Bedtime Fun!

Bedtime is becoming one of my favorite times of the day. Not because the tinks is going to sleep, but because we have so much fun! After dinner, Alex gets a bath and we play in her room until it's time to go to bed. Alex loves playing rocket and pays for her rocket rides in kisses. Cooper usually gets banned from the room at some point, only to have Alex let him back in a few minutes later. Alex loves to dance around her room, do forward rolls and just be silly. Some nights we read books, some nights we don't, it just depends on her mood. When it's time to go to sleep, she crawls in bed and we sing songs. It started out with just sweet bedtime songs, now it's Itsy Bitsy Spider, Row Row Row Your Boat, The Wheels on the Bus and our song we have to sing and hum to her. For awhile, I'd tell her I was going to go let Cooper out, clean the kitchen, use the bathroom, just whatever so I could leave the room for a few minutes then come back to check on her. Now when I tell her I'm leaving, she tells me not to check on her, then she tells me to go potty and wipe. The first time she told me this, I almost fell on the floor, it was when we were starting potty training, now it's a nightly thing and makes me smile!

Color Blind?

Josh and I are almost positive Alex is color blind. There are different variations of color blindness and we think she is red-green color blind. Alex has known all of her colors for some time now and can easily identify all colors...except red. For a while, she would just guess random colors and lately, red is always green. At Alex's next doctors appointment, we will discuss it with him. We are still a little baffled because we do not know of any color blind people in our family (it's hereditary) and it is very uncommon for a female to be color blind. Only about 0.4% of women in the US are color blind, where 7% of males are. Apparently for a female to be color blind, both mother and father have to have the same defect on their X chromosome.

We did a little research to try and figure out what a red-green color blind person sees and here is what we found.

A Braeburn apple and a Granny Smith.

The second row shows how a color blind person would view the same apples.

If we tell Alex something is red, she will tell us red next time we ask her, but I think that is just because she remembers it. If we introduce new red items, she always identifies them as green.

If she is in fact color blind, I already told Josh we are completely redoing our Christmas tree. We have all red ornaments. Alex is already showing a pure love for all things Christmas and I want her to be able to enjoy and appreciate our tree as much as we do!

Happy Halloween!

This was Alex's first year to go trick or treating! The last 2 years, she just seemed too young to really realize what was going on. She LOVED it! She was not afraid to go to the doors and knock.

We started off by going to a neighborhood party with our friends, the Mikitaroffs. Josh has been sick since Friday evening so he had to sit out on the activities, but my parents came in town so they went with us.
After the party, Alex and Kate went trick or treating together. They were sooo cute!

Alex LOVED having her Popi and Nomi there. Popi even held the little ballerina when she got too tired to keep walking!

Something about Alex

There is something about this little girl I absolutely adore. Well actually, there are about a million somethings I love and adore!

I love how sweet and silly she is!

I love how she told me yesterday, Daddy was her best friend!
I love how she will stop whatever she is doing to give me a hug or a kiss!

I love her little sing songy voice!

I love that she loves talking to Nomi, Grandma, Popi and Grandpa on the phone!

Most of all, I love that she is a mommy's girl.

Ballet and Tap

Alex is kinda hit or miss with her dance class. Once she gets there, she has fun, but she never wants to get ready or leave the house. She refused to go into the class unless I went in with her so I spent most of the time sitting in the corner watching. I'm so glad I took my camera this week because they were sooo cute!

Alex is going to be a ballerina for Halloween.

This is her costume (and new leotard or dance)!

She has done so well with her potty training. We had one accident this week at home. It was my fault, I told her I was going to pick out her clothes, then she'd potty before she got dressed. I got sidetracked on the phone and before I knew it, she ran to me telling me she had pottied. :( We've been out and about this week and she has done GREAT! I can now say I've seen more public bathrooms this week than I ever have. When we go somewhere, I try to make a mental note of where the bathroom is in case we have to run there. We had 3 false alarms at Barnes and Noble the other day, but I would much rather make multiple trips to the bathroom than have an accident! She doesn't seem to have any fear of using different toilets and does pretty good sitting on an adult size toilet!

Spooky!!

We went for our yearly family pumpkin patch trip today. It's a little local pumpkin patch that donates the proceeds to Habitat for Humanity. We've gone to the same place since Alex's first October! Unfortunately, since we waited so long the pumpkins were a little soft so we took a few pictures then headed to the grocery store for a pumpkin!

Alex watched Josh work on our pumpkin while I made dinner.

Alex was even sweet enough to let Cooper lick the pumpkin scoop!

Josh and the pumpkin!

The pumpkin (and one of my mums I got for $5 at Lowes!!!)

Meet Spooky! Alex loves the word Spooky so she named our pumpkin Spooky Pumpkin!

Adorable

Saturday we went to Josh's company cook off. Josh volunteered to be in the pie throwing booth. He had pies thrown at him for 20 minutes. We missed most of it because Alex decided she had to go to the bathroom. When he was done, I snapped my favorite picture of Josh and Alex. I love that in the middle of all the chaos, all she wanted to go was kiss her Daddy!

I love seeing their sweet little lips puckered up to kiss!