in October, Jenna, one of our wonderful neighbor girls, asked Emily to be her "Little Sister" as she competed in a local pageant. Daddy was a bit hesitant for Emily to enter the world of Beauty, sorry, Scholarship Pageants but Emily was 110% interested. They had a Getting to Know You pizza party in November (though it wasn't really necessary for our duo)A few weeks later the Little Sisters had their first dance rehersal and an Etiquette Tea. I'm not sure if Emily took the manners lesson to heart.

Then each Saturday in January, there was another rehersal until finally it was pageant night!

The Little Sisters put big shirts over their pretty dresses to try and look like orphans as they performed to "Hard Knock Life" from Annie. (Emily is in the blue towards the left.)

Finally, they got to escort their Big Sisters off stage during the evening gown phase of the competition.

The show went on until nearly 10:00 which made Emily one tired puppy. Unfortunately, Jenna didn't win either. But it was a great experience and Emily has been recreating parts of the practice and competition around our house ever since.

San Diego Zoo

It's tradition for us to go somewhere on vacation for a few days after Christmas with my parents. That seems to have been scaled back the last few years but we did manage to get to the San Diego Zoo just after the New Year. It was a cool day but we didn't get any rain so we were satisfied.
The girls love going places with their grandparents because the usual "no" that they hear following the question "can we have (insert your favorite junk food here)?" is replaced by "Sure you can!" They loved their cotton candy.

We did see the pandas. One was too busy eating to give us a good picture, but this one seemed to be lounging for the benefit of the photographers.

The children's zoo was a lot of fun too. The girls got to pet some goats and see some smaller animals close up. Here are my little hams - the happy spider and the scared fly.

Princess Hops-a-Lot

AKA Princess Poops-a-lot! For a few days it looked like we had a new pet rabbit. The neighbor girls came over one morning and asked if we had seen this rabbit before. Nope, not us. But we did have a small pet cage (for Emily's future guinnea pig) so we put up signs and waited for an anxious owner to show up. It took almost a week, but Princess was finally reunited with her owner. In the meantime, the girls and the neighbors had a great time playing with, holding and spoiling (with many, many carrot snacks) a very friendly rabbit.

Merry Christmas!

No Christmas season would be complete without a trip to see the big man himself. Emily asked for an MP3 player and Claire wanted a toy box with her name on it.

We spent Christmas Eve in Thousand Oaks with Jenn's side of the family. The girls got new PJs and lots of time with Grandma Holly and their cousin.
We drove home late Christmas Eve so we could be home for Christmas morning. For once, Emily was up bright and early and Claire slept in. We waited and waited for Claire (there didn't seem to be a good reason to make a grumpy Claire later in the day) but finally around 8:30 Sleeping Beauty woke up. Around 8:31 this picture was taken:

And by 9:00 this one:

The girls had a blast tearing into everything. We spent the rest of the day checking everything out. Daddy used his birthday present and deep fried a turkey for our dinner.