The dancing bear

I realized that it has been MONTHS since I last posted a video of Teresa dancing. Why didn't anyone say anything? ;) But, seriously, this girl has some rhythm, which she most definitely did NOT get from me. She's really good at adjusting her dancing to the style of music we have on for her. She'll dance to everything, she'll even start dancing if we start whistling random tunes.

Basically, because I know you were all wondering, a day with Teresa consists mainly of the following: we spend some time dressing up her babies, in as many of T's clothes as possible. Then we have to sit at the foot of the stairs and play ball for a while. She's really quite good at throwing and catching, but is absolutely terrible at kicking. She hasn't quite figured out to bend her knee when trying to kick a ball. A soccer player she most likely will not be. The third thing we do is dance.

If you ever come to our house, chances are you will be enlisted to dance with Teresa. She'll grab one of your fingers in her little hand, cock her head to one side and say 'pleeeeaaaa' as sweetly as possible. And nobody is allowed to not participate in the dancing. (She'll even follow you to the bathroom if you have the nerve to try to go there during dance time). I'm pretty sure dancing with T is what's going to cause me to go into labor with this baby, honestly, because she just makes us dance for so long sometimes! It's hard to tell her no, because she asks so sweetly, and it's such a simple thing that just makes her so, so happy.

Anyway, here are some videos of our dancing bear. She had her little buddy visiting, but he's taking a dancing break. You can see her coming after me in the second video, apparently I was not dancing vigorously enough. And I love the third one, when she finally runs out of energy and falls against the couch. It's always nice for us when that finally happens ;)

Untitled from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Untitled from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Untitled from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Dress up

Tressa has recently started dressing up her doll. Well, she's recently started having me dress up her doll for her. It's pretty much what I do all day. Marc's gotten pretty good at it as well, since as soon as he gets home I start sending her his way. She'll bring us her pajamas, or her tops, or skirt and have us put them on her baby doll. Then she takes them off and has us put them back on again. And again. We've had to get pretty creative in order to get them to stay on, since her clothes are so much bigger than her baby. There's a lot of tying of sleeves and legs together. I just had to take pictures of her today. You can't see all the layers, but her baby is wearing T's skirt from yesterday, two pairs of pajamas, a t-shirt, and on top a pair of my sweat pants. I tried to draw the line at getting my sweat pants on the baby, but it's just so hard to tell her no - recently she's started grabbing our hands, tilting her little head and saying 'Pleeeeaa' (please) so sweetly that it's almost impossible to tell her no.

She was being such a little poser when I was taking pictures today, it was great, she usually won't smile at the camera for us.







I told her to go sit by her baby, and this was the pose she came up with

You know...

You know you're a parent when you find yourself saying things like "we don't rub kitties on our bums!", and "bread is not for sitting on!"

Insert clever title here

We took Teresa sledding for the first time this week. And by we, I of course mean Marcus, and by sledding I mean she went down the hill next door to us twice. She L.O.V.E.D. it the first time down. Marc rode behind her, and she just had the biggest smile on her face. She looked so totally thrilled with it. I got it on video, but it turned out really blurry and lame, so that was kind of a bummer. Unfortunately, on the way back up the hill she fell in a big pile of snow and got her face and hands all wet and stingy like snow will do. So the second time down she wasn't so pleased, and we just went home after that. She did have fun getting pulled around the house in her sled the next day. We did not have that much fun getting ordered to pull her around all day ;).

Here's a pic of her before the sledding:



She's gotten soooo much better at letting me bundle her up to go out in the cold. Today she even went and got her coat for me when we were leaving. And she wore a hat! Now if we could get her in some mittens.

This outfit made me laugh. Teresa loves Mickey Mouse soooo much. She loves to watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and any time she comes across the remote she will bring it to us with requests for "Ma" (Which is also what she calls milk, and a couple other things. We have to work off context clues a lot). She gets so excited to watch him, and to point him out on her diapers and stuff. We've been wanting to get her some Mickey stuff for awhile, but of course everything Mickey is for boys, so we finally just got her a Mickey shirt from the boy section at Wal-Mart. She flipped out when she saw it, she was so excited. She brought it to me to put on her Wednesday, but she also wanted to keep her pajamas on, so this is how she ended up:



She was also watching Mickey when this was taken, which is why she's not looking at the camera.
This was the morning after what was supposed to be our HUUUUUUGE snowstorm. We ended up only getting about 2 inches, so that was kind of a bummer. T went out to check out the snow when Marc was leaving for work:



She definitely regretted picking some of it up...



Next up - blocks! We got T these blocks for half price at Target's awesome after Christmas sale, and she totally loves them. I love them too, because they keep her busy for so long :). She's getting pretty good at building with them, she especially loves making big tall towers. We're also using the blocks to work on her colors. So far she thinks they're all "boo".

Untitled from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Aaaand, I guess that's it for now. Marc just started another class, he's excited to learn even more computer stuff. It ends February 11th, so he's hoping the baby doesn't come before then. I'm hoping she comes tonight. Seriously, I feel like I've reached the end of my pregnancy rope waaaay sooner this time around. I didn't feel like this until T's actual due date last time, and here we are still 4(ish) weeks out on this baby! We had to go to labor and delivery two Sunday's ago because of a high blood pressure false alarm. That turned out to be a good thing, because it showed us how totally unprepared we were to have a baby. The cell phone was dead and we couldn't find the charger, we totally didn't know how to get to the hospital, and we had no bags packed for us or for T if she had to go anywhere. Also, the gas tank was on empty. So that was a good practice run, and it was nice to get a little preview of the hospital. It reminded us both a lot of where Teresa was born, and we liked that. Now we're just playing the waiting game and thinking happy, 8 pound baby thoughts ;).

Sleeping Beauty

We took the side off of T's crib a few months ago, turning it into a toddler bed. She's only fallen out once, so I guess it's been a success so far ;). She had started screaming and freaking out at bed time and nap time in her crib, but once we took the side off she went back to happily snuggling down to be tucked in at bed time. I guess it's just one more way she was wanting us to know that she's a big girl now. She won't sit in her high chair anymore either, she has to be in a regular chair like the rest of us.

Anyway, she's actually done a really great job of staying in bed once she gets in there, we've only really had one night where she wouldn't stay in bed. And it's cute now in the mornings sometimes we'll hear a little knock on our bedroom door and T outside saying 'Mama' and 'Dada'. One night last week we went to check on her and didn't see her in her bed. We just thought it was funny, because we can usually hear every single move she makes when she's upstairs, but this time we hadn't heard a thing from her. I guess she just very quietly got up and moved to the rocking chair. Cute girl.




Side note: how good is the flash on our camera? It totally looks like daytime in there. I was impressed ;)