Random November pics

It's just about the end of the month, and since I'll be traveling for work overnight Monday-Tuesday (I have to head up to NJ to cement a sale to a customer), I thought I'd finally post my miscellaneous November photos that don't really fit together, so I'll just throw them up here in a hodge-podge :)

First: Natalie modeling her rain gear.

Second: Henry looking cute in his jumperoo

Third: Natalie's friend Ruth (from daycare) celebrated her 2nd birthday. Ruth loves flamingos, so Miss Essie made her the cake on the left (it was made with real strawberries, and SO good!), and the other was store bought (chocolate, and quite good). Too cute!

Natalie enjoyed the chocolate cake :)

Last up: Henry showing how well he sits up on his own now!

Harvest Dinner

This past Sunday was the annual Loudoun County Democrats Harvest Dinner. We went last year, and I found out when we arrived that this photo from last year was used on the newsletter sent out about the dinner

From this year: a very similar photo!

Here's Natalie in the fire truck:

Maybe one of these will be used next year!

We also got a pretty nice family photo

Both kids were very well behaved! The group hall had high chairs for babies, which was great for us. Henry was the only baby in attendance, so he got lots of love all night! Many local politicians took turns holding him :) When the kids started getting a little bored towards the end of the evening, one of the older girls organized a game of Simon Says for all of the younger ones, which was great for entertaining. I then told Natalie she could go up onto the little stage to run around, which prompted the other kids to follow in a game of chase. It was very cute!

I'm really proud of Natalie that she has proven capable of wearing this necklace - it's not a "toy" necklace, but a real silver chain and locket that were a present to her from Kathy and Eric for her baptism. I'd been wearing it, as she wasn't old enough then, but we tried it and she loves wearing it! What a big girl.

Family play time

From last week: an evening of family fun! We found this ball for Calla in the bottom of her toy bin, and she has been having a blast chasing it around. Natalie particularly likes to throw it for Calla, and then they both chase it around the house.

While Calla was playing with her ball, Natalie and I were playing a game with Henry:

Playing dress-up

I mentioned previously that last weekend we took Natalie to her first "open dance" class at Tiny Toes. The kids get to spend about 45 minutes playing dress up with princess dresses, tiaras, jewelry, shoes, feather boas, tutus, hats, gloves...anything you can think of for dressing up!

Her first choice: Belle's dress from Beauty & the Beast

She then spotted this beautiful one, and had to wear it. Could you resist it? I want to wear the adult version.

Natalie then wanted ot try on some of the "high heels" available, which let me get this picture.

I love this shot. I feel like it's actually kind of artistic, and she just looks SO grown up to me.

Natalie wore that dress for most of the remainder of free time, but then she wanted to try one more. The last choice: Snow White! I love how the blue flower peeks out from the side and matches perfectly. 

The girls also get to dress up a little bit during the ballet part of class. Here she is with her butterfly wings and her princess wand (from her Halloween costume).

Her dance class for this week is tonight, but for the first time Evan is going to take her as he has yet to see her dance (beyond the videos & pictures I bring home). It'll be fun for him, and gives me a little Henry time!

Laughter is contagious

Evan read Henry "Doggies" by Sandra Boynton tonight for the first time. This was the result:

Try not to at least smile while watchign this, I dare you. I find it completely impossible.

Tapping and Spinning

At the beginning of November, Natalie started at her new dance class! It's at Tiny Toes Dance Academy (Leesburg location), and we're really enjoying it! Natalie's taking the Tap & Ballet class, and she seems to be really enjoying it. Like anything else, there are some pros and cons to the class, at least from my point of view. Luckily, the pros far outweigh the cons. Pros:
--her teacher, Miss Helen, has a daughter close to Natalie's age, which I like
--Miss Helen uses real ballet terms, instead of referring to a plie as "scooping butterflies"
--the girls dance instead of spending much of the class running and jumping around
--the moms stay outside of the class for most of the time, which teaches the girls to listen the teacher without us around.
--there is "open class" about 5 times/week, where the girls can come in, dress up, and dance around for 45 minutes of unstructured fun. We did this over the weekend, and she had so much fun!
--the class is MUCH smaller (only 3-4 girls, instead of about 12 in her other class).
--we did a makeup this week, and I mistakenly brought Natalie to the 5-6 year old class. Miss Helen still let her come in and do the class. Natalie loved being with the older girls, and did really well!
Cons:
--it's a little more expensive than Baby Ballerina
--there isn't much "correction" when the girls do a position or jump wrong, but that will probably come as they get older
--not being in the class, I miss out on a lot of photo ops! However, they do have us moms come in twice (half way through to watch some tapping, then at the end to watch some ballet). That let me get these videos.
Note: I have a better tapping video, but I've repeatedly tried to uploade and it won't. So, these two are the ones I can get up here for now.

You might notice a couple of things in these videos. First, Natalie's hair. No, I don't do it super fancy like that every week! After this class we had some professional photos of her & Henry taken, so her hair was done up for that. Second, you'll see she's in a dress for the ballet part. That wasn't intentional: she had a little accident just after the tap videos, and had to change. Luckily, I had her princess dress (halloween costume) in the car for the photos, so she was able to wear that for the rest of the ballet portion. She was obviously embarassed about the accident, and it really upset her, but she got back in and did the rest of class fine after I got her calmed down. She is doing really well with potty training on the whole, however!

Overall, we like the new class. So much, in fact, that we'll be having Natalie's 3rd birthday party there! Can't wait for that - Helen takes care of everything (decorations, craft, dance lesson, pizza, cake) and we get to just have some fun!

Sitting and Singing

These videos are a little old now (from November 1), but are still pretty cute. This first one is a better video of Henry sitting than the one I put up previously, when Henry turned 7 months.

The second one is Natalie singing her current favorite song.

Day trip to UVA

On Saturday, Evan and I took the kids on a somewhat spontaneous trip down to Charlottesville. When we started planning this trip two days before, we thought we'd spend the night. However, we found out there were NO rooms to be had due to not 1, but 2 Dave Matthews Band concerts over the weekend. So, we decided to do it as a day trip! We ended up gone for about 11 hours total, and while it was tiring, it was also a lot of fun!

Evan needed to meet up with some of the current members of the Va Pep Band to go over some paperwork, so we took them toThe College Inn on The Corner for lunch. I hadn't eaten there in years! Yummy pizza. We then wandered through grounds, taking in the lawn and Rotunda. I'm particularly proud of these photos as they were all taken with my phone, since I forgot my camera!

I love this photo! 

This tree is really pretty. Even better in real life!

The new murals in the lobby of Old Cabell hall. Looks almost 3D!

We went to the Bookstore to get Natalie a new shirt (and ended up with new shirts for Evan and I as well, and a hat for Henry!). It was there that we saw this:

Horrifying. Just horrifying.

We left grounds, drove past the new South Lawn buildings (actually very pretty!), then drove over to McIntyre Park to let Natalie play on the playground there for a bit. After that, it was time to head home. All in all, a fun day! Natalie didn't get a nap, so we had a brief meltdown while in the bookstore, and Henry got pretty fussy in the car on the way home as he was just DONE with being in the car seat, but otherwise it was a really great day. Now that we know we can do Charlottesville as a daytrip, we may try to do this more often!

The lost dancing pics

I was looking through pictures on my phone, and found a couple of pictures of Natalie dancing in her Baby Ballerina class that I apparently forgot I took! They're from early October, and should've gone in the
"Dance Classes #3 and 4" post, but I forgot that I had them on my phone. Natalie looks pretty cute in them, so I'm tossing them up here.

Over the weekend I'll put up pics & video of her new dance class, I promise! We've already done two of them, but missed this week because of my trip. I'll make it up later I'm sure.

I'm back!

Sorry for the week between posts! I hate letting things go that long on here. I had brought everything with me to do at least two posts while I was gone, and had absolutely no time to actually write at all! I went to San Diego for the Society for Neuroscience conference last Saturday (Nov 13), and just got back yesterday (Nov 18) around 6pm. It was a crazy 6 days! I have been to this conference 7 of the past 9 years (missed 2003 and 2006, both times because I had started in a new lab), but every other time was to present my research (via poster). This is the largest scientific conference I know of - over 30,000 people attend every year from all around the world. It stretches over 4 days (Sunday-Wednesday every year, either in October or November), and is just exhausting! It's tiring to go as a scientist, but at least then you get to set your own schedule. As a vendor, I can honestly say I haven't been so tired in a VERY long time.

I arrived at the convention center on Saturday just as we finished setup, so I didn't have much to do then. We went to our hotel, the Pacific Terrace in north San Diego. Right on the beach, beautiful weather - it was gorgeous! We had a nice relaxing afternoon/evening, as we knew we wouldn't enjoy that again.

The conference started for us at 8am on Sunday. We had three sales people from our office, our VP, our trainer, one of our distributors, two product mangers from our home office in the Netherlands, and our founder and CEO Lucas Noldus. Very nice guy! Very dedicated to his work; he's like a level 5 hurricane, just blitzing through everything in his path. I've not seen many people in my life who have so much energy, and just go, go, go! He'll be in our office on Monday to go over some things with us; he does that about once a year.

On Sunday, we had to finish some setup and attendees started coming through the vendor booths about 9:15am. We went non-stop until 5pm, with the same schedule on Monday. In just those two days we spoke to over 200 people! If you want to see some pictures, we uploaded a bunch while there to a flickr site; you can click here to see them (and you don't have to login). Many are from camera phones, so are blurry, but it gives you an idea of what we were doing.

Monday night I had to attend a social, and Tuesday after the conference we hosted a symposium, so both of those nights we didn't get back to the hotel until after 10pm. Wednesday was the slowest day of the conference, but we had to take down the booth immediately upon close at 5pm. We had everything broken down by about 7pm, and then had to sit and wait for our crates to be delivered (the union guys had to pull them out of storage, as well as help us take down the large center part of the booth). The crates didn't all arrive until about 9pm, so we didn't finish until after 10pm. Because we didn't know when the crates would be delivered, we didn't get to eat dinner, so we didn't eat until close to 11pm. Such a long day! I was then up super early to leave for the airport at 5:30am. I officially hate the San Diego airport, by the way: the lines are awful and security sucked. The only plus was that I didn't get full-body scanned or patted down in security!

So, I'm tired, my voice is still a little raw, but I had a really good trip. It was made even better by returning home to have Natalie come running down the aisle to me at baggage claim with the biggest grin on her little face. We had a great evening, and an even better morning all together. I had today off as a comp day, which was great, as we got to hang out much later this morning than normal, and then Evan and I went to see Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows - I very much enjoyed it!

Happy 7 months!

In celebration of turning 7 months old, Henry popped his first tooth! I haven't actually been able to see it yet, but you can definitely feel it! It's one of the two bottom front teeth. We knew it was imminent, as he's been shoving everything under the sun in his mouth, drooling, and been in pain on and off. Hopefully he'll get a little break before cutting the next one!

Don't have height/weight info as he doesn't need to go to the doctor again until 9 months, but he's definitely a growing boy! He's loving solid foods, and we can't spoon enough into his mouth at most meals. He's just started eating Gerber Puffs & melt-away rice crackers, and drinking some water out of a sippy cup!

It doesn't matter how big this kid gets, he's still super smiley!

Henry's also getting better at sitting up, particularly when we prop a toy between his legs.

This video isn't the best indicator of the sitting, as he did fall over pretty early, but it's cute anyway!

Maryland Rennaissance Faire

A couple of weeks ago we headed to the Maryland Renn Faire with a big group of our friends. All in all there were about 16 of us, plus 4 kids (all in strollers). We had never gone before, and I wasn't really sure what to expect. I loved it! So much to look at, eat, and do. I'm mad at myself for not taking more pictures of people in costume, but there was just so much to look at, and with keeping track of the kids my camera wasn't out as much as I would have liked. The Faire only runs from late August - October, so it's over for this year; we definitely plan on going again next year! But I want to dress up next time, and join the 60% or so of attendees who were also dressed up, including a few of our friends:

Nora, Will, and Emily

The faire is set up as a village in the woods

When we first arrived we saw a bunch of different musical acts

This one was a pirate band! 

One of the highlights of the Faire was the joust. I thought it was a lot of fun (even though no one was unseated), and Natalie absolutely loved it!

Natalie watched the joust from Will's shoulders!

Near the jousting were elephant rides! I really wanted to go, but the line was crazy long. Natalie and I had fun watching.

There was a lot of shopping, with many fun signs.

While cheesy, I thought this sign was funny.

Another highlight of the faire are the costumes. I probably should've taken more photos of the costumes, but I was trying to wrangle the kids and keep track of our group, so I didn't get as many as I would've liked. Here are a few:

Natalie started off the day super excited to look at everything

She got to sit on a princess's lap:

And she ended the day like this:



Halloween Part 3

The third and final part to our Halloween weekend was when it was finally, actually Halloween! Carrie came up to spend the afternoon/evening with us, as she really wanted to see the kids dressed up in their costumes and go with us to the Leesburg Halloween parade.

When Carrie arrived, she had presents for the kids: Halloween Build-A-Bears!

 

The witch hat on Natalie's bear (named Candy) was too good of a photo op to pass up.

 The four of us on Halloween.

After hanging out at the house for a while, it was time to get ready for the parade! But first, photos at the house.

 

We walked about a half mile up the road to the start of the parade route. It was COLD! Henry was warm in his costume:

But Natalie was chilly. Fortunately we had brought her blanket with us.

I had such a great time checking out all of the other kids' costumes. I really wanted to take pictures of them, but I felt kind of weird taking too many pictures of other people's children. However, I couldn't pass this one up; so original!

 For those who may not know, the wagon is supposed to be Thomas the Train, and the little boy is the conductor. They made the train cover themselves, and it looked so much like the show!

A lot of the floats in the parade were really good. This is a 1200 pound pumpkin grown on a local farm!

This float won Best Float in the parade. I missed who was sponsoring the float, but it really was amazing!

When the parade ended around 7pm, we walked back towards the house and did some trick-or-treating along the way. Natalie did very well! She was cold and tired, but had fun going up to the doors and saying "trick or treat!" and holding out her bucket for candy. Along the way, we saw a house that was VERY decorated for the holiday! Natalie was not a fan, but I thought it was cool.

Henry was really tired and hungry, so he was crying some in the stroller, especially when we stopped for Natalie to trick or treat. Eventually I ended up carrying him to help calm him down, and Evan ended up carrying Natalie because she was so tired. They both went right to bed when we got home, with only a little frustration from Natalie because I wouldn't let her take her bucket to bed. She didn't want the candy, just wanted to keep holding her bucket!