Happy New Year!!

This year we got to celebrate the new year with lots of family. We met my dad's aunts Rose and Flora and some of their friends and family in Deland to rent pontoon boats. Since there were so many of us, we rented 2 boats and me, Amelie and Allen got to ride with Aunt Flora, Mary and her husband Paul and their 2 girls Madeline and Catherine. We cruised along the St. John River and docked at Blue Springs State Park to picnic and admire the manatees.

Amelie had a great time hanging with the older girls who took great care of her. She kept talking about her friends she met and she wanted to go with her friends. On our way home from the boat rental place, she told me she missed her friends. Amelie absolutely loves older girls and they dote on her so well.

Amelie was also quite the hostess when we stopped for a picnic lunch. She very graciously offered food (that others brought) and shared it with everyone on board.

Later, we met everyone at Aunt Rose's in Palm Coast for a fun New Year's Eve party complete with some crazy sparklers (by crazy, I mean really long flowy ones I have never seen before).

Merry Christmas

Christmas is getting more fun each year now with a child in the house. Amelie is more and more aware now of Christmas - the constant Christmas music for the whole month of December (which I now love), the lights, the decorations (hence the giant blowup snowman in our front yard when I never thought I'd be the type to have blowup Christmas decorations) and the impending arrival of Santa himself.

When you ask Amelie what she is going to ask Santa for Christmas, she pretty consistently says "A jack-in-the-box". Recently, we got to go the bookstore with Emerson and the 2 got a hold of some jack-in-the-boxes and could be heard giggling throughout the store. The 50th time of the freaky clown popping out of the box was just as funny as the first. One night when driving around looking at lights with Ging and Poppy, we drove past a city building with a lighted display of Santa pulling his sleigh and Amelie yells out "Santa! I want a jack-in-the-box!" Well, as usual, Santa delivers! Amelie got her jack-in-the-box. For some reason though, she had a very unusual reaction. We were all excited for her to open this present, but when she did, she threw it down and ran out of the room. We were all perplexed. Allen and I went in to talk to her, but never got a real answer. She did come back out and warmed up to it though and then really seemed to enjoy it.

All in all, we had a great time, made even better because Micah got to stay with us through Christmas. Micah and his fiance got Amelie a new "big girl" bike which is a pink and purple 12" bike with some pretty awesome streamers and training wheels. It's going to take her a while to warm up to it though since the feel is quite a bit different than her tricycle. It took her a while to warm up to her tricycle too, so we'll see how it goes.

Throughout the month, we got to celebrate by cooking (Amelie helps a lot actually - she's even very good at cracking eggs); looking at lights; singing Christmas songs; reading Christmas books and going to Disney for their Christmas celebration which was very fun!!

We spend Christmas Eve and Christmas morning at our house with Ging, Poppy, Nana, Papa, Miz and Micah to help get into the Christmas spirit and watch Amelie open presents in the morning. After a good breakfast, we head over to Granny Great's house in Orlando for Christmas with the rest of the family - aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.

Bon Voyage and Happy Thanksgiving!!

We got to start off the Thanksgiving holiday with a trip to Nasa and a Disney cruise. We had planned for a while to go on a cruise with our friends the Suitt's and Lenny, Amanda and Emerson. We decided to spend the day before the cruise at the space center since Allen has never been there and Amelie has been in a huge Star Wars kick. It was Papa's birthday and we were lucky enough to spend the day with Nana and Papa. The highlights of the day for Amelie were seeing the robot that looked like R2 D2 to her and the "live" astronaut standing outside of the souvenir shop. She dragged me over to him to pose for pictures, then kept wanting to jump ahead of others in line because she wanted to tell the astronaut we were going into the bookstore - "Mama, I have to tell the astronaut we're going in to the bookstore!"

The cruise was so much fun from the beginning. You definitely can't beat a Disney cruise when you have 3 little princesses traveling together. Each princess, mind you, has very different princess qualities. Emerson enjoyed everything princess-y on the cruise including getting her hair braided island style. Victoria loved all of the shows and was always ready to see a show including the time we were finished breakfast on the last day of the cruise when they were kicking us off the ship.

We spent just a little time in Nassau as there wasn't much for the girls to do there and decided to spend most of the day on the ship. We did spend most of the day on Castaway Cay though as there was alot we could all do. Each night, we got to see some pretty amazing shows after dinner. Amelie was never interested in getting her picture taken with any of the Disney characters until one night, Captain Jack Sparrow was standing outside of the theater. She said, "Mama! Pirate! Let's go see the pirate!" So, she dragged me over to the line to get our picture taken with him. Since we had just been to dinner, she was wearing her Tinker Bell dress. She wanted me to make sure to tell him she was Tinker Bell. He seemed quite impressed to be standing with a celebrity.

We let Amelie pick something from the gift shop and she picked a stuffed Simba doll. Since then, she has been wanting to watch Lion King and that movie seems to have replaced Star Wars as her new favorite movie. I'm not sure if I need to worry about her always liking the bad guy - in Lion King, she really seems to like Scar. Hmm...

Not to be let down after the excitement of the cruise - on the day we got back, I got to pick up Uncle Micah who came in to see us for Thanksgiving. We had a great holiday with family at Granny Great's house in Orlando. We also had fun afterwards when Nana, Papa and Miz spent the next 2 days in Lakeland.

He died on the X

Amelie has been going to school at a Catholic church and they occasionally take the kids over to the church. One day, I was driving Amelie around and and she told me they took her to the place with benches and talked about "other stuff". I asked her "What kind of other stuff?" and she said "The angel". "The angel?" I ask. "The angel named God - he died on the X".

A mermaid's choice of attire

Again, I was driving Amelie around one day and out of the blue she asks, "Mama, why does Ariel always wear a purple bra?" Just like a good mother always does, I had the perfect response to this with an "Uhhhh....hmmm...that's a good question..."

Amelie is 3!!

Hard to believe, but, yes it's true - Amelie is 3!! The past 2 years that we've had her home have gone by so much faster than the 1 year we waited to bring her home!

We celebrated her birthday with a camping trip in our camper at Disney's Fort Wilderness campground. We used 1 day of our 4 day pass to go to Disney. On Friday, Lenny, Amanda, Emerson, Amy, Kevin, Abby and Malia all joined us at Fort Wilderness to help celebrate. We enjoyed a picnic dinner at the site followed by a campfire with Chip n' Dale that evening. Believe me, I stopped saying we were going to the Chip n' Dale show after the first time I mentioned it to someone (if you're wondering just say it out loud as you read this).

The next day, we enjoyed the first 1/2 day at Hollywood Studios where we got to see the Jedi Knight training at the Star Wars exhibit (Amelie is now officially a Star Wars fan, I'll write more about that soon). We hit a few more exhibits before it was pretty clear Amelie needed a nap before going on. We trekked back to the camper for some R&R and Amelie was quite refreshed. Afterwards, our friend Mel met us and we headed over to the Magic Kingdom and got to see their night parade and fireworks.

Okay, so now I'll post some update stuff...

Star Wars, Nothing but Star Wars...

A few weeks ago, we got to go to my brother's wedding ceremony (Micah and Katie had a civil union ceremony for purposes of being stationed together next year as they are both in the Navy. They'll have a big wedding in May). While in Maryland for this ceremony, my Dad quickly tired of watching Snow Buddies and decided to put in Star Wars (the original one with Luke Skywalker). Well, who would have guessed it, but Amelie has become an obsessed Star Wars fan ever since.

Darth Panda, I mean Vader

My grandmother (aka Nana, aka Granny Great) made Amelie a panda bear hooded bath towel in anticipation of her original homecoming. Well, now this towel is no longer used for baths, but for our miniature evil lord who now resides with us. She loves to wear this as her 'Darth Vader cape'. She has mastered making an entrance as the dark lord - once she puts it on, she gets quite a sinister look on her face and quite a slow, deliberate walk to make sure everyone is quite aware you do not want to cross this fallen Jedi. She likes to be Darth Vader when we go out and about on the town as well. When we were in the library she asked for her Darth Vader cape. So many around her watched and smiled as they commented, "what a cute panda". Simple fools. As I was walking behind her, she said "Mama, do the bad guy music". So, here I am walking through the library behind a short little panda girl going "Bom, bom, ba bom, bom ba bom, bom ba bom". Very reminiscent of Month Python's the Holy Grail with the entourage of the coconuts. Very fear-inspiring to be sure though...

Deep thoughts

The Star Wars fascination has led to some in depth conversations though. At one point, we were driving around town and Amelie asks, "Mama, why is Darth Vader not nice?" And I say, "Well, perhaps he has not learned to be nice." After a reflective moment, she replies thoughtfully, "well, maybe if he had a bunny?" I thought this was an excellent idea and told her so. She then said she would share her pink bunny with him and they could play bunnies. So, that leads me to think - Obama is now deciding on a Secretary of State (okay, so I am late actually writing this post), when really he should just pick a 3 year old girl. How much better would our world diplomacy be if all the world leaders could just meet with bunnies?

Attention to Detail

I was much older than Amelie is now when I saw both Star Wars trilogies and never cared about the storyline in the level of detail that my 3 yr. old daughter has gotten into. We have had to go online to research backgrounds to characters (such as the planets where Chewbacca and Luke Skywalker are from) because she has such a curiosity about all of these things.

Gotcha Day #2

It's hard to believe we're celebrating the 2nd anniversary of the most important day of our lives. It's funny that we were so impatient waiting for something we were afraid might not happen (or couldn't imagine actually being real), that 2 years have gone by already.

We spent the day at Blizzard Beach, a water park at Disney. Needless to say, we had a blast. Amelie had to ease into a little, so we went to Tike's Peak first. There, she got to get comfortable on the little kiddie slides and shallow pools. Then, we spent the rest of the day trying to keep up with her. We did the family raft ride where 6 people get in a raft and go down a rather fast slide to the bottom. The only drawback to this ride, at least for me, was the ski lift you had to take to get to the top. Mama was white-knuckled all the way to the top. Amelie kept saying "Mama, don't hold me". "Uh, no, I'm holding you". "But, Mama I'm okay". "But, I'm not". So went the trip with me like a psychotic person going "Ha ha ha, isn't this fun?"

The rest of the day was spent with multiple laps around the lazy river (Amelie actually did sit in a tube for a little while); jumping waves in the wave pool (which we called the "ocean"); and going down this gigantic slide (I mean gigantic because of the number of steps involved to climb up) where we could go down in a double tube and Amelie wanted to do over and over. On the last trip down, I lost my sunglasses. I get my sunglasses at Wal-mart, sub $10 as I tend to lose them in pools and restaurants, etc. Amelie seemed overly concerned about this. For a while afterwards, she kept asking "Mama, what happened to your sungassees?" "They fell off in the pool honey". "Go get them!" "It's okay honey I'll get new ones". "No! get those sungassees!" I'm not sure why the attachment to those, but I think she finally got over it.

Toward the end of the day, we all shared a chocolate drizzled funnel cake, which I feel safe in saying was a highlight. They announced that the park was soon closing so we told her we had to hurry if she wanted to go on a few more slides. She asked if her Gotcha Day was closing too and we told her that, no, just Blizzard Beach was.

On the way home, we had one sacked out toddler, so we stopped for some take out Chinese food.