catching up

I'm behind on posting so I'm playing catch up here with some recent pix and video clips. I'm having trouble getting the videos and text to insert between the right pix, but in the interest of sleep and sanity, I'm leaving this jumble as is.

The first photo is from this Sunday when Olivia bumped her head before church and our pastor sat down next to her to console her. I happened to have the camera at the ready because Emily was going on stage and caught the end of their chat. As you can see in the next photo, Olivia made a full recovery :)

I'm proud to say that both our girls made it on stage this year at church without a single tear :) Last year, after many fears and tears Emily sat out, but this year I tried to help her out by not giving her that out and it seemed to work. I reminded her that at school when it's time to go to gym or music, she doesn't choose if she goes or not, but just does what the rest of the class is doing...and that sometimes we have to do scary things that we don't really want to do. Or maybe it was Daddy's pep talk that did it--the one about envisioning everyone in their underwear! I'm not sure what made the difference, but once she resigned to going on stage she seemed to relax about it and looked very comfortable up there :)

Olivia has no stage fright and is quite a ham! Her class didn't sing at church, but her preschool had a little program that I went to. I wish I'd caught her on video when she noticed me in the audience and lit up, shouting, "Hi, Mommy! I'm over here! That's my mom!" Or when I coughed and she yelled, "Mommy, are you OK?" The other parents couldn't help but snicker. Although I didn't capture those comments on video, I did get her very animated hand motions as her class sang. The video here starts with Emily on stage and ends with Olivia wishing you a Merry Christmas.

As a teaser I've posted a shot from our Christmas card photo shoot that did not make the cut. After all that hard work posing, Olivia relaxed with her own little jam session on Emily's new guitar.

I've also included a shot from a very intimate (nearly naked!) Saturday morning tea party using a cute tea set we bought in China. Have I mentioned it's hard keeping clothes on that girl?!