Turkey Day in OKC

We spent our Thanksgiving in OKC with Nana and Keith.  They made a delicious Thanksgiving meal.  After lunch, every one of us took a nap.  It was great!  Wesley and I love OKC, and we really enjoy getting to visit with them.  They just bought a new house in Edmond, and they'll be all moved in the next time we go up there to visit.  Mia will have a lot of fun exploring the gigantic new yard, I'm sure.

I've never participated in "Black Friday" before, but Mia and I had to hit Walgreens to see if we could find some good deals.  We did pretty good.  I got Mia a couple of Christmas presents as well as a couple of other gifts.  My best Black Friday steals were online.  I bought a bunch of stuff from Old Navy's website.  Just about everything I got was five dollars, so I loaded up!  It's so hard to pass up a good deal.  Some of the clothes I bought were for our angel I chose from the Angel Tree at work.  It is an important tradition for us as a family to choose an angel every year.  Wesley and I have been doing Angel Tree every year since I was in college.  I think it helps to remind us how much we have to be thankful for.  It's so exciting to think of that person opening their gifts.  As soon as Mia is old enough, we'll let her start choosing an angel for herself and picking out the gifts. 

Mia had some crazy, wild hair today.  I swear, that child's hair can not be tamed.  I'm still working on it.  On the way home from OKC, we stopped in Norman for lunch.  Ah...such happy memories for me in that town.  Unfortunately, my memory became fuzzy when it came to remembering where an Arby's was.  I got us on the right street, but I could have sworn that the Arby's on Main was on the south side of the street.  I realized later that the one I was thinking of is on Lindsey.  Oh well, we made it there regardless.  Mia wanted to sample my chocolate turnover and proceeded to smear it all over her face.  I wanted to get a picture of her chocolatey face with a big grin, so I made a funny face at her to get her to smile.  As you can see in the picture below, the little turkey was mocking me by trying to mimic my silly face.  Little stinker.

Mia does pretty well on the road.  She is getting better at entertaining herself for longer periods of time.  She kept sticking her Cabbage Patch doll behind her head and wanting me to find it.  She would say, "Mommy! Baby? Baby?" I would pretend to look for it and then say, "There it is!"  Mia would giggle and say, "Baby! Mia head!" It's funny when she cracks herself up.

Both mine and Mia's first Black Friday. I actually did buy the hat.

 Such a silly girl

She had to put Daddy's sunglasses on when we got home.  Now, time to watch the OU/OSU Bedlam game!  Boomer Sooner!

Mia Loves You and You and You...

We have been practicing saying, "Love you!"  It's so precious.

My Almost 22 Month Old

We are fast approaching Mia's second birthday.  She has so many interests now that it's hard to keep up with all of them.  She's trying to sing but hasn't quite gotten the hang of it.  She likes songs with hand gestures and does them very well.  I'll have to video her doing "One Little Monkey Jumping on the Bed".  She loves it.  At the end of a song or a book she usually says, "Again!"  This could continue indefinitely, so usually I try to encourage her to do a different song or choose a different book after the second or third time.  It's so cute to watch her "read" right now.  She'll just sit quietly and flip the pages.  Everything she recognizes must be pointed out to Mommy and Daddy, though.  "Mommy! Elmo!"  "Daddy! Cow! Mooooo!"  I pulled out some old books of mine from the attic so that she would have some new stories to "read".  Looking at those Cabbage Patch and Dr. Seuss books from the 80s is a walk down memory lane.  I'm glad that Mia enjoys them as much as I did. 

One of Mia's current obsessions is taking off her shoes.  I guess she's just interested in the mechanics of it or something.  Just about every morning the socks and shoes are all off by the time we get to daycare.  She likes to run around barefoot at home, too.  These hardwood floors get cold in the wintertime, so I guess she'll break that habit when her toes start getting chilly.

Another thing her bossy little self likes to do is yell at the dog.  She walks around yelling, "Puppy, no! No! Mia's!"  Everything is Mia's right now.  She most definitely does not like to share with Xander.  She doesn't trust him because he always tries to steal whatever snack she has in her hand.  Mia wags her little finger at him and points to another room.  "Puppy! Go! Puppy! Go!"  I guess they have a kind of love/dislike (not hate) relationship.  This afternoon Mia walked up to where Xander was taking a nap.  When we want her to lower the volume a bit, we tell her to be quiet like a mouse.  She looked at me, put her finger to her mouth in a hushing gesture, and whispered, "Shhh, Mommy. Shhh, mouse."

My friend, Jill, and I went shopping yesterday with Mia.  We wanted to try to get some shopping done before the after-Thanksgiving madness commences.  Mia did well for awhile. However, when it was naptime, she had a full blown meltdown in Gymboree.  I took her outside to sit in a coin-operated racecar.  I was one quarter short to be able to turn the thing on, but Mia didn't even notice.  As far as she was concerned, she was driving that car all over the place.  Thank goodness for an imagination!

"Reading" her book

 Using Mommy's Christmas card projects box as a seat so that she can remove her shoes.

 "Hop in, Mommy! I'll take us for a spin!"

 The racecar was a little more her size than our Jeep.

 

Mia's ABC's

Here's what Mia and Wesley have been working on.  You might have to turn your volume up...

Giving Thanks

Mia's daycare had a Thanksgiving program today.  I left work to go to it and then stayed for lunch.  The program included all of the kids from the infants through the preschool, so they had to have the program in the chapel.  This was the daycare's first Thanksgiving program, and they did a great job.  They made all of the scenery and costumes out of paper.  It's amazing what those ladies can do on a budget.  They made the kids into pilgrims, indians, pumpkins, and turkeys.  The toddlers all wore pumpkin costumes.  Mia's class sang a song about pumpkins, but most of them didn't sing.  I guess there were too many parents watching them.  They all got the "deer in the headlights" look.  The older kids did great.  After the program, we went back to Mia's classroom for lunch.  The toddlers are too little for the big kid tables, so they had their Thanksgiving meal in their classroom instead of with the older kids.  It was a yummy lunch, and the kids all got a slice of pumpkin pie.  That was a big hit.  After lunch, the teachers sang the pumpkin song again with the kids.  Without the big audience, they weren't overwhelmed, so they sang and did all of the hand motions.  It was adorable, and Mia was a great pumpkin.  The teachers sent the pumpkin costumes home with the kids.  I was glad because Wesley had to work and couldn't be there for the program.  After her bath, I put on her new fleece pjs.  They looked pretty hilarious because they were huge.  Mia didn't care, so I didn't worry about it.  I put her pumpkin costume on so that her daddy could see her in it.  It was really hard to get pictures at the program, but I wound up with a few.

Mia talking to Ms. Eva

Mia is the second pumpkin from the right.

They all kind of look the same, don't they?

  My little pumpkin

 Chowing down on her Thanksgiving lunch

Showing Daddy her costume

Walk on the Wild Side

Today, Wesley and I took Mia to the Dallas Zoo.  We had free tickets through Mia's daycare, so we thought we'd take advantage of the pretty day.  After Mia's nap, we loaded up and made the less than ten minute drive from our house to the zoo.  It was a little chilly, but the sun was out.  The first thing we did was take Mia to the carousel.  She'd never been on one, and I thought she would like it.  She had fun on it, but I think it made her a little dizzy.  The zoo just opened a new Giants of the Savannah exhibit this summer, so we went straight there next.  It's really amazing.  We saw elephants, cheetahs, and impalas.  The best part of it was a huge open area where zebras, giraffes, and ostriches mingled together.  Mia enjoyed seeing the zebras and giraffes, but her favorite Savannah animal was the lion, I think.  When she saw one, her face lit up.  She said, "Lion! Roarrrr!"  We tried to take her around to the animals she would recognize like the tiger, monkeys, and gorillas.  She was looking at the gorilla with a quizzical look on her face.  He was lying down on the ground with his chin resting on his fist.  I said, "Look Mia, the gorilla is taking his senior photo."  She immediately did the "senior photo" pose that she is famous for at daycare. (Everyone thinks it's hilarious).  Mia had to make gorilla noises at him, too.  She had to make the corresponding noises to every animal that she knew.  It was cute.  She liked watching the meerkats, as always.  I'm not sure why she is fascinated by them.   There are statues all over the zoo for photo ops.  We sat Mia on a few of them.  She made other people walking by laugh because she kept yelling, "CHEESE! CHEESE!"  I love that she is old enough to really start enjoying our family outings.

Riding on the carousel

 Checking out the giraffes. There were at least eight of them.

 Looking for the cheetah.

 Giraffes, ostriches, and zebras

Pointing out the meerkats to Mommy and Daddy

 Remember this picture from Mia's first trip to the zoo last November?

 Here she is one year later on the same rock watching the meerkats.

 I couldn't believe that she could balance well enough to sit on this elephant's head.

 This was one weird-looking bird.  It was called a horned eagle.  It looked like it had the head of an owl and the body of an eagle.  Those feather "horns" on its head were just odd.

 Heading to the cougar cage with Daddy.

Wordless Wednesday: Queen of Hearts