While making a minor attempt to reorganize some storage in the basement, I happened upon a box of clothes my mom had given me a few years ago when Catherine first came along. They are mostly dresses that my sisters and I wore when we were little. Catherine saw them and immediately had to try all of them on.
Most of them are too big for Mary, but we did make the fortuitous discovery of a little jumpsuit that I think was Aunt Kristin's.
First Catherine tried this brown one:
Then this flowered one:
And finally settled on this blue one for the day. Daddy came upstairs and had some nice comments...
"Hey Catherine... Little House On The Prairie called... they want their dress back."
"Hey Mary... the 1970s called... they want their jumpsuit back."
Regardless, the girls enjoyed their outfits. Unfortunately we didn't have any jumpsuits to fit Christopher.
Mary tried to call a lot of people to tell them about her new style discovery.
And Christopher started packing for the trip home. Less than two weeks till Christmas!
We put the Christmas tree up over the weekend. As expected, the kids were extremely helpful.
I mean, the opposite of helpful.
They did a pretty good job while we were first putting the tree together by bringing me lots of branches and helping to spread them out.
Once the lights came out... things got a little sketchy.
I pulled out one strand and turned around to plug it into the wall to test it, and by the time I turned back around Catherine had unpacked a string of big lights and unscrewed about half a dozen light bulbs, which she placed carefully back in the box.
We took a moment for a quick aside about how light bulbs aren't toys.
All the babies really wanted to help with the lights. And touch the lights. And eat the lights.
And then we got out the ornaments.
In Catherine's words: "It's so EXCITING that we have ornaments!"
Mary firmly believes that the tree is simply a convenient place for storing the ornaments until she is ready to play with them. It's really just one more category of things to pick up and put away at the end of the day.
Also, Mary says "Christopher" like this: Fiff-fo-fur. And "apple juice" like this: affle foof She doesn't seem to have a problem with the "f" sound. And (in addition to about 20 other words this week) she learned how to say "mine." It apparently became very important for her to learn this when Fiff-fo-fur rolled into town.
It was about 60 degrees yesterday afternoon so I took a half day off work and we made a quick trip to the park. There aren't any pictures of the girls because they both had giant rivers of boogers running down their faces the whole time we were out - it doesn't make for pleasant pictures.
But they had fun showing Christopher around the park. He did a really good job walking on the uneven ground and leaves, and he really liked this rhino ride.
I really need to make a concerted effort this week to get some good pictures and videos, because right now the kids are all doing new and hilarious things and I don't have much proof of any of it!
Mary is talking almost nonstop. Every day she spouts off a new word and she repeats everything constantly. She didn't quite get the "Grandpa" part while Grandpa T was visiting, but had a very fun time running around calling him "T! T! T!". Of course, every picture I have of her lately is with her stoic face, her I'm-too-cool-for-pictures face, or her pouty fish lips.
Catherine is writing lots of new songs, making up lots of new stories, and dancing lots of new dances.
She's also learning how to change the diaper of a squirmy wormy baby and how to remove things from a baby's mouth that should not be there (she calls these items "chokes") - this of course thanks to the presence of Christopher.
Christopher, for his part, has decided that crawling really will not do in this World of the Toddling, and has made great efforts over the last few days to remedy his situation. He can walk all the way across most rooms now, and is even learning the technically challenging change-of-direction.
Here he is doing pretty well, until Mary bowls him over because she thinks he is heading to the shopping cart. We're still working on softening Mary up a bit when it comes to Christopher.
This video is unfortunately very dark, so you can't see the absolute elation on Catherine's face when she holds out her arms and Christopher walks to her.
And just a little aside here, I would like to point out that it is nearly impossible to get a decent picture of (or at least a decent face on) three toddlers at the same time - throw a Grandpa into the mix and there's just no hope. But I tried anyway.
