Happy 1/2 Birthday Sierra

Just a short post marking the 1/2 birthday for my little girl, mostly because I also need to mark the special occasion that she actually smiled for the camera!! That in itself is a reason for me to be excited because it rarely happens. She hasn't yet caught the 'little supermodel' bug and turned into a pose queen whenever she sees the camera. Usually I get a "cheese" as she turns away to continue whatever activity she has going on.

Anyway, here she is getting her height recorded on our growth chart for 2 1/2 years old!

37 inches for anyone who cares for the details

Sierra's favorites February edition

1. All the letters of the alphabet!! This school year Sierra started attending the 2 year old class at Nashua Child Learning Center at our church on Mondays and Wednesdays. For a while I struggled with the idea of sending my only child to school/day care when I am a stay at home mom, but Rob and I had some very good reasons for deciding to give it a shot. I am so glad we did! She loves going and has given us so many surprises over what she is learning. Before Christmas she shocked us by correctly naming the magnet letters that she has always enjoyed playing with. So I started asking her what letter is this? over and over and she knew them! Her very favorite thing to do now is pick out letters for us which is why I bought this cute little alphabet cookie cutter set. Here is a video of her first go at making cookies...

2.4.10 alphabet cookies from Vanessa Fringer on Vimeo.

2. The Little Einsteins. I have to admit that I like them a lot too :) For those of you without toddlers these are cartoons on the Disney Channel and they teach classical music and art in adventure settings. I got 3 DVDs for her to watch on our car ride to PA last month and she ONLY wanted to watch those 3 even though we had several other options with us. By the end of our vacation she had the opening song and much of the dialogue from several episodes memorized. I need to get a video of her singing that because it is super cute.

3. Balloons! I have no idea why since we never have balloons but she just LOVES balloons. Luckily we got one from our friend Jill after Chase's birthday party and she was in heaven! She just holds it by the string, nothing too exciting from my standpoint but it was the greatest gift to her.

4. Singing and Dancing

5. Being a princess. This is a new found favorite that we discovered while visiting friends in PA. We have no dress up clothes for her right now so when she got to share her friends clothes you could see in her face how absolutely beautiful she felt.

6. Chocolate pudding. Ok, anything chocolate, and yes she did get that from me. I do limit her chocolate intake but it is just so cute when she looks at me and asks to have "chloclate pudding".

New Start for 2010

I am one day shy of it being a whole YEAR since I last made a blog post. Wow, what happened to Vanessa the blogger?? Back in December I decided that my new years resolution would be making at least one blog post each month in 2010. Obviously that didn't happen but here is my fresh start just a few days into February. I'm not even going to try to make a 'catch-up' post for the majority of 2009 so if anyone needs to be filled in on any details you can feel free to email me. Ok, one minor detail to catch everyone up on...I'm currently 7 months pregnant with a little boy!

We've had an eventful start to this year that is worthy of sharing. After years of putting it off due to marriage, buying a house, having a baby, buying our second house, selling our first house (after we bought the second...that was a scary few months!) Rob has finally been able to get started on his Doctoral Program. I'm very proud of him for starting this long and hard endeavor. The first step in officially starting was to take a two week trip out to Kansas City for meetings with his advisor and lots of reading/research. So on January 14th the three of us drove down to my parents house in PA and a day later he flew off and left Sierra and I with two weeks to spend visiting with family and friends. I was in heaven! We had a great time bouncing back and forth between my parents house and my brother Andy's house, a little over an hour away. I was very proud of how well Sierra adjusted to so much change, several different sleeping arrangements, and many different play dates. She loved all of her 'new friends' (mostly all the new toys to play with is my guess). We had a great time with her cousins too. I could tell she was very comfortable with them because Kathy and I had our hands full breaking up toddler fights. Many times we were trying hard not to laugh at all of the drama the three kids were causing.

I had such a great time with my family and the many close friends living in the Ephrata/Lititz area. I wish the distance between New Hampshire and Pennsylvania wasn't so far!

We've been back home for one week now and with just under 2 months until our baby is due, we've got some work around the house to do! Rob just about finished up our bathroom renovation project today by adding the shelving for the linen closet. Then the other big things to do are repainting the dining room (upon my request...I'm just a little tired of the current color), a small painting job in the nursery, moving some furniture around to set up Sierra's new toddler bed and putting the bassinet and other various baby furniture in our room for the time being. Sierra gets a few more months of having her own room and then comes the fun part of transitioning the baby boy into that room as well. I hope she learns to sleep through crying quickly!

That is long enough for now I suppose. But here are two very amusing pictures of Sierra from today. She started asking me to give her pony tails and then kept handing me elastics so I just kept going! She loved it and didn't even want me to take them out for nap time. Rob and I were enjoying her new look all day :)

Two Month Recap

It is time to get everyone caught up with the Fringer Family. There hasn't been much going on up here in NH but here is at least a few pictures of Sierra to catch you up on how big she is getting.
Christmas: We spent Christmas in Pennsylvania with my family and had a very nice visit. Immediately after Christmas day several of us discovered how bad we were with taking pictures this year and we have no idea why. Rob did a great job of videoing everyone opening presents but there were not many snap shots taken. Sierra was given a baby doll and stroller which she fell in love with and wasn't interested in opening any other presents (not even the soccer ball that I tried to prove was much more fun than a baby doll). It was a great day but long for us as we drove over night from NH and arrived around 7am. A few days after Christmas we had to say bye-bye to Rob since he needed to be back in NH for work and Sierra and I got to stay in PA through New Years Day. We spent several days with Andy, Kathy, Austin and Brayden. Sierra is still working on 'playing nice' with her cousin Austin. He was great and wanted to play with her while she preferred to scream whenever he was near. I did manage to get a nice picture of the cousins taking a yogurt break together.
Finally New Years Eve came and I was able to get out on my own to spend some time with my aunts, cousins and PopPop (I have no pictures of that event either). Sierra spent New Years Eve with her grandparents and provided some entertainment for their friends from church. But I think by this point in the vacation she was ready to get back to her familiar surroundings back home. Here is my favorite picture from her celebrations...
That brings us to January. The only really remarkable thing is the amount of snow we got this month. Each week we were getting more and that usually meant another 8-10 inches. so this was the typical view out our living room window...
And that also meant...
ICE! Unfortunately because of this ice we have had numerous leaks into our kitchen and one night Rob was even on the kitchen roof pounding away at a foot of ice at 1 in the morning! The good news is that my handy husband can take care of these issues but at some point during the warmer months we will be dishing out some money for re-shingling the roof and redoing the ceiling in the kitchen.

In further Sierra news, she's definitely growing! I could tell by the fact that her one pair of pants can no longer cover her bum each time she bends over. It was pretty funny watching her walk around with the waist of her pants sitting below her bum.
A few other day to day pictures: this is what our mornings look like
Acting a little crazy throughout the day:
And finally Sierra had her first attempt at dress up the other day. I was trying to get her dressed for the day but she was more interested in her basket of hats and mittens. She had me put TWO of her hats on her plus one pair of mittens and then ran away from me when I tried to get pants and a long sleeve shirt on. So I took a picture:

Happy Baby Shower Fran!

Do not be alarmed, baby and Vanessa are not in the same sentence anywhere in this blog post. This is a post about my wonderful friend Fran's baby coming in February so please no one be confused. Two weekends ago many of my close friends from college took over Fran's house for a great time celebrating Fran and Jason becoming first time parents. Eryn, Carson and I drove down to PA from NH, Beth came from VA, Jessica came from Pittsburgh and lucky Jill had the shortest drive from Ephrata. Eryn and I actually won prizes at the shower for driving the farthest. I was pretty proud:) Even though I almost threw my gps out the window for nearly failing us within the last 1/2 hour of our trip at midnight, but it all ended alright. Here are some pictures from the shower compliments of Bethany Lyle, official photographer:

A shot of the hysterical competition of who could dress the baby the fastest. Jay seriously needs help learning how to dress babies blindfolded. Who does this on a regular basis & can teach him?

Fran's sister Nathalie put together one of the nicest showers I've been to and everyone had a great time. And Fran was very gracious to host 5 extra girls plus one seriously cute 6 month old boy for a few nights. It was hours of laughter, fun stories and great memories. I love all these girls!
By Sunday evening it was just Eryn and I left at Fran's house and I actually wanted to try my hand at scrapbooking for the first time. This is pretty intimidating stuff for me since I completely lack any sense of creativity AND my friends could be professional scrapbookers (scrappers?). I'm sure there is such a thing, right? They all have amazing talent and I usually just sit there with my mouth hanging open looking through their books. Anyway, I'm determined to put something together for Sierra so I took this opportunity for Eryn and Fran to walk me through the process. Eryn basically did all the work because I made her, Fran pretty much has her own store of supplies that she opened up to me, and I did a fabulous job of gluing things to the page. Wha-la! Here are my first two scrapbook pages!
Maybe by next spring I'll have another page completed. At this rate I'll have Sierra's book done by the time she gets married.

Ice Anyone?

For those of you who don't necessarily follow the news from the Northeast part of the US, parts of New England are still trying to cope with days of power outages. Here is the little story of the Fringer family dealings over the weekend...
Friday morning around 1am Rob and I awoke to a BOOM and then flashing blue lights outside our window. I didn't know what was going on and was very confused in my sleepy state until Rob told me it was just our power going out and a cop car outside (possibly moving a fallen branch). Ok, I realized it would be a cold night but just snuggled under the covers and went back to sleep. Sleep did take a little while since I kept hearing crashes of branches falling outside but luckily nothing came near to damaging our house. When I woke again at the normal rising time we realized that the power would probably be out for a while once we looked outside at the massive covering of ice everywhere. It amazes me how something that looks so pretty can be so destructive. Here is what our property looked like.

So much for my beautiful, tall lilac tree
And another tree down

We were able to spend the night with some friends who were lucky enough not to have lost power and we had a nice time with them on Friday. Saturday Rob and Steve (our youth pastor) were all over the place assessing the situation at church, checking out our place and just trying to be of help to anyone who needed it. I was so surprised and felt so blessed that our power came back around noon on Saturday. So we had it pretty easy compared to most of the people in the greater Nashua area. Our only lasting effect was that our cable tv and internet didn't come back on until Tuesday night which wasn't so bad since I could probably do with less of both of those. As for the rest of our community, we are still hearing of people from church who even today (Wednesday) do not have power and may not until after Christmas since there seems to be a shortage of replacement transformers for the power lines. But it was a blessing to see so many people at church on Sunday even though we had to keep all of our coats on, and there were so many people offerering spare heaters, spare beds and anything else they could think of to people who had a need. I believe that the number was around 400,000 people who were affected by this ice storm and lost their power for a few days. Wow!

HI

Hi everyone! I wanted to share Sierra's first word with you, so HI! So far this is all she is saying clearly but she does like to talk quite a bit in her own language.
I haven't made a post in a while but you haven't missed much either. It has been a pretty relaxing October and November. Sierra took her first steps back on September 13th and then took another month to really get going with it but she is a pro now. It is so cute to see her walking all over the place.
At the end of October we experienced Sierra's first flight out to California to visit Grandma and Grandpa Fringer, cousins, aunt and uncle. I knew ahead of time that considering how very active she is, a 6 hour flight would be pretty interesting. And that's just what it was. I can't say that the first flight was horrible, although it really felt like it at the time. I know that she could have behaved much worse but I don't even want to imagine what that would be like. There were fits of screaming, attempts to escape our little row of seats, and sadly, tears shed by me (Vanessa that is, Rob managed to get through the flight without crying. At least one of us did.) Finally we made it to CA without any angry looks from our neighboring passengers. Sierra was a wonderful house guest for her grandparents and we all enjoyed the visit very much. Below is a picture of Sierra in the opposite attire needed for the beautiful weather out there, but modeling her new winter coat that we definitely needed once we got back home to New Hampshire. It has seen a lot of use the past few days when the temps haven't reached any higher than the mid-30s.
We don't have any snow yet but I'll be sure to take a picture of the first snowfall. Hopefully we'll get some snowboots for Sierra before that happens so I can get some pictures of her in the first snowfall.