Happy birthday to our special four-year-old!

Adelaida amazes me every single day. She makes me laugh, she tells me stories, and she gives me so many hugs every day. More than I ever expected, I love her!


And today, we celebrate another milestone as Adelaida turns four years old.

Here are some of the traditional pink panther pictures of Adelaida over the past four years:

two months old


nine months old


one and a half years old


two years old


three years old


four years old

A princess, a flower, and a leopard

Halloween was a lot of fun this year -- Adelaida was old enough to enjoy getting dressed up and Cordelia and Estella were still young enough that they weren't frightened of people in costumes.

As usual, we had several Halloween-themed events in October: a Halloween Festival at the girls' school, two playgroup Halloween parties, and Trick-or-Treating in Old Town Albuquerque on Halloween. All were fun and we got some use out of the Halloween costumes!

Adelaida (princess), Estella (flower), and Cordelia (leopard)


This is a picture of Adelaida and her two best friends at school: Paul (Spider-Man) and Baylor (astronaut). She does everything with these two boys and they seem to like her as much as she likes them!

Snow!

We had a few inches of snow fall on Thursday evening, and another couple of inches last night. This morning, we were lamenting the fact that, this time next week, we won't have a sledding hill just outside our front door anymore, so Dale decided to take advantage of the snow while we still can.

Fortunately we hadn't yet packed the sleds, so Dale bundled himself and Adelaida up and they trekked up the mountain (ok, really they walked up seven snow-free steps to the top of the six-foot "hill").

Dale and Adelaida, ready to sled!

Wheeeee!

"Let's do it again, Daddy!"

Adelaida's first solo sled run.

"Can we have hot chocolate now?"

Busy, busy

I try to post something at least once a month, but somehow it has been almost two months since I last posted anything! We are busy, at times too busy to let you all know that we're still here and still doing well. But surely I could post just one picture of our girls, and a few sentences to let you all know what we've been up to lately...

Estella, Adelaida, and Cordelia in their Thanksgiving dresses. Dale thinks that Adelaida looks like the master-mind in this picture and Cordelia and Estella are her minions, ready to do anything she asks of them! It's hard to get three little girls to sit still for the camera, and this is one of my favorite pictures of the girls right now.


The girls are all healthy--except for a few colds, a week with the stomach flu (I'm still not sure how Estella didn't get that nasty illness!), and a little gasping-for-breath lips-turned-blue hypoxemia episode that earned Cordelia a hospital admission. Nothing out of the ordinary for a family with three young kids, and thankfully Cordelia's episode seems to have been a one-time event and she is just fine now.

The kids all dressed up for Halloween (I'll post pictures in a future post), we traveled for Thanksgiving (more on that soon), and are packing all of our belongings for a move next week (also in a future post). I'm enjoying my job and Dale is traveling a lot (really nothing post-worthy there).

Oh, and I achieved one of my goals for the year -- 2012 Christmas cards were mailed in 2012! Much better than last year's cards, which were approximately seven months late. :)

December is busy, for all of us, it seems. I hope your December is filled with fun times spent with family and friends!