The Warm-up

Catherine has a pretty awesome Mother's Day Out class. One great thing is that all 10 kiddos have birthdays from mid-December thru mid-February. That means there is a school party every week--sometimes twice/week. This makes good warm-up practice for her big day.

We were eating dinner Friday night and talking to Catherine about our weekend plans. We were telling her how we were going to a birthday party for her friend Andrew at the McDonald's Play Place the next morning. Catherine nodded and then burst into song. I caught round 2 on tape. The singing has continued throughout the weekend. It was the first thing I heard coming from her crib on Sunday morning. This evening we tried to get her excited about her upcoming birthday. When we tried to sing Happy Birthday to Catherine she was very adamant that it was Andrew, or Lillian, or Hayes, or Ava or anyone other than herself. We'll have to work on that this week!

As a side note...Catherine loves to sing all the time. She regularly joins me in duets at bedtime. Her version of Edelweiss is pretty great. I've tried for 6 weeks to get her on tape singing Silent Night. She clams up whenever the camera was in sight. If I ever capture it, and I am determined I will, it will melt your heart!

Looking back with a Laugh

I've been trying to better organize our photos from the past year. It would be a great idea if I actually developed some instead of storing thousands of files on the computer! As I was looking back, and had to stop and laugh and some of the ones that didn't make the blog. Here are a few of the more recent ones...I hope they make you chuckle, too.

This looks like a good hiding place...and a good pouting place. (July 2010)
Catherine loves Aunt Allison so much that she sits outside of the bathroom waiting on her. (Aug 2010) This was the beginning of "knock, knock!"
The shades were so cool that Catherine wore them for the entire week after we returned from Indian Rocks...Jim started calling her Kareem (Oct 2010)
"Dad, you don't need the directions! It goes together like this!" (Oct 2010)
Catherine was turning into quite the little mimic in Oct 2010
My, Catherine! Those are some mighty large shoes you have! (Nov 2010)
Is a caption really necessary for this one?? (Dec 2010)
Super Kitty Cat (Dec 2010)

Snow...ummm...ICE day

All of us were home today for an ICE day. It wasn't as bad as predicted, but still too much to attempt to drive in...especially down the big hill in front of our neighborhood. We tried to make the best of it. Catherine REALLY wanted to play in the snow. It was so hard trying to explain that it was ice and wasn't like the snow we had a few weeks ago. Late morning, we decided to take a walk to the front of the neighborhood to see if I would be able to make it in to the hospital later in the day or tomorrow. As soon as the garage door opened, Catherine took off running for the snow, and though I tried, I couldn't stop her before she hit the sheet of ice on the driveway and fell right on her bottom. Poor thing! I hope it didn't ruin future snow for her.

Better mode of transportation for the ice than C's feet...the new BOB

Since playing outside wasn't a good option, we made cupcakes instead. Catherine is an excellent baking assistant!
"Which color do you want first, Catherine?" "GREEN!" (Which is so funny since purple is so clearly the favorite color these days.)
Master Cupcake Decorator

Too bad the ice melted just enough that I have to go to work tomorrow. I wouldn't mind having a day like this all over again.