We had a lovely month - my awesome cousin Catriona and equally awesome sister Ali both visited and Ali stayed for Christmas.
Gingerbread houses were constructed by Ali and Fiona...
Christmas photos in cute matching dresses were attempted, with partial success, but they never made it into christmas cards...
We performed a dramatic enactment of How the Grinch Stole Christmas in the annual Hamer talent show. There were many other spectacular talents on show this year too... here's 10 minutes of the most impressive talent showing you've seen.
Santa Claus stopped by and brought Fiona the backpack she wrote to him to ask for. She had what she described as "the best day ever" opening presents from all the kind and generous friends and family we have. Adele had fun too but was a little overwhelmed.
Adele had a big assessment at Shriners, which is an amazing hospital for children specializing in (among other things) orthopaedics. We are lucky enough to live very close by and they provide services for free to people who do not have insurance or whose insurance doesn't cover the treatment they need. She's been diagnosed as having mild cerebral palsy which almost exclusively affects her left leg, and we're going to be doing physical therapy there two times a week in addition to the PT we do once every 2 weeks through the Minneapolis schools early intervention program. There's no reason she won't learn to walk, it'll just take a while, but all the extra PT will be great.
We headed to the U.P. for New Year and stayed in a log cabin in the woods with some friends.
Minneapolis has been eerily warm and almost totally snow-less so far this winter, so Fiona was very excited to stomp around in the snow up there.
Adele doesn't like to wear her mittens so didn't last long but enjoyed rolling around in it and observing for a while.
We had a great time hanging out with friends, and Fiona and Adele loved making two new friends of their own.
Today (and I did initially plan to just write about this before feeling a need to summarize the whole month) Fiona requested that I paint her fingernails (for the first time). She noticed a girl in her class at daycare had hers painted and asked me to do hers for her. She asked for red, which, luckily, is one of the two nail polish colours I own (the other being clear) so I painted them for her. I'm guessing that this is only the beginning of many requests for things she'd like because her friends have them...
She was so happy she kept bouncing around and it was very hard to get a picture in focus!
So that's the excitement for today. And who knows what tomorrow might bring!
