Caught In The Act

Cassandra was caught playing with the Christmas tree ornaments.  She likes the Fisher-Price and Little Tikes ornaments the most.  We've actually had to spend a lot of effort convincing her that they are not normal toys.

Big Helper On Mom's Birthday

Cassandra decided that Mom needed help opening her birthday presents.  Well, actually, she just likes to open presents.

I'm checking the bottom, Mom.  You never know with this family.

Trains At Christmas Time

This Christmas, we thought we take the Cassandra down to Union Station to see how she would react to hundreds of screaming kids.  OK, not quite true.  Kansas City Southern Railway has for many years put together a Holiday Express Train that kids love.  This gets tied in with many of the exhibits that are a permanent or semi-permanent part of Union Station.

Cassandra had a lot of fun.  Of course, the big favorites are Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends.  She busied herself by pointing out his friends including James shown below.

We also found Thomas pulling Annie and Clarabel.

Cassandra enjoyed seeing a LEGO train set much larger than our sets.  I think she wanted for us to go buy some more LEGOs so we could have a setup like this in our house.

Included in the exhibits was a restored train that used to run during the holidays at Macy's.  We even knew the engineer from Church.

And here are some shots of the Holiday Express.  Cassandra had a ball.

Boxes Are For Sitting In, Not Sitting On

We gave Cassandra a pull-ups box to play with.  She did pretty good right up until it stopped being a chair.

The Empress shows shock that something like this could happen.

And now she starts to cry because we didn't immediately rescue her from her predicament.  Never mind that she did this to herself.

We Are Expecting

We are letting friends and family know that Cassandra will be a big sister soon (late May/early June).  We've already told immediate family and it looks like the little one will luck out, not having to share time with nearby birthdays because there really aren't any for a few weeks either way.  The Empress is looking forward to having a minion to boss around.  She is really excited.

Cookie Decorating Party

We invited several friends over for something a little different.  Since kids like cookies so much, we thought we would put them to work decorating.  In reality, this just ended up being a combination of sugar ingestion and art projects.  It was a lot of fun...the hardest part for me was to convince Cassandra that is was OK to not eat the cookie immediately.  We really could make it and put it to the side and make another one.

The twins brought their parents.  Notice how I got smart and went to portrait views so I didn't cut off  anyone else's head.  Better late than never.

Neal brought his parents for fun.  In case you cannot read his shirt, it asks the question, "Dear Santa, Is it too late to be good?"  A very important questions for any child under the age of five.

Gwen applies decoration of some sort to a cookie.  Notice the high level of concentration?

Art projects are so much better if you can wear them and eat them too.

Decorating For Christmas

This is of course not the Empress' first Christmas.  It is however, the first Christmas where she can assist us in decorating.  As you can see, she really enjoys doing activities like this with Mommy and Daddy.