Visitors!

I don't think its any secret that when it comes to decision making, I am the worst.  Second only to my mother:)  Thanks for passing that one on mom.  Anyway, in a lame attempt to keep our apartment owner happy we decided to stay here this year for Thanksgiving and it was our turn to visit my family.  I hated missing out on family time!!!  It's so much harder during the holidays! But we had a pretty sweet little dinner here on our own and luckily for us, my parents decided they would come for a visit before Christmas so that we could at least be together for a short time.  Yippee!

 While they were here we got SPOILED!!! They were excited to get Christmas shopping done since we wouldn't be together and then we decided it would be fun to let Anabelle play with her big gift while they were here to play too!  They got her a little kitchen and she loves it!!!  One of the first things she did was go put her hands under the faucet and try to wash them.  I think she was wishing water would really come out, but she has been learning to pretend and still does it all the time.  She like to "cook" the food and stir anything and everything that is on the stove.  We call the silver pot her hot chocolate pot and she loves to stir it and then poor it in her little cup for me to drink.  Its so cute to see her learning so much and I love to sit with her and see what she comes up with!

 We were trying to enjoy some sunshine so we planned a picnic at the marina.  It was a little chilly but it still felt nice to be out in the fresh air!  After being sick for a couple of months, I was missing my vitamin D!  Papa showed Anabelle how to feed the birds and she thought it was so cool.  She wanted to try and one flew up and snatched it right out of her hand! She didn't like that so much. Ha

 Anabelle showing grandma the seal we found.  She loved it and wanted us to take her to see it up close to bad!

Grandma and Papa also took us to the Long Beach aquarium and we all loved it!  It was the perfect activity to get out of the yucky rain outside.  She loves animals and had fun getting right up to the glass to see the big fish!

Giant Fish!

We didn't want to miss the sharks outside so we braved the rain and daddy let Anabelle wear his hat for cover:)

Look we found a daddy in this one! ha

I Give Up...

Well, as many of you know, I am terrible at keeping up with this blog.  I make myself all kinds of empty promises that I will catch up entirely and then be really great at it.  The tragic truth is that I planned to be all caught up before Anabelle turned one and then disaster struck our picture files.  Kyle kindly moved ALL of our family photos over to an external hard-drive in order to make more room on the computer and they have been a completely unorganized and almost impossible to track down mess ever since.  One day I got really motivated and tried to find pictures for all kinds of posts I was behind on and made a separate folder complete with dates and labels, only to learn that when you unplugged the hard-drive again, somehow all the files I thought I downloaded disappeared.  I was SO discouraged!  I basically decided it was impossible and have been terribly behind ever since.  So, I am finally going to suck it up, give in, and start off with where we are at now so that I don't continue to forget all the fun adventures we are having as I put it off any further! Heres to giving it another go:)