Lately

I am working on catching up all of the "Love Note" posts, and I just emptied my camera of 845 pictures that have been filling up my memory card since December. I need to do work. Anyway, most of the pictures and videos fit into one of the posts that I've already typed or can work in a Love Note category. The ones that don't I'm sticking all in this one little post. Lazy? Yes, but also needed if these picture are ever going to make it to the blog.

Ok, so here we go... this is our life lately.

Playing "dog catcher" just like Papa.

You should know that Helen Claire is obsessed with Pa- like to the point that he's taken on superhero abilities. Somehow, even though we live 211.2 miles away from driveway to driveway, when I pick her up from school and ask her who she played with, she says without fail, "Papa." When I say I like her artwork or her shoes or her hair, she tells me Papa did it. If I ask her what song she wants to sing, she says "Papa." When I ask her what she wants to wear to school, "Papa" is her answer. If you ask her who gets the bad guys, she's going to say "Papa." She thinks Papa hung the moon, so when I told her that Pa used to be the dog catcher, and he would find all the stray dogs and take them somewhere so they could eat and drink water and someone would take care of them, she rounded up all her dog animals and made her own pound.

She's a nice pound owner, though, and gave her puppies a bottle of "wawa" and took a nap with them.

We have been working on emotions with Helen Claire, so we can actually talk about how we feel instead of whine. It's not working out so great, but she is getting the emotion faces down.

I'm not completely sure what this face is, but we see it a lot... I'm going with mischievous.

Happy (when she makes this face, she makes a clicking noise- I have no idea why)

I have no idea- confused, maybe?

Mad. She can only hold this face for about 10 seconds, then she gets tickled at herself.

Sweet smile

She also does scared, show me your muscles and bearhug. It's hilarious. I don't have a good picture of it, but here is a video.

Here are some random outside shots ... I have no idea what we were doing, but we've been enjoying the mild winter weather this year.

This one is blurry, but Helen Claire was running and telling baby something very important

I love how focused she is...

This is way too random to go in any other post, so it's here. Helen Claire thinks it is fun to strap and unstrap car seat buckles, her booster chair buckles, and just about every other thing that can be snapped or unsnaped. One day in Jonathan's truck, we made a makeshift "carseat" for her baby doll out of the console and her sippy pal. She was thrilled about it!

This is what happens when I don't wake up and get dressed before Helen Claire is awake. We try to find things she can do safely while I'm in my bathroom getting ready. On this morning, she put her boppy pillow to good use as a back rest while she read. Way to go boppy people- that thing has been with us since day one, and it still gets a lot of use!

Helen Claire got a pair of baby yoga pants from Aunt Laurie for Christmas. Oh. my. gosh. They are the cutest things ever.

They even have the roll top on the tummy!

Two things about this picture... 1. Don't judge me because of the way my living room looks (the iron is not plugged in, by the way) 2. Helen Claire is watching The Lawrence Welk show, and she was amazed. She stayed in a trance like this until we finally turned it off.