'Tis the Season to be busy

As usual at this time of year things are busy busy busy. Here are some shots of what we've been up to.

We tried the Santa thing again at my company Christmas party. She was still pretty scared.
But she LOVED the present he gave her.
Here she is with one of her teachers at the daycare's Christmas social. Apparently Santa visited there too, so Maeve asked her teacher to hold her.
Here's one of her teachers from when Maeve was in the toddler class.
Pat has been putting our snow blower to good use clearing the 3 foot walls of snow and ice that the snow plows have been leaving at the end of our driveway every time it snows. The driveway and walk are easy enough to handle with a shovel, but the end always gets a giant wall of heavy, slushy, icy snow. He actually had to chop a 2 foot by 4 foot block of ice apart with our axe to get it out of our driveway.
Maeve was super excited to decorate the tree.
We had to do a little bit of redistribution afterwards as most of the decorations ended up around the very bottom of the tree on one or two branches.
Maeve wanted her hair in pony tails on Sunday. I told her she looked just like her reindeer.
We had Pat's family over for a preChristmas games night on Sunday. Here we all are crammed into the kitchen for a family photo.
Maeve wanted to have her hair up with her pretty dress on. She looked like a brunette Cindi Lou Who.
Here she is hamming it up for the crowd. Our little centre-of-attention.

Thank goodness we're on vacation from Christmas Eve until January 5!

Maeve's First Gingerbread House

Back in November, my parents came for a visit. We had Pat's parents over for dinner that weekend too and Maeve got to make her first Gingerbread house with help from Grandma and PoPo.

Here she is concentrating very intensely on getting the decorations correct.



And Voila! the finished product.




Here she is cleaning up all the sprinkles the next morning.



And resting in her tent with Daddy after all that cleaning.

Breakfast with Santa

This weekend the Bamboo Bunch (a local group of families with children adopted from China) had their annual Breakfast with Santa. Maeve was excited to go and see Ho Ho himself, but emphasized that she did not want to sit on Santa's knee.

She picked out a pretty dress (all she ever wants to wear these days is a pretty dress--even better if it is pink, what a girly girl!) and had a grand old time running around and visiting with her friends from Mandarin class. But when it came time for Santa to come, she would only tentatively wave at him from across the room and quickly launched into "want to go home!"

Although she loves the cartoonish idea of Santa, the reality of the big guy in a red suit and crazy white beard is absolutely terrifying to her. Alas, no photos with Santa again this year I'm afraid.

We will try again at the kids' Christmas party at work, but I'm not too hopeful.

Here's Maeve tentatively waving as Santa enters the room. It is a bit dark, but you can see the dread on her face.


This was as close as she would let me take her to the big guy. I had to accept the book. She did whisper "Tank you" to him, but I'm probably the only one who could hear it.


She did like the book though!


And she is still a fiend for bananas.




By the way she loved swinging the skirt of that dress around.
And please excuse the way that I look. I've been sick ever since I came back from a business trip to Chicago. Blech!

3 Fordes walk into a photo booth

Happy Halloween

Some photos of Queen Mabs and her cousins on Halloween. She had fun at Grandma and Grandpa's in the afternoon. And she enjoyed trick or treating in the morning at school to the other businesses around the daycare. But after going to a few neighbours that night she just wanted to go home. All the other kids running around in scary costumes in the dark was just too much for her.

We don't give Maeve candy, so G&G got her a lovely baby doll with accoutrements such as powder and wipes. She was in heaven!

The Queen with her favourite Jedi knight and favourite Count.

They really got in to character!

Showing off her skirt swirling abilities.

The Queen and her royal throne/high chair.

Trick or treat!

Whoops, what happened to October?

It has been a busy autumn so I haven't found any time to blog this month. I've got a bit of catching up to do!

Maeve is growing like a weed. At 30 months old, she's about 35 inches tall and weighs around 30 lbs. She's a solid little girl.

She chats constantly at home and I think at preschool, but not so much with anyone else. She's even shy when she sees the same friends that she sees at school everyday in another context, like Chapters. Suddenly, she clams up and won't say anything. She does like to talk to her Popo on the phone, telling her "you come see me".

She has quite an imagination. Her dolls and stuffed guys get treated to all kinds of discussions and adventures. They often get tea parties, birthday parties, soup dinners, shopping trips in the stroller, diaper changes, storytime, boat trips down the hallway/river, train rides to Popo's house on the couch, time outs for misbehaving and much more. Pretty much anything we do with her or say to her gets repeated with them-a mirror which I don't always like to see. "I don't say that do I?"

She tries really hard to be independent; putting on shoes and boots by herself; picking out her pretty dress for the day; pulling on her pullups and pants herself; feeding herself with her chopsticks; brushing her own teeth (after mommy has already brushed them); but at the end of the day, she's still daddy's little girl and only wants him for the bedtime story and prayers.

When she is "reading" a familiar book to herself, she basically gives a synopsis of each page based on the picture and what she can remember of the story. She's pretty accurate, even though it is a little abridged, "long ago, far way, happy kingdom, castle, king, princess Leora."

If she doesn't know the story, she sings this kind of familiar tune and says "wee wah, wee wah, whattawa". We thought it was pretty cute. Today, when I was dropping her off at daycare, I finally clued in to what it is. All the kids were running around playing pretend guitars singing, "We will. We will. Wok you!" Ah ha! I knew that tune was kind of familiar.

Anyways, here are our October adventures.

Celebrating mom's 41st birthday
Some of the deer who have been visiting our backyard each morning this month.

The Friday before Thanksgiving, we took Maeve to the Toronto Zoo. She liked the animals, but tired of them after a while. Seen one big, wild animal, ya seen em all. She was more interested in running all over the park.
Maeve checks out the white rhino
The orangutang checks out Maeve
And to the tiger in the zoo, Maevey just says "Pooh, pooh"
When you ask her to smile for the camera, this is what you get.
The elephants were frisky that day
The hippo's over der mum
Sharing her snack with the concrete hippo. I think it was a hippo animal cookie.
Uh oh, this giant boulder is going to fall on us.
Maeve runs away before she gets crushed by the big rock.
Pretending to be dinosaurs...
Relaxing by the giraffes
I think they were snubbing us.
Maeve's favourite animal was the stuffed monkey from the zoo store. She named him Monkey King.

This past weekend, we took advantage of a temporary lull in the rain to go to the Yee Haw Adventure farm. Maeve had a hoot. Her favourite parts were the pig races and feeding the goats.

At the entrance
I don't look like this big orange thing, so why do you call me "pumpkin"?
Maeve's first tractor ride
"Ooooo baby chicks!"
What should I do next? Check out the lady dressed as a cow in the background.
The goats have this crazy climbing apparatus up in the air.
You put feed in the blue cups and use the pulley system to get it up there to feed them.
I guess goats like to climb
She LOVED the sand box, which was filled with soy beans instead of sand.
Bye bye Yee Haw Farm. See you next year.

Hope this long post makes up for being off the radar for so long.