Mums gone wild!!!

I went to Wisconsin to meet up with a few friends who all have August 06 babies. We had soooo much fun! They are a really funny, down to earth bunch. Here are a few pics:

The Wisconsin Six!


Me and Deb

Jilly(left) and Shannon

Marci (left) and Debbie

Dancing...


....more dancing


...and you are never to old to do the running man, apparently!

I think the highlight of the trip has to be the baby signing dance!!! Deb described this perfectly HERE (p.s. read her blog while you are there, she is wicked funny)

Zebra on campus

A zebra showed up on campus today. It was, most likely, a prank by the graduating class. Somehow they kidnapped (zebra-napped?) the animal, transported it to campus, broke in to our oldest building, Seney Hall, and got it up to the third floor. Then, in a stroke of genius, they sealed all the doors to the third floor with 2x4's from the inside (so no-one could access the floor), came down the elevator, and rigged the elevator with a chair so it was out of use. This meant that it took until lunchtime for them to get the zebra out! Ha ha! The campus was all abuzz. Local news crews showed up, and helicopters, police, animal control. We made the news as far away as Chicago!

Here's a couple of links to the story
http://wsbradio.com/news/042308zebra.html
http://www.11alive.com/life/article_life.aspx?storyid=114855

And here's a student's video of the event
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB1H2cPZUvo

Fun times!

Counting!

Holy crap.....my kid can count to 12!!! I had no idea!

I was laying grapes in front of her one by one and I started to count them "One....two...." and Ana picked up "...three, four, five, six, seven, eight". I looked up at James to check her heard it too! Wow! So then I am walking around the house bragging that she can count to 8 for a bit, then I decide to teach her to 10, so we get to eight and she goes quiet and I say excitedly "nine, ten. Yay". She looks back, unimpressed, and says "eleven, twelve"!! Hmmm. Who knew? I guess she is just picking up everything these days!

Of course I tried to get this on video and she clammed up. I pestered her so much she had a tantrum and pushed the camera away diva style! Maybe tomorrow!

So...um....yeah....my kid is officially a genius!

Snuggling

Ana just came and climbed on my lap, snuggled in, and fell asleep on me. It was the highlight of my week!

Amazing expanding vocabulary!

I can't keep up with listing all the things Ana is learning. She is amazing! She sees something once and she remembers it. Just this week she got a new Baby sign DVD and she knows the signs for lettuce, carrot, pear, bean, strawberry, corn, peach, vegetables, colours, red, yellow, orange, rainbow. I could go on and on! She labels everything she sees (which surprisingly never gets tiring to us). She also notices things I'm filtering out. This morning we woke up and were lying in bed together and she heard the birds chirping outside, and excitedly yelled "birds" and did the sign for birds, then began imitating their chirping. I was thinking "where are these damn birds" then I realised they were outside and she had heard them. Amazing!

Yesterday she moved into joining together 3 words. "Don't want it" is her first official sentence. She also says "I'm sorry mummy" and "stop it Briscoe".

Woah is one of her favourite words. When she sees something new of exciting she gives a big "woah"

I'll try to get this all on video, but usually she goes quiet as soon as I pull the camera out!

Giraffes and such!

So I was showing Ana a picture of a giraffe to teach her the word, but apparently she already knows all about them, because she repeated "Giraffe" then added "long neck". What?? Who taught her that? She also corrected my pronunciation of zebra with the American "Zee-bra". I guess they are up to zoo animals at daycare. Who knew?

Evidently I spend too much time videoing her because she now puts on shades when she sees me coming!

Future basketball star

This child is OBSESSED with basketball! Expect to see her in the 2024 Olympics.

5 year anniversary!

Following our tradition of taking a picture every year holding up the number of fingers to correspond to the years! Not sure what we'll do when we hit 10!


I am truly blessed to be sharing my life with James. He is a wonderful person, husband, and father! Hopefully we'll be enjoying many more anniversaries!

Ana and Jacob

So Ana has a little friend at school called Jacob. He is so cute!

When she says his name she over-pronounces every syllable! It is hilarious!

Check her out!

Awwwwwwww

Last night we put on Ana's signing DVD (aka crack for toddlers) and when it got to the song that my mum sings to her ("you are very special to me") Ana started wailing Nana, Nana, Nannnaaaaaa!

It was so sweet!!

Ana is so funny!!

Yesterday we were playing around on the floor and we banged heads, we both put our hands up to our heads and said "ohhh" at the same time, then started laughing. We sat like that looking at each other for about 5 mins just cracking up! Then Ana kept trying to head butt me so we could do it again. So she would lean in, bang heads, then we'd both grab our head and laugh. It was soooo funny (you probably had to be there - but I'm telling you it was funny). Anyway, being the adult, I quickly tired of this game, especially as Ana doesn't have much control over the strength of her head butts. But Ana wanted to keep playing so she kept trying to sneak up on me and head butt me, so she would creep behind me, oh so stealthily, and bump my head. If I spun around and busted her she would just die laughing. She was coming up will all kinds of tricky ways so sneak in a head butt!

Naughty Ana

LO - this year and last

I am part of a group called Leadership Oxford, and every March we take a group of students to the north GA mountains for a retreat. Ana came this year and last....what a difference!

Last year she mastered the art of holding her own bottle, playing with toys and keeping warm!


This year she had a great time playing in puddles, riding on Daddy's shoulders, and playing horse shoes!

Grandparents

My parents were here last week and Ana loved it. She looked lost when they left and wandered about asking for "Nana" and "Gra-dad"

We couldn't get her to sit still for a picture with them though, but here are some attempts!