When we DO get out of the house...

...we tend to get a little goofy.

Happy Belated Birthday, Chris!  We obviously had a great time at your party!

What do you do when you're stuck inside??

It's been snowy.  Very, very snowy.  So we've been spending a lot of time inside.  A LOT of time inside.  It's driving us all a little mad.  But we've been trying to keep busy regardless.  What all have we been doing?  Well, let's see...we've been reading:

Building caves:

Busting out of caves:

Playing in our new pirate ship (and saying "arr, matey!" repeatedly):

Pretending to be one of the Beastie Boys:

And playing "beautiful butterfly" (ala "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" - note the "cocoon" off to the right on the couch):

Just how much snow have we actually had?

Yeah, that was 3 snow storms ago.  Sigh.  I am so done with winter...

Happy Birthday Neena!

Neena (Dashiell's great-grandma) celebrates her birthday every year on New Year's day, which of course means CAKE!  Dashiell loves cake almost as much as he loves Neena! ;)  And the Happy Birthday song?  He was asking to sing it all day in anticipation of the celebration, and kept telling me how much he liked that song.  What's not to like?  You sing the song, then you get to eat cake.  Very Pavlovian.

Dashiell was happy to do his part to help Neena blow out her candles:

Neena looks great in this picture, and behind her hands you can see that Dash is more than happy to be part of her big celebration!

I know I mentioned how much we appreciate the fact that Dashiell has great-grandparents who are so wonderful and loving in my post about Papa Jack's birthday, and of course it still holds true.  We are blessed to have them in our lives, and have felt that more than ever over the past holiday season. We love you, Neena and Papa Jack!

Squeeze box

We gave Dashiell an accordion for Christmas this year, and since Grandpa Weber plays the accordion, Dashiell was only too eager to accompany him in a little ditty:

Grandpa's accordion playing is a little rusty, so Dash thought it might work better if he helped out:

Merry Belated Christmas!

I've been meaning to do our Christmas post since, well, Christmas, but haven't felt inspired since we didn't get many good pictures of Dash.  He is still in a "no pictures" phase, though occasionally he'll bless us with a good "cheese!"

Regardless of the lack of photos, we had a wonderful Christmas!  We were able to go out to Minnesota again to visit my family, and it was great!  Lisa was able to spend quite a bit of time in Bemidji with us, and we saw a lot of my other sister Terri and her family, who live in Bemidji, too!  So it was a family-filled, fun-filled week!

 

Dashiell, Auntie Lisa and cousin Idgie

Uncle Glen and Rick took Dashiell on his first snowmobile ride!  Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of him on the snowmobile, but I did get one of him waiting patiently before the ride:

We also paid a visit to the Headwater's Science Center during the week, which D loved!  He especially loved this display:

 

It showed the "Bernoulli Effect" (I think that's what it was) and Dash loved the air coming out of the tube that was keeping the ball in the air.  He kept going back to this display and was so sad when other kids wanted to try it.

Christmas itself was lovely.  My family does a Christmas Eve celebration, which works in our favor since we usually try to fly back to Massachusetts on Christmas day.  When we were opening presents, Dashiell thought it was hilarious that auntie Lisa was wearing a bow on her head, so he had to wear one too!

Dash is funny about opening presents.  He was excited to open ONE present.  Then he was excited to play with that one present, and had no interest in any of the other presents he had left to open.  We had to convince him that other presents were going to be fun, too.  Silly boy! 

I'll try to post more soon - lots more to talk about, just not enough time!