A Perfect Christmas

We couldn't have wished for a better Christmas this year!

Kinsey had so many Christmas pajamas that she had to start wearing them on Monday:

Gramma and Wayne arrived on Tuesday. Jamie's mom and I spent most of the day on Christmas Eve baking cookies and other treats and Kinsey even helped (and she was good at it too). Here's a video.

We put Kinsey to bed and thought she was sleeping when Santa came, but it turned out she wasn't sleeping and wanted to get up VERY badly! She threw such a fit that we thought something was wrong for a few minutes, but after we finally settled her down, we realized she was just being a stinker who didn't want to sleep. We couldn't let her come out in the living room like we usually do when she won't go to bed because of all the presents so we were taking her into our room instead. As we carried her through the living room, past all the presents, she was whipping her head around trying desperately to see everything. She was definitely on to us and didn't want to miss anything! After much effort, she FINALLY went to sleep at 11:45!

In an effort to get her to go to sleep, we let her open one present

 So Christmas morning got a late start because we didn't want to wake her up and have her be grumpy. And with the number of presents she had combined with the fact that she, of course, wanted to play with each one after she opened it, she didn't actually finish opening presents until Saturday! Seriously!

Kinsey had so much fun opening presents though. She opened everything all by herself and got really excited as soon as she saw what was inside the wrapping paper each time. This was the first year she was really into it like that (just like at her birthday) and it was so much fun to watch her enjoying every moment of Christmas!

Here's a video of her playing the piano too.

 

Santa brought Kinsey a Barbie Mini Cooper that looks just like my old Mini (Pepper), except mine wasn't convertible.

To make the day even more special, Santa surprised everyone with a visit on Christmas morning at our house! Kinsey is shy of Santa this year though so she didn't really want to go near him. She kept her distance and cuddled up to her daddy while Santa handed a few gifts to her before he left.

And to top it all off, we had a White Christmas! We haven't had snow on the ground since the 2nd week of November and even though it was forecasted to snow, we didn't know if we'd really get it. But it started to snow right about 10 am and kept coming all day long and through the night into Friday! It was beautiful to watch all day (and is still beautiful to look at too). Having spent most of my life in FL with 80 degree Christmas days, I positively love it when it snows for Christmas! We've lived in CO for 3 Christmases so far and had snow for 2 of them (and we weren't here for the other one anyway).

Watching the snow fall - this was early in the day before it really started to pile up!

 At Christmas Dinner Jamie toasted to Kinsey's 5th Christmas! What a perfect toast to end the perfect day! I can remember the gloom that hung over that first Christmas with Kinsey just over a month old and still very fragile. We have come so far in the past 4 years and 5 Christmases!

Ready for Christmas Vacation

Today was Kinsey's last day of school for the year - she doesn't go back until January 7th. We are both looking forward to 2.5 weeks of sleeping in!

Speaking of sleeping in - Kinsey's been using so much energy running around lately that she's been needing to go to bed earlier! She gets super grumpy/slap-happy starting at about 5:30 in the evenings lately so we've started putting her to bed at 6:30 instead of 7pm.  She hasn't been grumpy in the mornings to go to school, but she was incredibly hard to wake up before we moved up bedtime a little bit. Not sure if this will need to be a permanent change or if she's just going through a growth spurt and needing extra rest right now. We'll see. But I'm hoping over the break that she can stay up a little later and sleep in. 

Kinsey's class along with the other preschool class did a little program at school today. My dad went with me to see it. Here's a  video of Kinsey ringing the jingle bells (I have no idea what the song was that they were supposed to be singing!). Kinsey was really cute at school today - she was playing a lot with a little boy in her class and they kept walking around holding hands.

She also decorated a felt Christmas tree at school today. She did a great job-  I was really surprised to see her squeeze the glue bottle all by herself!

She watched the teacher squeeze the glue out for her and then she picked it up and did it all by herself!

Very carefully placing an ornament on a spot of glue!

This week I finally caught a recently new skill on video - doing "dump, fill" with the water in the tub. She didn't grasp this concept for a very long time, but she's got it down pat now! Tonight she was even filling one container with water then dumping it into another to fill it up! Here's the video.

And here's a video of her eating french fries with ketchup. Some time ago, Jamie had the idea to put ketchup on her food when she's refusing to eat it sometimes and it usually works to get her to eat. She likes to dip her food in the ketchup herself too.

We're planning to lay low over the school break - lots of sickness floating around these days (the county sent home a letter about an unusually high number of students out sick with the flu or norovirus) and we don't want to get sick before Christmas (Kinsey was sick last year and that was the pits).Gramma and Papa Wayne will be here for Christmas this year - they get here on Tuesday - and of course my dad will be here too. And Aunt Sandy will join us for Christmas Day. We are excited!

Here are our Christmas card pictures from this year (taken by my wonderful friend Aliy):

 

And just the other night I remembered that we took pictures in this same spot for Kinsey's half birthday when she was 2.5. We happen to have the picture below of us walking holding Kinsey's hands -at that point she had just started walking if she had both hands held. During our Christmas photo shoot, Aliy happened to take the picture above of us on the same bridge, walking away from the camera just like a year and half ago, except now Kinsey's walking totally on her own! How cool is that? She is simply one amazing kid!

 

Catching Up

Sorry I haven't written the blog in a couple of weeks. I've been busy and there hasn't been much to report either.

Last week Kinsey came down with a cold on Thursday afternoon and she was pretty out of sorts all weekend. I had a craft show on Fri and Saturday, but fortunately Jamie had some extra help from my dad and his mom and wayne were here again too (they're really working on getting their house built here!). Anyway, I think it's a good thing that we kept the oxygen concentrator since the last time she was sick because I think having that here kept us from having to take Kinsey to hospital with this cold! It was a pretty bad one with puking up mucous for about a day and not eating for about 4 days. By Monday night she was starting to feel like herself again and ate a good meal. She missed school for a few days, including what was supposed to be her first field trip on a school bus and all, but she went back this Thursday. She's still getting rid of a bad cough, but otherwise fine.She was nice enough to share her cold with me though so it's been a long week. The good news is that Kinsey went about 2 months without an illness, which is a record for this time of year! Maybe her immune system is getting stronger?

Kinsey did have her annual visit with the pediatrician this week and she showed off by walking all the way from the waiting room to her exam room! She was also weighed on the standing scale and measured standing against the wall for the first time - she's really growing up! Speaking of, she's on the growth chart - at 5th percentile for weight (at 29lbs) and 15th for height (at 38")! She didn't get any shots at this visit- apparently they need to be given sometime between 4-6 years and since she was getting over this cold, we decided to wait until next year.

We're ready for Christmas around here - got our tree early last week and promptly put it behind some furniture barricades to prevent Kinsey from tearing it apart! We set it up after she went to bed one night so she didn't really see it until the next day when she came home from school and she went straight for it and quickly discovered how to get over the barricades!  We moved the furniture a little bit and she hasn't been able to get to it since, not that she's not trying though. Here's a video.

We also got this cool remote tree lighting thing from Hallmark this year and Kinsey really enjoys turning the lights on with it every night. You push a plunger thing down and it makes a little noise and then the lights come on the tree. Here's a video.

Kinsey has perfected a skill this week - climbing onto furniture. Specifically the dining room chairs. But her new skill is that she gets onto the chair and then stands up and then tries to climb onto the table! I say "tries" only because we won't let her do it, not because she can't! Here's a video of that too.

Last but not least, I've recently begun the process of applying for the Medicaid Waiver that Kinsey qualifies for. First I had to apply for SSI and get a denial letter (we don't qualify for that based on our income, but you have to be declined for that first. Then today I met with a great non-profit organization that helps parents navigate the medicaid process. Actually, they do everything for you! The case worker said we qualify and pending approval, we should receive Kinsey's Medicaid card within 2-3 months! And even better, it's actually already effective as of our application date, which was today! It's hard to believe we waited so long to apply for this - back in FL, all the waivers were income based so we didn't qualify for any of them. Then we we got here and were told there were waivers we could get, we weren't too excited about it because we'd heard bad things about Medicaid. But more recently I've learned the truth about it and we decided it was time to apply. Medicaid will serve as secondary insurance to our private plan and will pay EVERYTHING the private plan doesn't. So copays, costs up to the deductible and that 20% beyond the deductible will all be paid for! There's also a program that pays the premium for Kinsey's portion of the private insurance plan too! It will be such a relief to have those costs off our plate! I'm not one to take advantage of government aid, but I think we deserve a little help!

Anyway, that's it for this week.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We've been busy preparing for Thanksgiving and enjoying it with family... My aunt Linda, Uncle Jack and cousin Jackie are here from NY as usual. Kinsey's had the whole week off from school.

On Wed we took Kinsey to see Santa. We didn't get a great picture, so I'm sure we'll try again before Christmas is here. . .

We had a relaxing time at the house for Thanksgiving eating lots of food and playing with our farm animals. My friend Aliy brought her kids over to burn off some energy with the animals and Jamie brought out the barrel train too for everyone to take a ride . . . including Jackie and Bailey!

Kinsey's practicing on the goats to be a gold ribbon Mutton Buster

We also watched the Macy's Parade! Kinsey was pretty into it this year, enjoying all the dancers and the balloons.

Watching Santa arrive!

Kinsey shared one of her little chairs with Jackie to watch the parade :)

 And today we went Black Friday shopping, of course! Kinsey enjoyed checking out all the toys and picking out pretty things at the Coach Outlet again this year.

Not much else to report. But here's a really cute video of Jackie and Kinsey playing together. Jackie was riding Kinsey's little ladybug toy and chasing her around and Kinsey was eating it up!

More New Skills

We enjoyed celebrating Kinsey's official birthday on Monday with more family presents throughout the day. I still can't believe she's actually 4 years old!

This week Kinsey learned a couple more new skills . . . and I was able to catch one of them on video.
First of all, she's learned how to flush the toilet. She thinks this is lots of fun and of course likes to watch the water go around in the bowl. She also likes to keep flushing it when it's not ready to be flushed again yet.

But her other new skill is very impressive as it involves a series of steps - I don't know when she figured this out, but one day this week I was using the sink in the bathroom and she came in the room. She went over to the side of the sink and turned on the faucet, walked to the front and bent down to pull her stool out from under the sink, held onto the front of the sink to step up on the stool and then played in the water! I wanted to grab the camera right then, but I was frozen - in disbelief that she was doing all this and fear that she would fall! But she did it! And the next day she did it again . . . a few times and I was able to capture it on video that time.

She's also recently trying to brush hair. Sometimes she will take the brush and attempt to brush her own hair, sometimes she tries to brush mine or her doll's hair. Here's a video of her "brushing" Gramma's hair last weekend.

And here's a cute video of Kinsey walking while pulling her toy horse around with her.

This week she's also gotten better at wearing her glasses - she wore them for 2 whole days straight without taking them off! She always wears them without any problem at school, but usually pulls them off within a few minutes to a few hours after leaving school, but yesterday and today she wore them all day - including rides in the car and watching TV (which are the times that she usually gets bored and takes them off). Hopefully that's a sign that she's getting used to them and will keep wearing them more.


Gramma went to school with Kinsey last Friday when she was visiting, so here are some pictures from that. Oh, and it happened to be Pajama Day:

 

Finally, here are a bunch of cute pictures from the last couple of weeks - I didn't want to overload the blog last week with more pictures since we already had so many from the birthday celebration. 

This girl loves her chickens!

Kinsey wore her new Pug hat this week (a gift from Jamie's cousin Kari). Doesn't she look just like Bailey?

Kinsey really likes to play with my fall decorations. Here she is introducing her baby doll to my Pilgrim salt & pepper shakers.

Kinsey's 4th Birthday!

Today (Monday) is Kinsey's 4th Birthday! It's so hard to believe that she is four! Jamie and I agree that she has changed so much this past year, more so than other years, especially in just the last month since she started walking. It's amazing how much that one thing has changed her so much.

 

 

 

 

We had Kinsey's birthday party on Saturday. It was a carnival theme, complete with carnival games, snacks and a balloon artist. Jamie also gave the kids several rides in the new barrel train that he and my dad just made. Kinsey had a fabulous time - definitely the best she's ever enjoyed her own party so far. Her ability to walk this year made such a difference too - she was able to walk around and play with everyone else - just like all the other kids :) I can't stop smiling thinking about her walking around and even standing with the other kids to watch the balloon artist. She also really enjoyed everyone singing Happy Birthday to her - she knew it was all about her and just soaked it all in with a great big smile on her face. She's really quite a ham!  She enjoyed opening presents as always and of course she loved the barrel train ride. And the very best part was that she was healthy to enjoy the whole thing (she's been sick the last 2 years for her birthday/party). 

Walking around while waiting for her guests to arrive (I made her dress)

Checking out the food table

The cake (I didn't make that!)

Playing in the duck pond with her friends

Watching the balloon artist with her friends

Enjoying all the attention as we sang Happy Birthday to her.

Blowing out her candles -with a little help

This girl LOVES baby dolls!

And one last picture - this is Kinsey's first school picture!