LEAVES !!!

Autumn. How beautiful. Stew took these pictures yesterday. Just a couple of blocks from our house is an old school house that is still being used as a primary school. The field has several large Maple trees that have dropped their leaves. For the last week, Madeline has had a great facination for these leaves. I thought that it would be a fun Saturday afternoon activity to go and play in the leaves. Well, look at the pictures, need I say more...

Thanksgiving continued...

Here are the pictures that should have been on the thanksgiving entry, but due to blogger issues I was unable to post them with the narration...
Enjoy.

Sisters

I, being the only girl in my family and the baby, have never know the wonder of a sister or smaller sibling. I can see the love that Madeline has for Jenna and it warms my heart so much. I can see that they will be good friends during their lifetime (for the most part). We have started rooming them together at night and hopefully progress to naps as well. This will be challenging as they both woke up several times last night for various issues... Stew and I are very tired today...
Jenna is really starting to play with her toys and interact much more in her new world. She bats at things, holds on tight and I think if it were up to her, she would be sitting on her own ( her torso muscles are very strong) She is even more smiley and starting to turn her coos into giggles. I find that I am not as quick to make Jenna do things ( like roll over) than I was with Madeline. I see that Madeline has grown up so fast and I would like to savour Jenna for as long as I can. I think that Madeline, being my first, was a bit of a "guinea pig" of sorts- we were both learning at the same time on a hideous learning curve. But now with Jenna, I can completely enjoy the stages because I know what to expect.
Madeline was busy making block towers this evening while we were talking with Gran (Stew's mom). I have never seen her focus on something for so long. At one point, she had a tower of 10 blocks!... and then she knocked it down! Such a sweet heart.

Thanksgiving for us all!

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we all went to my parents for 4 days. It was filled with fabulous fun. We all slept so soundly. There is such a tranquillity about my parents house, it is just so relaxing (maybe because I have a lot of help when I am there... something to think about). Jenna and Madeline had a wonderful time at the Grandparents too. Madeline, of course, b-lined for the elephant, but also had fun picking the last of the grapes with Grandpa, and unloading and re-loading Gammy's cupboards. (There is one cupboard that she is allowed to go into, but this weekend she claimed the soup cans from another cupboard and stacked them and stacked them and stacked them. Her personality is just so beautiful.
We gratefully stuffed ourselves with turkey and the fixings while enjoying my parents dear friends that shared the dinner with us. On Sunday we wanted to do something fun so we went to a farm called "Chickadee Ridge" which is near Armstrong. This farm raises miniature horses- no higher than 38 inches high! Madeline is 38 inches high! It was totally wonderful to be surrounded by 250 tiny horses and babes. They not only had horses but lots and lots of other animals too. Sheep, goats, bunnies, ducks, aligators, lemurs, and fallow deer- just to name a few! We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves with the sites, but we also enjoyed watching Madeline. She was in her glory- animals, animals EVERYWHERE! When we arrived at the farm, we were greeted by a sheep who seemed extremely friendly. He took a liking to Madeline, or so we thought. He head butted her. We thought it was very funny, then he did it again- kinda funny, then he did it again bunting her to the ground- NOT funny anymore. I will now inherit a saying from my oldest brother, or maybe it was from the Simpsons...

"[Sheep] are like people, some are just jerks!"

We then had to take a picture of the jerk sheep for sentimental reasons- and also so I could place it on the blog. Madeline feels no anger to said sheep and showed incredible grace as she forgave him and moved on the other animals. She even let the buck fallow deer eat a carrot (Kuset in Madeline vocab) right out of her hand! My brave little girl!
It is so nice that my dad is home now (semi-retired) because he can enjoy life now! Normally he would be away for all holidays and miss all the fun. I think that it is ever more important that he is here now with his grandchildren- there is such a glow on his face when he is with them. Our weekend was in one word- Delightful!
(*photo's to come- blogger is being tempermental*)