Sunday, January 27, 2013

Christmas-time catch-up

So, although we are mostly caught up there are a few December occurrences we missed here on the blog.  The first was our visit to Santa at the mall.  Elena was convinced Santa wanted to meet a cowgirl, so that explains her outfit.  Clara was just proud to have a list of things she had written up for Santa.  We are lucky to live in a place where we just walk up to Santa and don't have to wait in line.
Next up are some fine times in Arizona.  One day when we were ready for lunch steve found us a fun place called Magic Noodle that actually pulls all the noodles fresh when you order them.  You choose the length and width and can watch them forming your noodles before they are cooked up.  That was a perfect lunch for our noodle-loving girls!


Whenever we are in Arizona we get to meet up with our good friends Mike and Maria, and their kids (Madeline, Joseph, and Xander).  Oh, how we wish we lived closer together!  This year Elena told me she was going to marry Madeline, and Clara said that she was going to live with Mike and Maria.  One way or another we are destined to be intertwined with this family.

While we were visiting Clara exhibited a spurt of spontaneous phonetic writing, which has only grown in time.  This is her first spontaneous sentence: Cad did run down the street.
Elena followed suit, with: Mom bad to the bathroom.  While a bit embarrassing, we are going to blame this on Joseph, who wrote a very similar sentence right beforehand! No actual bathroom visits were related to this sentence.
Much sweeter - I love my Mom so so so so so.
We had a very fun, very lucky warm Christmas day - perhaps this didn't make it in to the earlier pictures, but this was the picture Grammie Ellen took of us by the lake on Christmas day.
We had a fun outing to the mall, where we saw a store that catered to special events for young people.  It is very likely that this was meant for quinceanera dances (and young attendees at these dances) but our girls were so excited to go try on dresses, and very disappointed when we told them we couldn't buy them the $80+ dresses when we had nowhere to wear them.
We stopped at America's Taco's for a great lunch and a goodbye to the very sick Uncle Scott (he got a bad case of the flu that we were lucky enough to avoid).
Elena and Clara wanted to take pictures to show to their class that they were at the desert - these are the settings they chose:

Like the country bumpkins we are we took some time to play at stores we never get to see -the masks at CostPlus were a big hit!

G-Daddy and Nana Rose gave all four of us ice skating passes for Christmas, and we had fun skating in the unlikely desert setting.

We tried to go see Wreck It Ralph with Nana and G-Daddy (which had to be postponed until a time when it wasn't sold out) and instead ended up at a double-decker carousel.  Awesome!!!


We spent one day walking around in downtown Mesa, exploring coffee shops and boutiques and fun settings.  Look at grown-up Elena in front of a pretty yellow door!
There were also a lot of sculptures, which the girls liked posing with:
We had so much fun - it is great re-living these little tidbits!

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