ScrumpyDaddy

I know you are probably wondering how I am posting on this when Valentines Day is not for another couple weeks. Well, I am posting about decorating for Valentines Day. Dave and I don’t really celebrate the holiday, at least not more than saying to each other happy Valentines Day. We just figure why spend the money when everything is over priced and we can show each other how much we love each other on any other day that is not over commercialized. Anyways, it is still fun to decorate for all holidays especially with a 3 year old.

Abby, Dave and I made heart decorations to hang on the windows out of construction paper. We let Abby use for the first time my die cutter. She did a great job pushing the handle down all the way to cut the paper into heart shapes. These are small hearts so we used some of them to decorate big hearts that I cut out of pink, red, and white paper.

Abby and I then used a glue to stick to put the small hearts on the big ones and to put glitter on them too. I attempted to have her use letter stamps to spell out Happy Valentines Day, but that did not go so well. Either she didn’t push hard enough so the letter barely showed up or she put them on top of each or upside down. Oh well, maybe next year. I ended up doing it myself instead.

The hearts are now all on the windows. Sorry no pictures of us actually making the hearts.

Here is a collection and some of Abby’s favorite sayings at 3 years old.

“You can be Ariel and I will be flounder.”

“Sing like Ariel.”

When Abby is mad she says, “You’re not being my friend.” or “I won’t be your friend if you are doing….”

“I can’t do it!”

“I want to watch a movie.”

If Mommy or Daddy tells her no to something she will often say, depending on who told her no, “Daddy said I could.” I love it when she says, “Zach said I could.” Mind you Zach is 6 1/2 months old and can’t say anything more than, “Uh”, “Bah, bah, bah”, “Mmmm”, and other little sounds or screams.

Abby loves to make up names for people if she doesn’t know them like, Eacher. They never sounds like real names, but just a collection of sounds.

You can catch Abby singing to herself. “If you be my friend.” or like Ariel, “Aa-a-aah, a-a-ah.”

Abby takes a vitamin every morning. She calls it a “bitamin”.

Abby has unfortunately gotten in the habit of when we say, don’t hit the cat (or something like that) she will say, “I wasn’t.” How do you teach a 3 year old what a lie is and how do you get her to stop?

“Bikeacycle”

“Bana” for banana

“Red stop, green go, yellow slow down.”

“Say weeeee” There is a small hill on the road that comes down to our road and she loves saying weee as she goes down it. She also wants you to say it too and gets upset if you don’t.

“Daddy go faster.” Whenever we are driving she likes to tell Dave to drive faster and we have to explain to her that either we are already going the speed limit or there are other cars in the way.

When she is hungry she will often say, “My belly hurts.”

She is very proud of herself when she zips her coat up or puts her shoes on, “I can do it.”

“Read me a book.” When we put her to bed at night we always read her at least one book, unless it is really late, and no matter how many books we have read she always says, “One more.”

When she is eating sometimes we have to encourage her to finish eating. We will tell her take 2 more bites. She says, “No, five more.” I don’t think she really understands that means she has to eat more than I told her.

Here are some Dave wrote down from about 6 months ago:

“Salt and pecker”

“Fight? I fight with daddy all the time. He puts me in time out and I cry.”

One day while watching The Little Mermaid: Ariel says, “Have you ever seen anything so wonderful?” Flounder says, “What is it?” Abby answers, ” It’s a fork! It’s a fork Ariel!”

Zach turned 6 months old on January 1st. I can’t believe it has been 6 months since Zach came into our lives. It feels like our little family is now complete.

Zach has grown so much over the past month both in weight and skills. He is now 20lbs 8 oz. and had to move into 12 month clothes. Carters 12 month clothes start at 20.5 lbs. I can’t believe how fast he is growing. It has to stop soon, right? The only problem with the clothes is the fact that they are a little bit long on him. Hopefully he will start to grow in length instead of girth.

Verbally, Zach is a chatter box. I think he just likes to hear himself make noise. He can make his M sounds and now his B sounds. He loves to go bah, bah, bah. He can also make raspberries. Abby and Zach will do it back and forth to each other at the dinner table. As much as I don’t want to encourage that at the dinner table it is way too cute and I just have to smile when they do it.

Physically Zach has not only grown, but is able to do many different things now. He can roll over both ways from back to belly and belly to back. He can also stay in a sitting position. He can’t quite pull himself up to sitting without help, but can stay there once in the position. He can also reach and grab any toy in his reach and pull it to himself. He also loves to suck on his toes now or his shoes or socks. Wet socks, gross!

Zach started “solid” foods a week ago Sunday. He has had 6 bowls of rice cereal now. He is doing very well with it. He definitely likes to eat. At first he pushed his tongue out and dribbled much of it onto his chin, but ate the entire bowl. We have started to make it thicker, which has helped that. He could probably eat more than we give him if we let him, but for right now we have started with 1 tablespoon of rice cereal mixed with breast milk.

Lastly, Zach appears to be starting to teeth. He loves to chew on anything. Whatever his hand can grab goes right to his mouth. We are still waiting to see any teeth, but they will be here soon enough. Zach goes for his 6 mo. well baby visit this coming Wednesday.

Well…I am finally getting to blogging about Christmas Day. Christmas Day was wonderful. We just lounged around all day and didn’t have to go anywhere. This year we stayed home for the day and had another Christmas the next day at my in-laws house.

We stayed in our PJs all day long and just got to enjoy being together and trying out our new toys. If you have seen the movie A Christmas Story you will get this reference, but when Abby came down and saw all the gifts under the tree she went over and started to pull all of them. She was saying everyone was hers. It reminded me of Randy from Christmas Story as he pulled all his gifts and said, “Oooh, that’s mine.”

We then divvied out all the gifts to each person. We made sure our 2 kids had more gifts than us to open. Abby immediately started opening her gifts. She was so excited she had no patience. “Santa” of course got her exactly what she wanted. It isn’t hard when all your 3 year old asked for was a Grover (character from Sesame Street). Santa was very good to Abby since she had been such a good girl this year.

For me the best part was watching Abby open her new doll house that Dave and I had made. She loved it and has played with it everyday since opening it. She is at the perfect age to use her imagination and really enjoy the doll house.

It will be a sad day when we have to take the decorations down for the year. I can’t wait until next year when Zach can really get into Christmas as well. This year he did a great job ripping the paper, but had some trouble keeping it out of his mouth. He wanted to eat the paper instead of just rip it off. Mmmm…paper.

Grandma and Pap came over for a little while on Christmas Day, which was nice too. Abby and Zach got to have them all to themselves that day and open their gifts without the other cousins or aunts and uncles. Again, peaceful and relaxing. That was the theme to this Christmas.

Zach trying to eat the paper instead of just ripping it off.

Even our cat, Draco, enjoyed the wrapping paper on Christmas Day.