parties, trips and visitors.

When did I update last and how has so much happened since then?

December has gone so quickly.

We had our lovely weekend at Great Wolf Lodge the first weekend in December.

The second weekend was Jesse's company's Christmas party.  Mom and Dad Hildebrand came over for the weekend to watch the girls while we went and left Sunday.  Jesse and I had a fun and relaxing time at the party; the girls and grandparents all reported back a good time as well, so success all the way around.  Nothing really to report there: Jesse and I always enjoy the Christmas parties and I enjoy dressing up fancy one time a year.

in other news, someone please give me an event or excuse for wearing my red stilettos besides cleaning the house.

The following Tuesday- was that really only last Tuesday?- the girls and I took off for a really quick trip up to Findlay.  A dear friend of mine was back in town from Alaska where she is currently being awesome at a camp over there and I told Jesse I had to go see her.  She worked us into her busy schedule and came to my parent's house and spent a good chunk of Wednesday with us.  Lily convinced her to play doctor and they worked together to "doctor" and take care of all the stuffed animals Lily could find.  Most of the problems were fortunately solved by vitamins, so many crises' were averted.  We came home on Thursday.

Friday evening, Rick, Nikki, Noah and Brianna showed up to spend the weekend with us, which is always so much fun and chaos.  That really is the best way I can summarize the time we spend together, and I always look forward to it.  The Brennan kids blend right in with ours, and they have so much fun together.  Lily is finally realizing that Noah and Bri aren't babies anymore, but that may be because they are almost as tall as she is...

how do you keep a 4 year old and three 2 year olds calm for any amount of time?  Blue's Clues and a big chair.

And now here it is, Christmas Eve.  I'm not sure what I will do in a few years when the girls start getting nosy with presents, because they were just hanging out in the open since we started gathering them.  Ok, not really in the "open," but if they'd opened Jesse's closet, they'd have seen the majority of them.  We did have the girls with us when we bought them outfits one day a few months ago, and Lily has unfortunately remembered them and asked about their new clothes on a regular basis.  We told both Lily and Emma at the time that these were for Christmas, but that doesn't seem to deter Lily.  In fact, the other day, after being shot down repeatedly throughout the day to wear the new outfits, Lily finally found a new angle: 

Lily: Momma, can we pretend it's Christmas now? 

Me: sure, we can do that.  How do we play Christmas?

Lily: well, first we'll need are our new outfits...

That kid.

Holiday busy-ness aside, the girls are all doing great.  

Lily continues to surprise us with how brilliant she is.  I realize we are biased, I don't care.  After she was so disappointed that she didn't have real doctor tools in her Doc McStuffin's doctor kit, I told her that she would have to go to medical school to get real doctor things.  That was that, and since then, she has been pretty adamant about going to school to be a doctor.  I told her that she'd have to work very hard to get into medical school and that didn't seem to daunt her too much, she just hopes she can ride the bus there.

Emma is very sweet and caring lately.  What a fun stage- most of the time.  She has recently really taken to Kaylee, and wants to always be with her and help her out as much as possible, especially with Kaylee starting to try to walk.  On the other hand, Emma seems to have a switch: when she's tired and done, everybody watch out and try not to anger it.  Her tantrums have reached new levels of monster, to the point I've actually been concerned she was going to hurt herself.  These go better when Jesse is home, of course, because I can be firm in not giving into her demands and nonsense, because giving into a tantrum is not something we encourage here, and then after a few minutes, Jesse can go in and play Good Cop Dad and calm her down, talk reason with her, and dry up the fountain of tears and snot with some cuddles.  Bad Cop Mom, Good Cop Dad...don't worry, sometimes I get to be the good guy! 

the logical thing to do when eating raspberries!

Kaylee. That little girl is just a joy.  She has a huge smile that is half gummy and half tiny teeth.  She is up to 2 bottom teeth and 2 top teeth just through.  She loves to eat whatever we will feed her, and if her sisters leave snacks within her reach, she doesn't mind helping herself!  Kaylee also has started trying to walk, and succeeded in walking across the room by herself yesterday.  Every time she is getting started, she will take a few steps and then fall and just crawl the rest of the way.  She can't stand up on her own yet, just pulling herself up on something still, but she has started walking between toys and short little steps.  You can just see how proud she is of herself, which is the best: if she smiled any bigger, her face might break.  Considering she took her first steps last Monday, she's moving right along, trying hard to keep up with her sisters.  Before you tell me that she is walking quickly because younger kids always walk quicker, please just stop.  Lily walked at 10.5 months as my first born, and she is 10 months, 3 weeks (ish): my kids just move quickly.  They are slow to start speaking- at least with Lily and Emma- but they don't waste time getting their groove on: which we enjoy!

I guess that's it!  Team Hildebrand has a quiet Christmas planned for tomorrow.  I told Jesse I wanted to try and take a family picture tomorrow morning before we opened presents and he gave me a skeptical look and said, "before presents?  Are you crazy?"  So we will see if that happens or not!

...say what? 2

More ridiculous things we say as parents:

Jesse: no more Legos!
Lily: but why?!
Jesse: because I said..EMMA! Get that out of your mouth!

"Emma, if you want to see, stop playing with your feet."

Me: I'm tired.
Jesse: why, did you get hit by a car?

Jesse holding Kaylee:
"Emma, you're getting kind of wiggly. ...I mean Kaylee. Why do I do that?"

"Emma, stop rubbing chocolate on your feet."

"You can pretty much shake the bedickens out of it."
- yes, "bedickens."

"Babies don't go in the toilet!!"

"You don't get hurt if you don't fall."
- what?

Cleaning the basement, Jesse was on a spree of throwing things away:
Me: what are these pictures?
Jesse: trash, just pitch them.
Me: they are our engagement pictures!!!
Jesse: oh yeah? Trash.

Me: we need to get the girls a pygmy goat!
Jesse: great, that's the one that will get eaten by a coyote.
Me: I'll cry.  That's the one they will have named Elsa.
Jesse: then they'll just have to "let it go"...

Christmastime!

And just like that, I finish one post about Thanksgiving and move right into the next about Christmas. 

The girls helped get a few ornaments on the tree and then I immediately decided we needed to take a few Christmas pictures.  These goobers.  I don't even know.  One year, I will either a) wait for Jesse to be home to help keep attention at the camera, b) I won't care or c) the girls will be old enough to actually listen and obey all at once and not taking turns or not at all. 

Until then, we have fun.

This past weekend, Team Hildebrand took off for the Cincinnati area to meet up with the rest of my side of the family for a pre-Christmas weekend at Great Wolf Lodge.  My folks had the great idea for us all (Mom and Dad, Mama, Jess and family, Joel and Kimmy and my family) to get together before Christmas and have a weekend together where we could just spend time as a family and exchange gifts at that point.  Meeting at Great Wolf Lodge was a really fun place, especially for Lily and Emma.  Naturally, I only took a few terrible pictures on my cell phone and none on my actual camera, so that's annoying.  We had a great time, and it went too quickly, but my troops had a fun!

happy baby loves water

play hard, crash hard

watching a show

story: the girls and I had never had Dippin' Dots, and when the girls asked for ice cream, Jesse went to the Lodge's ice cream store and bought us all Dippin' Dots. I ate a huge bite of mine and asked what in the world was wrong with these things. Jesse looked at me funny and said they were fine and to stop being picky.  So I kept eating it and kept asking why these things were so weird and doing strange things in my mouth and head, similar to pop rocks, which I hate (and also had never had before this year).  After watching me eat them for a few minutes, Jesse asked, "what in the world is wrong with your mouth?  Why are your Dots doing that?"  And then a lightbulb went on and he said, "OOOooooooh, I got you 'Poppin' Cherry.'  I guess that was the pop rock flavor..."  upon telling the story, it isn't as funny if you weren't there, I'm sure, but it was hilarious to us at the time and I want to remember how funny we are, so it needed to be told.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I found little kid sized oven mitts that came with packets of sugar cookie mix and a cookie cutter.  I make fantastic sugar cookies, but I loved the mitts for the girls, so I bought two.  Since it was a mix and I only had to add in a few ingredients, I let the girls do 90% of the work, only helping to guide them and with the oven: they added the ingredients, turned the mixer on, floured the table, rolled and cut the cookies out, and with an extremely nervous Momma, checked on them in the oven and took them out when they were done.  It was a fun activity, and the cookies even turned out decently, though the dough was kind of over worked and the cookies were a variety of thicknesses.

right in the middle of the action, ready to help out also.

Thanksgiving

Jesse and I hosted our first Thanksgiving at our house with his side of the family and I'd say it was a success: plenty of food, lots of family time, the girls all had a great time playing with two of their cousins, plenty of laughs, and even an attempted photo shoot with 5 little girls.  I had a wonderful time, and Jesse and I probably would agree that the thing we were most thankful for was that everyone was willing to come to us and we didn't have to travel.  Not that we were unwilling by any means...but with three little girls that are in various stages of traveling well, we were very appreciative that everyone came here this year.  

Matt and his family arrived Wednesday evening to get the party started.  Lily and Emma were so excited to see their cousin Kole that they alternated between looking out the window and calling each other Kole in their games of make believe.  What a fun age.  

Thanksgiving morning, Erin and I went to jog a Turkey Trot, which was super fun and we both want to make it a regular part of our Thanksgivings when we are able to celebrate together.  We left Jesse and Matt with 5 girls, 4 years old and under, and went for a lovely run.  Since I'm pathetically out of shape and Erin doesn't have hills in northern Michigan, we almost died but decided that it was a success since we didn't throw up at the end.  The small, silver linings.  We walked in the door and all 3 of mine had an immediate meltdown which took awhile to get under control, but Mom and Dad Hildebrand arrived somewhere in the middle of Emma's tantrum and everyone else settled down.  

playing in the snow in pjs and boots

I had made the turkey ahead of time, and I'm so glad I did and that we are a "reheat on Thanksgiving" type of family.  At least this year.  My general idea was that we would eat when the food was hot, so that took a lot of pressure off of me to feel like I had to have a dinner ready at a certain time, and there was enough craziness with a small herd of girls running around that I probably wouldn't have noticed anyone getting feisty and hungry anyway!  As it turned out, we were all seated and eating by 130, so it worked out fine.  Jesse gave my turkey a pass, which was an improvement over the turkey I made for Christmas last year, and we just all relaxed, visited, played with girls and napped the rest of the afternoon.  Well, the girls napped some, I don't think there were any adults naps that took place. 

the always flattering meal picture

Jesse's folks left Friday evening and Matt and Erin left Sunday.  I love having family here and had a great time getting to visit with everyone.  The highlight was watching all the little girls interact together, and even Kaylee was really interested in Anna and would lovingly smack her on the head or steal her pacifier.

Mom H made sugar cookies for Lily, Emma and Koleen to decorate.  Lily liked to pile the sprinkles on.

we exchanged Christmas presents over the weekend also.  Matt is modeling the hat I made him and the backpack we got Kole.

Since then, I have been trying to get the house put back the way it was and move into the Christmas season.  We finally finished ordering presents for my family's gift exchange that is coming up, and then maybe we will finish buying gifts for our girls.  Knowing us, we will be ordering things off Amazon and having them shipped here the week before or the week of Christmas, thank you Amazon Prime.

Back to the fact we had a mini photo shoot:

I realized I had enough dresses in the appropriate sizes that I could outfit everyone in semi-matching clothes for pictures.  With a 4 year old, two 2 year olds, an almost 10 month old and a 3ish month old all in a picture together with no crying, I'd say this was a smashing success.

I unashamedly bribed Emma with a cookie to get her to stay in the picture.  her facial expressions were incredible as a result. 

everyone notice how absolutely adorable little Anna looks in this one.

poor Kaylee was a trooper and just wanted a nap.  I was so focused on Grumpy Pants Emma that I didn't notice how uncomfortable Kaylee looked.  oh well.

That's about it from here for now.  The tree will hopefully be decorated tomorrow, since it's been up for 2 days now with no ornaments...

More coming soon!