Arizona!

This post, as usual, is long overdue. I just had to get this post about Christmas up before March and it looks like I did it just in time! The girls and I spent 3 and a half weeks in Phoenix and Tucson. David joined us on Christmas Eve and left on New Year's Eve. The weather for the most part was great in Arizona (50s and 60s) while NYC was busy shoving snow left and right!

Ava with Auntie Michelle and cute Jaden at the Phoenix zoo

Hanging out at The Farm in Phoenix

Arden and Jaden holding hands. We loved meeting Jaden for the first time. We call Jaden our little goober.

Arden was obsessed with Ah Ma's necklace

Happy family

Arden's first Christmas present. Ava had to get in on the action, of course. Sorry to David for posting a not so fab Christmas morning pic.

Ava got a tricycle for Christmas for my parents. She loved riding it around the lake. Too bad we had to leave it behind. But that's the grandparents way of luring us back to Arizona for another visit!

Totally blurry picture but I love how much fun everyone is having in this picture.

Ava wasn't scared of Santa, but it seemed like she could take him or leave him

All aboard the Christmas train

Pony ride at the Christmas fair in Tucson

This was the cutest thing ever--grandpa and Ava on the swing together singing songs

Chronicles of a Clueless Mom: Incident #1

I think of myself as a clueless mom and oftentimes use harsher words than "clueless" to describe my mothering skills. But I need to be kinder to myself. Can I just say that motherhood is kicking my butt? It's been a rough couple of weeks with sick kids, Ava peeing in her bed constantly, Arden refusing to attempt to sleep through the night, and succumbing to illness myself. But I've survived it all and will survive whatever is thrown my way! Ha!

"Chronicles" implies that this will be an ongoing documentation of my foibles, and most likely I will do enough stupid things to fill a whole book. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Let's start with incident #1.

Sometimes I just have to let Arden cry a little bit in her crib in hopes that she'll fall asleep on her own. But that girl has a serious gag reflex and will vomit if she gets too worked up. So my hopes and dreams of letting her "cry it out" have been dashed. I'm joking about it being my hopes and dreams, of course, but to completely eliminate the crying it out method without even fully attempting it just means more sleepless nights for us. When David and I hear the dreaded gagging sound we both rush into to room and there in its full glory is a little puddle of her dinner. So the other night, after Arden's dinner made its unwelcome appearance, David stripped Arden's sheets and I threw the nastiness into the wash. After the wash was done, I started to transfer the sheets to the dryer and noticed some strange little wet circular substance fall out from the wash. I discovered that I had thrown in a diaper along with the sheets into the washing machine. Smooth! Finding a bloated, ripped apart diaper in the wash is the worst. As far as I could tell it was not a poopy diaper, but who knows? Trying to clean these water absorbing polymers from the washing machine was such a pain. I re-washed the load and somehow that took care of whatever I couldn't get out of the machine. Lesson learned by this clueless mom--check what I am washing!