Jane looks like us both!

This one I can buy. I should see how much she looks like Barbara.

WHAT!

Ok, I don't really see how this meter can be right. I mean, Lizzy looks just like Brent, doesn't she? Maybe I was mistaken or maybe this meter doesn't work because I resemble Posh Spice in my photo. I realized that I have surprisingly few photos of myself and even fewer that are of my face straight on

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Benny Mc Sweats-a-lot

So let me begin by saying that I LOVE my nephew, Ben. He's my favorite little boy in the whole world (since I don't have any boys of my own). He's the sweetest, most adorable, cuddly little boy that I've ever met. He laughs and laughs and smiles and giggles and you can hardly even stand it. He's also a very good hair bow model, which comes in handy for me from time to time.
Now just because I adore him doesn't mean he doesn't have any problems. He's a bit fussy at times. Ok, a LOT fussy, and he has a temper to boot. (see Cameron and Leslie's blog with the Santa photos) He doesn't nap well (hence the fussiness). His poo smells like a little piece of death wrapped nicely in a huggie, unless its a swamp poo. Nothing can hold the swamp poo. He also seems to sweat a lot for such a little man. Like, a LOT. A surprising amount of sweat. When he got out of his car seat, this is what his new hair cut looked like:

My camera didn't focus well, but you get the picture.
I still love you Benihana.

Plain Jane?

I feel like Jane and I are usually in a fight over what she's going to wear. She almost always wants to wear a dress, which is fine a lot of the time, but it's tricky in the winter. Fortunately, she has to wear a cute little uniform to preschool and she gets to wear a dress, so that at least solves the school clothes problem (for the time being). She never wants to wear anything warm and often thinks that dress up clothes are interchangeable with everyday clothes. Take for example today, we told her that she needed some quiet time and she went to her room to play. When she came out, this is what she looked like...


Most of the time when Jane comes out of her room, she looks something like this. There was also a purse that completed the look. She wore this all afternoon, all the while complaining about how cold it was. She's come to the point though that beauty comes before comfort, so she'll suffer through the cold to look THIS good. I'll give her this, she's got a sense of style, it just needs a bit of fine tuning.

Our Christmas

Our Christmas day was pretty fun for everyone. We started at our house in the morning. Jane was up all night before, so she slept until 9:00 when we decided that we needed to get her up so that we could get on with the day. We had Santa presents here and Mommy and Daddy's gift for her, which is the fancy pink kitchen from Costco. Jane isn't all that into Santa. I think that its partly because Brent and I don't really encourage it because we don't like Santa and partly because she's terrified of him. I know that people have very strong opinions about Santa, so I won't go into why I don't like him, I just don't encourage Jane to get into it. I think that the thing she was most excited about was the orange that was in her stocking. It was a little anticlimactic since the orange seemed to be the highlight of her day.

We then headed to Grandma and Grandpa's new house in Daybreak to have yummy breakfast and open Barron family presents. It was kind of a rough day since just about everyone in the family is sick and the babies just refused to take naps. I don't think that Lizzy went down until like 3:30 and she didn't sleep for long. When she doesn't take naps, it is just SAD. I swear, sometimes I look at her and I think that she's the cutest thing I've ever seen...

And sometimes.. not so much


We think that she resembles the Emperor from Star Wars in this one. Poor tired thing. She DEFINITELY needs her beauty sleep.

This is Aunt Leslie's gift to Lizzy. The Shirt has a cute little deer on it. It's SO CUTE. Everyone should visit Crazy 8 in case you've never been there. Its like to Gymboree what Old Navy is to Gap. They have to cutest stuff and its so cheap!

This one was just so cute that I had to post it. Ben had just gotten up from his nap and he's just so cute I can hardly stand it!
All in all, it was a nice, laid back Christmas. Just the kind that I like.

'Twas the night before Christmas

We had a very busy Christmas Eve and it finally seems to be over. Just a couple fun pictures of my sweet girls from today.


Jane got this dress up outfit from her Grammy at the Stringham family party on Sunday night. She put it on first thing this morning and wouldn't take it off. We finally convinced her to wear clothes, but she had to put the dress up on over it.


Here are my babes in what looks like a blur of pink and white polka dots! We took this picture tonight after they opened their Christmas Eve present, which is, of course, pajamas. How come pajamas are about the cutest thing ever? I just want to dress my kids in them all the time.

Brent and Brentina

Enough said.

The Bag Lady

Unfortunately, our little Lizzy has pretty severe excema, so bad that she spent a couple months of her newborn life just covered in rashes and scabs. She can still get REALLY bad if we don't keep her medicine on her and grease her up at least a couple times a day. I think that one of the reasons that she's so mobile is because she used to just wiggle around on the ground when she itched and then she realized that she could control her movements. If we don't watch her closely, she'll just scratch her ear, ankle, face, whatever, until she's just bloody and its so sad, which is why she has to sleep in the bag at night. The bag is fabulous because it adds an extra layer of blanket when its cold AND we trap those sharp little fingernails so that she can't claw her pretty little face up. One would think that this bag would prevent her from crawling around as usual, but she gets by. Allow me to demonstrate...

all bagged up and ready for bed

I love her little bag.

Jane's got skills

Apparently Brent let Jane play with the camera a couple of nights ago. I'm not too sure how I feel about this, it being our only camera and she being only 3. Anyway, she wanted to take some pictures of Daddy and Lizzy at dinner time (which she later threw up all over everything) and here are some of them...

Sadly, I can't really do much better.

Lizzy the copy cat

So, I have been hearing people tell me since Lizzy was born that she looks just like Jane did when she was a baby. I've actually gotten quite sick of it since I really haven't been able to see it. I mean, I know that there is a resemblance, they're sisters, but they are easily identifiable. That was until tonight. I was going through old pictures Jane when she was Lizzy's age and even Jane kept thinking that they were pictures of Lizzy. It was actually a bit creepy. Here's a couple for your consideration. What do you think?

This one is the weirdest of all to me

Notice the arm placement on this photo. Ok, everyone else was right, my girls look just alike. If you really know me and my girls' personalities, you should be able to figure out who is in the pictures, but they do look a ton alike. It'll be fun to see how Lizzy's face changes as she gets bigger. Maybe next time we can have one that will look like me instead of 3 Brentinas. Who knew Brent was such an adorable baby girl?

From the mouth of Jane

(the silky on the head is not what you would think. she likes to pretend she has long hair.)


She says the funniest things. Here are some that I'm writing down this week so that I don't forget.

"I can get the cheese by my own self."

(to the disneyland castle in the beginning of a movie) - "There is Christopher Robin's temple."

Me "Jane, can you go get Daddy so I can talk to him?"
Jane (instead of getting him yells) "Daddy, mommy wants you to come here so she can discuss!!!!"

When I was trying to take her binky and silky..."I can't! Cuz it's too horrible!"

Me "Jane, you have the silliest hair I've ever seen.
Jane "Why thank you."

Me "Jane, can you come turn the lights on for me"
Jane "Yes, your highness."

Here's one for Cam, need a spokesperson for Daybreak?.......

Jane "Mommy, I want to pack up our whole house and move."
Me "You want to move? Where do you want to go?"
Jane " To Daybreak."
Me "Why do you want to move to Daybreak?"
Jane "Cuz I just love Daybreak."

* disclaimer - that was TOTALLY unprovoked. I don't know if she really does like daybreak that much or if she's just been so fully indoctrinated at this point that she thinks she likes it.

After putting on chapstick, Jane says, "Mommy, look at my lips."
Me "What do you think about your lips, Jane?"
Jane "They are beautiful and satified."
Me "You mean satisfied?"
Jane "Yes, they are beautiful and satisfied."

Hats off to daddy

So, the other day, Jane and Brent watched a Curious George wherein George decides he wants a new hat. He tries all the hats and can't find one that he likes, so he ultimately makes one. Then Jane decided that she wanted to make a hat, so the other night when I was gone, the two of them made a hat together and here are the results...

She also found my old glasses and wanted to try those on. So now she looks like a really intelligent 3 year old with a paper top hat. Gotta love it.

An all too familiar scene

Usually when I have both of the babies, its hard to get a moment to myself. The two of them are just drawn to me no matter where I am or what I'm doing. I certainly can't sit on the ground without them crawling all over me. This is a picture I took just today. I was trying to get a photo of them and instead of sitting and posing like good little babies, they both made a bee-line for my lap. You can see my legs in the bottom of the photo.

My silly girls

Jane has been taking dance this year and she seems to really enjoy being a ballerina. She had her first recital last weekend and she was fabulous. Well... about as fabulous as an uncoordinated 3 year old ballerina can be. I forgot to get out my camera before, so we just have pictures with daddy afterwards and at home with her precious medal. She LOVES that medal. We were so proud of how brave she was to go out there. We've been going through a shy stage for a while now that involved LOTS of crying and clinging. Her nursery leader called her a barnacle. Anyway, she seems to have gotten over that and she went out there without any tears and did a great job.

We've been enjoying her bizarre comments. Seriously, I have no clue where she comes up with some of the things she says, like the other day...

"Are you know my friend Kettoran?" (we've been having problems with 'are' and 'do', but at least she's saying 'she' instead using 'her' all the time)
"Jane, how do you know Kettoran?"
"Oh, from McCrackin's house"
...hysterical laughter ensues

Making up names is one of her favorite things to do. That and making up songs for every occasion that are most frequently sung in a lovely falsetto voice.

I'm pretty uncomfortable with Lizzy's mobility at the moment. She's not quite 8 months at this point and she has been crawling for a little while now. She's cruising on the furniture and crawling up into things... like the table in Summit. Danielle snapped this photo while I was gone so that I could be even more disturbed. She's about the sweetest things I've ever met. She finally seems to know who her mommy is and she prefers me and wants me more than other people. I'm eating it up for the week, since I'm sure that next week I'll be over it.

Oh Tannenbaum

So, our tree has been up for a while now, but the pictures of us putting up the Christmas tree haven't. Lizzy likes to be underneath it at every opportunity, kinda like the cats. Hmmmm.
Jane was busting me up because she didn't like the way that the bristles felt when we were spreading out the branches, so she used her mittens. She's already a little lacking in dexterity and the mittens certainly didn't help her cause. Afterwards, we told her that we wanted to take her picture under the tree and she took that very literally.

Christmas time is here.

So this year I think will be the first year that Jane REALLY gets into Christmas. She knows all about everything somehow. She knew exactly what a gingerbread house was and she wanted one. I decided to just pick up a kit from Target over the weekend and we had so much fun making it last night. We don't have our decorations up yet, but we've got a gingerbread house.
Meanwhile, our absolutely exhausted Lizzy crawled around on the floor.

Cousins at Thanksgiving

Here is Jane the model. She is wearing her favorite hat that Danielle made. She will hardly take it off when its around. I don't know where Lizzy was during all the picture taking, she must be taking a nap or something.

I snapped this photo of Benny Boo and his grandpa at Thanksgiving. Aren't they cute?