Merry Merry Christmas!

We hope you all had a super duper fun day! Violet had a blast opening up all her gifts. Here she is with her favorite - twin babies!
She also got adorabl Hello Kitty (or "Meow! Meow" in Violet-speak) slippers. Here she is sporting the new slippers and looking at her new Curious George doll.
We also took our annual Christmas Walk on the Beach.
Here's part of the crew! From l-r Brett, Jon, Leah, Joel, Me, Rudolph (I mean Anna) and Claire in the front. I'm holding an uncooperative Violet!Every Christmas we go to my grandparents club for a WONDERFUL Christmas brunch. The food is SOOO good! And luckily my stomach is finally feeling better so I was so excited to eat a ton! We all got dressed up too. Unfortunately we had to wake Violet up from her nap to go and she wasn't in the greatest mood, but here are a few pics! Violet and her daddy:
The back of her super cute dress:And the three of us. We've also been swimming a lot - Violet LOVES the water! We're going to have to figure out a way to get her in a pool more often at home. She discovered how fun it is to "dolphin ride" on our backs, and even went under a few times and didn't even cry!
Earlier this week we had kind of a chilly day down here so we all headed to the zoo. Here we are with the alligators in the background:
And with Grandma
Playing at the zoo's playground
Sitting pretty :)
Luckily it warmed back up again and we've spent almost every morning on the beach. Violet spends a lot of time playing in the sand... and EATING it! She eats HANDFULS no matter what we do to stop her. GROSS! But I guess it's nice and salty so I can see where she is going with it, but hearing her crunch-crunch-crunch is really gross. Yuck!
With her cousins Anna and Ethan by the water
Taking a dip in the ocean with her Uncle Brett
And taking a walk with me.
Looking at the "ducks"
And sweetly squatting while collecting shells.

Good News x2!

1) Violet had her 6 month post-spica-cast x-ray on Wednesday morning. It came out GREAT!! Her little ball and socket are in place and starting to form pretty normally. Her socket previously was very shallow (why her hip kept dislocating) and it is starting to widen and deepen. YAY!!! We were SO happy to hear that! Now we don't have to go back for a YEAR! So apparently Christmastime will always bring an x-ray too. She'll need yearly x-rays for the next few years, if not more. Lucky us!

The best part was that she was a ROCK STAR through the whole thing! She didn't make a peep during her x-ray (she has to lay down under this huge machine with her legs at weird angles - usually lots and lots of tears) AND she's totally in love with our doctor. She wanted him to HOLD her! It was really funny.

It is crazy that she's been cast-free for 6 months. I'm so happy to have our regular old kid back. She's just now started climbing (on EVERYTHING!) and running which is so much fun to watch. You'd never know that she had hip issues now!

2) Violet is POTTY TRAINING HERSELF!!

Which is good because I have no earthy idea how to potty train a kid. She's slightly unorthadox about the whole thing (of course)... see she has this little pal from playgroup named Bryce. For some reason she has adopted that name for all things potty... to the potty itself, when she goes, etc. (sorry Lisa! I have no idea why!). So when we hear "Bryce! Bryce!" we know she has to go. In the last 3 day she has gone both #1 and #2 on the potty all by herself!!! Of course this comes with reading "Harry the Dirty Dog" about 37,482 times first, but indeed she does have to go! In fact just a second ago she ran in there, did her thing, and we were out in five minutes! She just looks like such a big KID sitting on that potty. Geesh, where does the time go?

We head to sunny Florida tomorrow and you can bet her potty chair is coming with us! Hopefully we won't hear the calls of "Bryce! Bryce!" in the middle of the plane ride. I'm not sure what we'll do!

If you found this blog searching for info on spica casts,
please visit this wonderful and incredibly helpful forum:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Hipbaby/
Also, please take a look at my Spica Cast Survival Guide, which you can download here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Hipbaby/files/
It's the first thing on the list.
Sending lots of good hip healing vibes your way!!

Hurray for Christmas!

Last week we braved the crowds (okay, we were the only ones there) and got our last real tree. I'm buying a fake one when they are cheap after Christmas. I'm sad to not have another real one, but the tree-hugger in me feels a little better about it :)

Anyway, here are Jon and Violet with the tree on the roof of the Outback
Violet checks out the lights. She really REALLY wanted to eat them. I guess they do look like electric candies!
Here are the two tree decorators being very silly. I caught Violet's cold (see below) and could hardly get off the couch. Poor me!

I know I probably said this last year, but if you're looking for the Best Christmas CD Ever, click here! It's John Denver & The Muppets - A Christmas Together. Our whole family loves this - we've been listening to it since we were little and we're busy getting our kids listening to it too. LOVE IT! Plus you know the reason we moved to Denver was for John Denver, right? Right.

So Violet got pretty sick last week - it started innocently enough but soon we had red, puffy, weepy eyes as well as a super runny nose and cough. Lovely! We thought she looked pretty funny with her puffy red eyes so here you go!Unfortunately I also caught it, and in true "pregnant lady" fashion I had it twice as bad and twice as long! Luckily today I am finally feeling a bit better so hopefully I'm on the mend!

We also got a good dumping of snow this week. Violet insisted on putting on all her gear - bunny hat, jacket, big white boots, mittens... so we got ready to go, leashed up Porter for a nice walk and... she apparently wanted to go for a CAR RIDE and not a walk! It reminded me of the Christmas Story movie. We just went back inside.
Here are a couple of videos for ya... This first one is Violet attempting to say "Anna" - she was looking at my sister's Christmas card with all the kids on it. I kept telling her the names and this is what she said for Anna (this is what she usually calls Leah).


While I've been sick this week, Violet has had the run of the house. Usually I wouldn't let her do this but there wasn't much I could do to stop her and she was having SO much fun. She is picking up a LOT more words but these are still gibberish (well, I actually think she's saying "pizza" but I'll try to ignore that!). She cracks us up! Also please note the absence of all decorations and lights at her level on the chair. Many painstaking hours were spent moving them and taking them down as far as she could reach!

The Annual Christmas Photo Shoot

We somehow bribed Jon's brother Trent to come out with us to take our annual Christmas Picture. Last year it was just Violet by the tree, but we thought we should take advantage of our new most beautiful surroundings and get all three (or 3.5) of us in!

Here was one that demonstrates Violet's new "Smile with your TEETH" grin. She's so silly! I just said it one day and she DID it! Too bad it's not all that natural :) This was taken halfway up Lookout Mountain near Golden looking out over the Rockies.
Some of the pictures looked like this. Actually, not really. Trent did an AWESOME job and I think just took this one 'cause it was funny. Pose! Pose! Smile! VIOLET LOOK OVER HERE!!
We took a few of us walking down the pathway with Violet. This was was pretty good...

Not quite there...
And if you can see Violet's face here she is DONE WALKING and DONE TAKING PICTURES thank-you-very-much!
BUT she still got some smooches from mom and dad.
Her and Daddy look over the mountians.
Here are a few of Violet I took at a park in Golden.


Thanks Uncle Trent (on the left) for taking such amazing photos! It was nearly impossible to narrow it down to one for our Christmas card... we had about TWENTY that were our favorites!You'll all have to wait to get our card to see what we picked. Nope, it's not on the blog! :) I like surprises, remember?

Let the Holidays Begin!

I hope you all had a fabulous Turkey Day! I know I did! This was the first year I was not with my family (yup, the first one ever!) so not only was I missing them, but I also was going to attempt to roast my own birdie and have Thanksgiving at our house with Jon's family.

Here is Mr. Turkey as it went in the oven. I used this website and followed their directions - it turned out SO GOOD!!
Jon being silly and about ready to slice into our perfectly roasted turkey.
Feast!! Jon, Trent, Heather, Mike, "Oma" Joanne and the back of Violet.
Speaking of Violet, the poor thing spiked a 103 fever the afternoon before and it didn't let up until Friday. I felt so bad! She wasn't in the mood to do much of anything but she did eat a plate of mashed potatoes for her Thanksgiving dinner. We didn't convince her until the next day to try Uncle Trent's famous sweet potatoes - then she decided she loved them (we all did - there was almost a pound of brown sugar in them! YUM!)
We went out to eat a LOT which was so great! My stomach is still a little iffy so it was really nice to have someone else cook for me :) Here are Jon, Heather, Trent and Joanne out for lunch on Friday.

Violet getting some snuggles from Daddy.Then we went out for my birthday on Sunday night to my new favorite Mexican restaurant in Denver. SOO yummy!
Friday night we had Christmas with Joanne and Violet got some great stuff! Here she is modeling her Dutch Wooden Shoe slippers. She LOVES them!

She quickly figured out that these wrapped up presents had FUN STUFF in them. She went from being a nice little elf delivering the gifts to their recipient to a little elf devil who wanted to keep and open them all for herself. Ah, to be almost 2 again. Luckily most of the gifts were for her :)
She got some great building blocks from her Oma. She mostly likes to knock down whatever castle me or Jon builds for her. Look how much fun she had riding the carousel! It could be the bright lights, loud music, or the guy standing behind her who looks like a baby-napper, not her daddy!
We also went to visit Violet's 2nd cousin Tobin. He is so cute and they play so good together! Here they are sharing a bowl of blueberries.

A teeny tiny bit of news...

Teeny tiny as in about 2.5" long at the moment...
Yup, Violet's going to be a BIG SISTER in June!!!

You'll all have to wait until then to find out what it's going to be... we're kickin' it old school again and waiting until then for the big surprise!

So far I've been feeling... poopy! Starting right at 6 weeks on the nose the lovely nausea (all day, thank you!) and food aversions started. Poor Jon can't make coffee or eggs anymore for breakfast. It seems to be letting up now at around 12 weeks but I was sick with Violet until closer to 14 so I'm not holding my breath. Plus I've heard from a lot of people that the higher altitude can make you feel worse and I believe them!

In other news, last week it was really really warm here (in the 80's!) so Violet got all dressed up in her cute little skirt and we took some pictures. I love her little toes!Then we went out in the backyard. Violet chose her own boots. She's very fashion forward, don't you think?We hope you all have a super fun and turkey-filled Thanksgiving!