Not Meant For a Modeling Career

Grandma Bev bought these cute little dresses for Alyssa and Ashley for Christmas last year and I finally decided it was time to get a picture of them with the dresses on. Not such an easy task for a 3 yr old and 1 yr old. I posted every picture we took to give you an idea about how the photo shoot went.
Us: "Alyssa, just smile and look at the camera."
We throw Ashley on the step and take the picture just as our arms are out of the shot and Ashley is already in motion.
Us:"Alyssa, can you please just stand next to Ashley's rocking chair and look at us and smile."
We put Ashley in the chair, rock her a couple of times and remove our arms quickly and take the picture.

Us: "Ashley. Alyssa. Ashley, look at Daddy." (Click)

Danny:"Daddy's gonna get you." (click)

Danny:"Daddy's gonna get you." (Click).(They love that game, by the way).

Finally we decided to have Alyssa hold Ashley down for us.

Although these lap shots show the happiest faces, they kind of defeat the purpose of showing off the matching dresses.

Hence, the name of this post. I don't know how they manage to get 1-3 year olds to pose for professional photo shoots. I guess, we are just not professional photographers.

Here's Ashley

I had a couple of comments about how I left Ashley out of our posts last week, so I'm dedicating this post to her. She is quite a handful lately. All she wants to do is run and make a mess anywhere we go. You can imagine how fun that is when we are at church, or the library. Our home seems to constatly be a disaster zone because if I try to pick one thing up, she just goes and makes a mess in another part of the house. It makes us laugh sometimes how destructive she can be, but we love her. We took the girls to a place called Incredible Pizza on Saturday. It is similar to Chuck E. Cheese, just a lot more expensive. The food is a lot better though. Here is Ashley in the game room.
Like I said before, she likes to run and I spent the whole time chasing her around from one game to the next. Fortunately she is still too young to want to actually play the games. Her favorite was the miniature carousel.Everywhere we go, people comment on her white-blond curly hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. Since she loves to run around so much, one of her favorite games to play is run away from Mommy and Daddy. She seems to think "Come here" means run away faster. Because of Danny's reaction when she once called him "Mama"(Danny:"No, I'm Dada!") another one of her favorite games is to call us by the wrong name. She is a lot of fun and she really makes me laugh sometimes when I find myself chasing her in ridiculous places as she runs away and laughs at me.

New Crayons

After Alyssa wore the 24 crayons in her old box down to stubs, I finally decided it was time to get her some new ones. So I got her a box of like 64 this time and here she is using them for the first time.
She loves to use the crayons one by one and then line them all up so she knows which ones she has already used. And thanks to NickJr.com, we have an endless supply of things to color.

The Things You Do When You Don't Have a Pool

It was really hot on Saturday and Alyssa was watching the kids across the street have a water fight. She wanted to go play with them. Instead, we set up our sprinkler that attaches to our hose. I've been thinking about doing it all week because it has been so hot and it hasn't rained in awhile. It was an even better idea on Saturday since Danny had pulled some weeds and mowed the lawn in the front on Friday. Alyssa had a blast playing in the sprinkler. Here are some of my favorite pictures.She has asked us four times a day every day since to let her play in the sprinkler. Unfortunately for her, we have had rain since Sunday night.

Our Block Party

Some of our neighbors threw a block party on Saturday. It is the third year in a row that they have done it. When we got the invite, the time said from 2pm-11pm and we thought "what are they going to do for 9 hours?" Around 2pm, we looked up our street and saw a fire truck parked there and some firemen standing around it. Danny took Alyssa up to check it out.
We don't know who had the connections, but it was there for maybe an hour for the kids to come and sit in and talk to the firemen.

Alyssa loved being able to sit inside of it and pretend she was driving it.

They also rented one of those inflatable bounce houses for the kids that was up starting around 2. They had food, music, some lawn games and I think someone put together a mini obstacle course for the kids but we missed that. We went up around 5:30 and stayed till about 8. It was a nice chance to meet some of our neighbors. Danny even got an invite to watch the UFC fights that night at one of the houses. This is just one of the many reasons why we love our neighborhood, especially our street.

Twins

On Sunday, after Church, I noticed that Danny was wearing the same outfit as Alyssa. We took some pictures of them while we were out on our walk that evening.

The funniest part about it is that they aren't even common colors to wear, especially together.
I also liked that they both had navy blue flip flops on.

Random Pictures

We felt bad about the lack of pictures to post last week, so we tried to take some pictures of our uneventful week and here is the result. We use the little basket pictured below to store books on our main level. Ashley's favorite activity is to empty it out as soon as I put the books away. One day, I looked over and saw her emptying the basket and then work very hard to climb into the basket (another favorite thing to do) while is was still on the lower level of our endtable. She sat in there for a good 5 minutes and when I finally decided to take a picture, she climbed out just before I could get a shot. Alyssa, as usual, is happy to do anything that her sister does that we see as funny or picture worthy. So she climbed into the basket so we could get a picture of her. I think she was disappointed to discover that she didn't fit in that position as well as Ashley.
Here is Ashley on a different day sitting in her favorite basket. I'm not sure why Alyssa has that facial expression because I didn't take this picture.
I just liked this picture of Ashley because it shows that she really does have hair. In addition, that hair is also showing signs of being curly. She also just looks very happy.

Here is Alyssa with her breakfast of choice. She wants me to buy these every time we go to the grocery store and I finally got to the point of being sick of eating them. On this particular day, I let her pick out one donut and her choice was this blue sprinkle one.

I didn't take this picture either, but it made me laugh because Alyssa looks like a little tiger in it.

On a side note, in case anyone has noticed the condition of Alyssa's legs, don't be alarmed. She seems to take after me and bruise very easily. And she is still learning how to walk in her summer sandals.

Alyssa Goes to the Dentist

This is actually Alyssa's second trip to the Dentist, but we didn't take the camera the first time. We spent a few days talking up her upcoming trip to the dentist. We recently got a Dora book from the library where she went to the dentist and kept telling her she was going to the dentist like Dora. That got her excited. Here she is in front of the Dentists Office.

Somehow, she remembered the bib from her last Dentist trip and talked about how she would have to lift up her hair so that they could put the bib on her. Here she is with her bib.

Danny is the one that took her and he said that she did very well. She let the hygenist look at and clean all of her teeth, but she wouldn't let her polish them. And she let the Dentist look at them too.

Here she is after they are done looking in her mouth. She is glad that that part is over with.And here is the best part about the whole trip...a new toothbrush and a toy airplane.