back to boring?

Our uneventful trip out here has turned into quite an eventful week. Wednesday we went out to get Claire's car seat to put into another car. I discovered that my back seat was all wet. I thought I had left the window down. It had been raining for two days straight. No, window was up. Then I looked up. The interior roof had caved in and was very wet. I looked around some more and my front passenger seat was wet. That was when I opened the moon roof and found that the seal had popped. The moon roof has never worked. When the previous owner took out his subwoofer and undercarriage lights, he also ripped out the power to the moon roof. We have wanted to get it fixed, but never had either time or money. Alann's dad is going to try to fix it if he has time. For now it is just sitting in the garage. There doesn't seem to be too much damage, but I may need to get the roof reattached.

Claire had fun playing with her cousin Andrew. He is a month younger and is also walking, but much more unsteadily than she is. So she thought it was great fun to walk over to him and push him down. Or take whatever he was playing with and make him cry. She is a bully.
Here she is with her grandpa and cousin.

And here she is playing with Andrew and her aunt Stephanie.

One of Alann's family traditions is making gingerbread houses. Every year, I try to make a reindeer. I don't know why. I just do. They turn out with varying degrees of success, depending on what I decided to make it with. This year, it was tootsie rolls and pretzels. It didn't look like a deer, so instead of a reindeer, we decided it was a guard dog. When I put it next to the house, we realized it was way too tall. So it became the guard horse. Then Danny (my bro-in-law) suggested I put a hump on it. And thus, the Christmas guard camel was born.

He left some presents for Danny and Steph at their house. For making fun of him. Here is our finished house:

Christmas was fun. Claire had a good time opening gifts.

She got a lot of new toys to play with. Doesn't she love this purse?

Oh wait, that's Daddy playing with her toys. She is helping Grandma open presents.

They also have a train under the tree. She loved to watch it go round and round and take the Santa off the train.

This was Alann's gift to me:

He wrapped it all by himself. Can't you tell? He and his parents went together and bought me a very nice Kitchenaid mixer. I am so excited. I've really wanted one of these, for numerous reasons (one of which being our hand mixers suck!) but figured we would just keep making do for a few more years. But he found a really good deal. I didn't really think anything would top the serger he bought me last year, but I think this one might do it. I really do love my serger though. We will have to see how well this works. I'm trying to decide what I want to make with it first. Alann wants me to do something with it before we leave in case it doesn't work we can return it to the store. He bought it out here in MO.

Then, Christmas night, I fell down the stairs. It was only about half the flight, and I was in the air for part of it, so I really only hit 3 stairs. It was scary, but I'm okay. Just bruised. A lot. My arm, my tail bone, my pride. Nothing serious.

Saturday, Claire fell down and smashed her face on the floor so hard she gave herself a bloody nose. Then we went out to Indiana to visit with my mother-in-law Debbie's family. While there, Claire fell into a wall that had moulding on it and gave herself a huge bruise on her forehead. It covered at least half of her forehead. She is lucky she didn't cut herself. We went to one of Alann's niece's baptism, and while there, Claire was just all over. She stole every hymn book she could find, then she started playing with her great-great-grandmother. Then she stole her kleenex out of her pocket. My daughter is a thief. But she entertained a few great-aunts (which makes them sound old, but they aren't) and was mostly well behaved. Luckily, she discovered the granola bar in her bag during the important be-quiet part and so was happy to just sit on my lap and eat. She was pretty well behaved for spending most of the day in the car.

She has improved so much in walking this week. I think having Andrew to compete with really helped. She is much more steady and falls less. She has also started "running" which ends up being a fast walk for us at this point. But she tries to run away when she knows she is doing something she shouldn't, or when we want her to do something she doesn't want to do, like get dressed. It's fun though. She also figured out how to climb the stairs. She can't figure out going down though.

We don't have much planned this week. Mostly hanging out, but we hope to get out to St Louis and Columbia and visit with some people.