Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day for the Bowman family wasn't quite what we were expecting. The girls were looking forward to class parties, and Matt and I were planning on a lunch date while they were in school.  Julia came down with the stomach flu early Thursday morning, though, and very much needed Friday (Valentine's Day) to recover. So only Audrey got to party with her friends... aren't they cute?

 

Julia was pretty sad about missing her class party, but after getting a few calories in her she felt good enough to enjoy the flowers Daddy brought home. She especially loved that hers were white laced with crimson. (Never forget that this child's a Bama fan!) 

 Audrey loved her flowers too.

 Audrey was thrilled to pose for me all afternoon. Here she is with her box of chocolates.

... and with her heart shaped cake.

...and again because I wasn't too thrilled with the original facial expression. ;)

Finally, dear Julia felt energetic enough to decorate her heart cake as well.

Happy Valentine's Day

2014

8 months later... I'm going to try to keep this up with a blog or 2 a month and will (hopefully) backtrack to cover the 8 missing months. 

2014 hasn't been so great thus far. After a couple of weeks of severe back pain, Matt had surgery January 10th for a partially ruptured disc.  He's doing well as he recovers, but it will still be several weeks before he's back to "normal".

The week of his surgery was (obviously) very painful for him, but I'll readily admit that it was very stressful for me.  No one has ever accused me of handling stress well, and that combined with exhaustion pushed me close to a breakdown for a few days.  The whole situation cemented my yearning to live closer to family. Friends down here made many offers to help out with childcare and food, and I most definitely took advantage of it! It just would have been an extra relief to have our parents or siblings close enough to lean on too.

An early visit from Santa

Since we are visiting TN on Christmas this year, we decided that we'd once again ask Santa to make an early visit to our home. Thankfully, he obliged.

As usual, we sprinkled reindeer food.

We put out carrots for the reindeer and cookies and milk for Santa.

Ok, we actually put out pink lemonade for Santa. The reason being we were soon leaving town for a week, and I didn't want to buy another jug of milk.

 That night, Santa came!! Since it was a few days early, our Elf decided he'd stay and play until Christmas Day. 

Julia's begged for a TV in her room, but I've been pretty adamant about that not happening. Santa and I came to the agreement that she could have the TV and a DVD player - no cable and no wifi connection.

Audrey got the biggest mannequin Santa could find. (Well, within Santa's "not spending $500 on a mannequin" price range.)

 Santa left all 4 of tickets to see a movie, Frozen, that afternoon.

We ate a lot of popcorn and had a lot of fun. Merry Christmas!

 

How to make little girls cry...

I have an idea, Robertsdale. Let's put out a big Santa mailbox in the middle of a big park. Then, let's come out and take it down a week before Christmas so that kids can search and search in vain for Santa's mailbox and then break down in tears because Santa "will never get our letters."

Great.

I appreciate it.

Thankssomuch;thisdidn'tcauseheartacheformyfamilyatall!

 

Fortunately, this momma remembered that the post office had a special spot inside to mail Santa letters, so we tried there. Thank goodness this was sufficient to the girls. It might not go "directly to Santa like the one in the park", but the post office should be able to get the letters to the North Pole before too long.

Crisis averted.

Later that week, we did head back to the park to play around the Christmas decorations they so graciously left out until after Christmas. 

Yes, they're wearing shorts. Yes, it's December 20th. Yes, I do realize that one of these days we'll live in a place where flip flops and shorts aren't likely to be seen in our Christmas pictures.

 

And, just in case you were wondering... Yes, the post office did manage to deliver their Santa letters in time.

Like many moms, visions of a nice family picture and a sweet Santa picture danced in my head this December.  Matt's not into family pictures, but I thought I'd be sneaky and force him into cooperating by including "Take a family picture" as one of our countdown to Christmas activities. Here's what I wound up with... it will not be framed and hung for all to see year after year.

 

And as for that Santa picture I wanted...

Way to go, Santa. My girls (Julia in particular) finally, FINALLY cooperate when a camera is nearby and what do you do? Screw it up with your Grinchy expression. 

 

Merry Christmas, friends and family. May your pictures be better than mine!

School Christmas Parties!

I love joining the girls in their classrooms for special events. Julia, isn't always so thrilled to see me there, but let's all just agree to tell the child to "get over it!"

I keep telling Julia that one of these days she's going to regret not smiling for my pictures, but so far she isn't buying it. 

 

 Audrey, on the other hand, loves me visiting her classroom and taking her picture.

 I tried one more time to get a nice picture of Julia...

...but as you can see it got me nowhere.

...She scares me sometimes.

Julia's Baptism

September 1, 2013 

This was our second attempt.  Julia accepted Christ as her Savior on February 14th. We originally scheduled her baptism for March 10th since Meme and Pop would be in town for the girls' birthdays, but Julia got a little stage fright. She was good to go this time around.