Molly and I got Erin good for “tickle day” yesterday. I told Molly to come with me because I have to tell her a secret. At this point Erin already became suspicious. She’s such a smart chick. Anyway, I whispered into Molly’s ear that it was the day before mommy’s birthday so it’s “tickle day” so we need to go over and tickle her. Molly gets this look in her eye and a grin on her face when she’s about to go tickle someone and sure enough she did on her way over to tickle mommy. Secret covert highly classified tickle operation successful.

As for the creative side of me during Erin’s birthday I attempted some flash animation. Here’s my lame but loving gesture of an attempt to say happy birthday.

-Doug

We’re so proud of Molly… she’s making great strides in potty training this week! And tonight, she made a poopy in the potty chair, a very big accomplishment. Doug was the lucky parent presiding over the milestone… I was sitting on the couch when I heard Molly exclaim, “It’s a rattlesnake!” I was a little confused at first, but Doug clued me in right away. I guess it did look like a snake…

We also posted some new pics in our January 2008 album, so check ‘em out! We’ve got pics of Doug and Molly frolicking in the snow, and fun family pics from our recent trip to Iowa!

It was another crazy weather day here in Illinois… started out beautiful and in the 50′s. About midday the temp had dropped into the 40′s and we had a severe thunderstorm with tornado warnings. By 5pm, the temp had dropped further into the 20′s with blowing snow. Now, the winds are gusting at over 40 mph and I think the windchill is easily 10 below. Yikes!

~ Erin

What a whirlwind weekend for us… we drove off to Iowa on Friday for a belated Robbins family Christmas… Nick, Karla and the girls were on leave before moving to Washington state, so they were able to fly out to Iowa for a few days. We hadn’t seen them in person since May of 2006, so we jumped on the opportunity to see them! We got to meet Danielle for the first time! Steph, Jay and drove up with little Xavier, so it was great to see him again, too!

Molly had so much fun playing with her cousins… Doug got Ava, Laina and Molly hooked on playing “hide and go seek” so that was a lot of fun to see where three little girls would decide where to hide in Grandma’s house! We ran into a couple of “sharing incidents” involving plastic necklaces but other than that, I think the girls really got along well. When Molly woke up in the morning, the first thing she wanted to do was “play with cousins!”

On Saturday, we had a Robbins family photo shoot. Surprisingly, the kids held on a lot longer than I thought they would… we were able to take lots of photos, but it sure is hard to get 5 little ones all looking happily at the camera in the same shot! Here are a couple of my favorites:

We drove home on Monday, and of course there was a nice snow storm covering our path almost the whole way back. It was fun to see the whole family get together, but I just wish the temperature made it above zero so we could have played outside in all of that Iowa snow! Oh well!

~ Erin