Christmas & Such

This morning we attended Ella Ann's school Christmas program. May I remind you of last year: The kids were all walking in the room ringing bells....Ella Ann spots Spencer and I....immediately bursts into tears.....I spent the reminder of the program on the floor directly in front of her trying to get her to smile and/or sing through her tears....both of which did not occur. This year was quite different...quite the opposite in fact! She did so great....I actually heard her little voice singing above the other kids! She sang all 5 songs...every word, did all the hand motions and smiled so big and waved when she saw Spencer, Rane and I. It was so darn cute! I videoed and took pictures while Spencer manned Rane...it was a job in and of itself, as you know.

"Away In A Manger"

Her entire school, minus the kindergartners.

Then there was Rane........

still crawling around daily, hourly really, with random objects in his mouth. Yesterday it was a baby spoon I had dropped. Today he carried around one of my big spatulas. No joke.

Had Ella Ann witnessed this attack on her precious baby she would have had a COW!

And the grand finale......

Jack Nicholson, anyone, in "The Witches of Eastwick"? Ummm...if you haven't seen it, he plays the devil and his hair looks like this. Rane did his own hairdo with the help of some bananas.

This week Rane is full of new tricks. He can clap now all the time (he did it for a while a month ago and then I guess he forgot how), says "bye-bye" and waves, says "mama," says, "uh-oh," and "uh-ahhh." I say, "uh-ahhh" on a regular basis when I'm trying to get him to either get out of something or stay away from something...he says it now to himself when he knows he is doing something he's not supposed to do...as well as "uh-oh" when he drops something. He cut his 7th tooth this week too. He is well on his way to being 1!