photo updates

Addie's teachers have mentioned that she is coming out of her shell and really enjoying playing with her friends at school. She seems to play with a wide variety of kids every day. When I ask her who she enjoys playing with the most it varies from day to day. She has one little girlfriend who she claims is her best friend.

She's enjoying ballet quite a bit. The last time we went to class she burst into tears when we arrived at the studio. She was nervous so I asked her to hug me and squeeze all the nerves out. It seemed to work because she dried up her tears and marched right into class without me. She even hurried through her snack break to get back to Miss Alice before the rest of the class. I caught lots of smiles on her face that day at class! I think it's going well.

Arabella is still doing exceptionally well at potty training. She has immense control over her bladder at such a young age. I'm truly impressed. She says "go pee" and we walk to the potty and then she goes. Sometimes she even dribbles a little in her panties, stops herself and then tells me she needs to go. She spent the entire afternoon in panties without an accident yesterday.
Bella's going through a growth spurt. For the last few days she's slept in to 7:30 AM! She wakes up fully rested and giggling ready to start the day. She's much more of a morning person than her sister. Addie likes to lay around for an hour or so before she's even ready to eat breakfast. Bella starts her day running.

The girls are in love with Frosted Mini Wheat cereal with milk. Addie calls it "the white ones" and I often have to turn over the little mini wheat chunks in her bowl to prove to her there is frosting on them; just on the other side.
We've kicked up the healthy eating in our house. Dinners are always healthy but the girls seem to be eating more of it now. I've completely stopped buying snacks at the store and replaced them with homemade muffins, cookies, crackers, etc. It's awesome for the girls but I'd be lying if Justin and I didn't crave something to munch on in the evenings sometimes. My latest creation were sweet potato biscuits. These are barely sweet so I was tempted to drizzle a little icing on them but thought against it since the girls don't need extra sugar in their snacks.

The homemade ice cream machine has been life changing. I guess it's a trade off. We've given up store bought snacks but reintroduced ice cream at home. I'm totally OK with this. There is nothing better than mixing up some milk, cream, sugar, and vanilla; pouring it into the machine; turning it on; going to sing the girls to sleep; and coming back to homemade vanilla ice cream. So far I've tried strawberry, mango frozen yogurt, and the most adventurous so far-Chai tea brown sugar (which was super yummy).

Yesterday I did all the driving by myself since Garry had the day off. I am quite proud of this accomplishment since I had to get Addie to and from school with a number of errands in between. Running errands in this country is a challenge enough when you have a driver to get you around. One of my errands was to get myself to the Royal Thai Embassy which is in a neighborhood not to far from ours. I found the embassy without getting lost, parked and dropped off our paperwork to get our tourist Visas. We're going to Bangkok!!! The weekend prior we had ID photos taken of the girls. It was a fairly painless process. The only snafu was when Bella's picture was deemed unusable by the photo shop because her hair blended in with the white background. HA! They took another and adjusted the contrast on the photo. It's still barely visible. Thailand here we come!