Weekends, Braids, and Bellies!

We love weekends at our house!  Especially the 5:30 AM wake up calls we get from Anna, but nothing is better than snuggling with her on a Saturday morning trying to convince her that the sun is not awake yet!  By 7:30, she can no longer be convinced and starts to get a little more demanding in her pleads for cereal time.  Nonetheless, we get a lot accomplished at our house before 10 AM. 

Friday night we had a nice night at home.  It was quiet and lovely, after a very hectic week with activities, meetings, and other business every night.  Saturday we did some grocery shopping and started thinking about getting ready for our Super Bowl party on Sunday. 

Sunday we had the "Iowa crew" over for some Super Bowl fun.  We get together a couple times a year and we decided it was time again.  The Super Bowl gave us a good "excuse" to get together.  The group had a great time catching up, eating food, and just watching the chaos of the small children.  Anna LOVED having friends over, and shared her toys fairly well.  She talked all day about how Brecken was coming over and that maybe they could "watch a movie or somethin."  It took some convincing to help her realize we were watching football, not movies.  They played hard and were exhausted by the end of the night.  She can't wait until the next time she gets to play with her friends. 

Tonight is Mommy-Anna night.  Daddy is at bowling, so we had an early supper and got on with our typical Monday routine...bath and a movie.  We added in braids during the movie.  Anna loves to have "crazy" hair, so we're going to sleep with braids tonight to make it curly tomorrow.  She's getting better about letting me do her hair, every now and then, so I took full advantage of her offer to let me braid!  It took me back to my days in high school braiding everyone on our volleyball teams hair before our games!

Her braids. 

 Smiling for Mommy. 

 Enough with the pictures Mom!  I'm trying to watch Ariel!

 I also finally took another belly pic...this is week 22.  It's frightening how quickly the 20 weeks are already disappearing.  I think with Anna it felt like the weeks were barely ticking by, but this time I hardly have time to keep track of how big baby is this week before we are on to another week!  18 weeks to go...or so.  There really is a belly there now.  I don't think I can hide it from my students any longer.  Although, I'm sure I'm not hiding anything....I just haven't admitted it out loud to them.  Maybe tomorrow I'll leave my bulky sweaters at home. 

Well, we are off to a good start of another week.  We have lots of fun stuff going on this week.  Plenty to keep us on our toes.  This weekend will include a celebration of Cousin Will's birthday!  He's going to be 2 already!  Anna's struggling a bit with the fact that we have been celebrating birthdays but none of them are her birthday...."I wish it was my birthday," were her exact words when we were discussing Will's birthday and she mentioned this a few times on my birthday!  But this will be a good month to get used to other people celebrating birthdays because we have another friend birthday to go to later this month...Aaron is turning 3!  So much excitement!  February is flying by already!

I will end with a quote from Anna: 

While brushing her teeth in the bathroom (she goes in first and gets to brush, then we come in and finish) we overheard her talking to herself... "Missed me, now you gotta kiss me!"  Where she got this we are not sure....but friends at daycare are first on our list of suspects!

Happy Monday!