Julianna and I returned from Grandma and PawPaw's today. We were greeted by a letter from the IRS informing us that they are auditing another year of taxes. Julianna might learn some choice words other than audit.
And now for a few highlights from our trip. We visited Uncle Don at work and got to sit in his helicopter. This is Uncle Don's seat.

From Easter, or as Nana calls it, Evey's Sister.
I have more to post, but I need some strong chocolate to recover from my IRS greeting. Good thing Lent is over...

Julianna has always had an avidity for selecting her own shoes.
Running, with ribbons on our knees.

Julianna has unique ways of sitting on the chairs.

Run out of seating in your TV room?
Try an old computer tower.

This morning when we brought the paper in, Julianna requested the "airplane section". I guess she is keeping up on the latest news on the EADS/Northrop Grumman tanker contract.

Who has the Metro section?

Throw me another moon pie, mister.
Julianna told me she wanted two hair bows. I started looking for two pink ones to match her outfit, but she declared one of them had to be blue. It is so exciting to have her learning new things. Right now, she is learning "karaoke" since the current favorite video is "sesame sings karaoke". Well, I need to go because it is almost time for my personal favorite, Ladybug picnic. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12...

Julianna and I had another interesting conversation this morning. She was chasing one of the cats down the hall and I gave her my standard phrase of mutual nonaggression. She looked at me and said "aggression". I repeated nonaggression, she repeated aggression. I think the cats are doomed.

Finally, a new post. The flu hit our house, but we are recovering. Julianna did go to the adoption clinic at UAB. They think she is essentially caught up on her motor skills. She tested at 2 years, six months. Chronologically, she is two years, eight months. Her language skills, though, are still a concern. She is finally interested in videos, but only ones with music and sesame street characters. The only exception is The Aristocats, which I think I now know by heart. It does, however, give me relatively uninterrupted blogging time.

I have decided to run. My goal is to run a marathon, hopefully next January. I've been taking Julianna out with me and she is a tough task master. When I run, she yells "faster, faster", then giggles mercilessly and when I stop to walk, she yells "again, again". Hopefully she won't make me eat raw eggs....

Julianna is quite fascinated by Phillip's new Star Wars book. She calls it the "Chewy Book". She gets to look at it right before bed, after she reads her other books. Phillip has shown her parts of Episode IV and she has her very own R2D2. I let her watch part of Episode I: The Phantom Menace last week. When I told Phillip, he said he had not planned on letting them watch the first three movies until they were 10 or 12 because it is like letting them read the apocrypha.

Planes, trains and automobiles....
Fixing the seat on her tricycle.

Julianna and I had quite the conversation this morning. It went something like this:


JC: Nandy (candy)
Mom: You would like some candy?
JC: Purple nerds
Mom: I will have to find the purple nerds.
JC proudly strolls over to the 'secret hiding' place and declares: Up there. Momma get it.


On the plus side, I found a bag of unopened Christmas chocolate while digging around for the purple nerds.

This lovely sequence of events happened last week.

Julianna removing Daddy's wallet from the drawer:

Checking it for money:
I think we might be in trouble when she hits the teenage years...

This election cycle, Alabama moved its primary up so that it would be a relevant event rather than a rubber stamp for the already selected candidate. The primary will be on Super Tuesday for most of the state, but Super Tuesday happens to coincide with Fat Tuesday and in Mobile and Baldwin county, the voters will be to preoccupied with their pre-lentan preparations to vote. Our primary, therefore, is today. For all you sticklers, the votes will be sealed until next Tuesday and one election site will be open. Legal disclaimers aside, here are the photos of our day.

Getting ready to head out the door. She had to have "Big Bear" with her. He also has to wear a diaper, which keeps popping off because his butt is a little bit bigger than Julianna's.

At the polling place. There was not a single campaign sign anywhere. Usually the turn is covered.

Showing off our sticker.
This one is completely unrelated to the voting. It just warms my heart so to see her "reading" a book.

Things around here are quite fun.

Rocking our babies. The green one is "Alisoar". It is a dinosaur, but Julianna was calling it an alligator. It sort of morphed into Alisoar. He has joined the sleeping crew.

Everyone is now tucked in and being read to.

Putting a diaper on "toy"

On this day, she decided that the diaper had to be powdered. She also checks them for poopies, takes them off, rolls them up and puts them in the trash.

Putting the babies to bed is our favorite game. We usually do it a couple of times a day. She calls it "lay down". Cannot for the life of me figure out where she learned that. I'm just waiting for her to pick up some of our other phrases, like "you need to pursue a policy of mutual nonaggression with the cats".

Here we are on our way to eat lunch with Mimi. Julianna loves lunch with Mimi. She will go for hours before we leave saying "lunch, Mimi". Mimi introduced her to ketchup. I got Mimi a lovely t-shirt to show my appreciation. On this particular day, Julianna was dipping her chicken all the way in the ketchup so it was completely covered. After awhile, she started eating the ketchup straight out of the container with a fork. I think we might loose our standing with the Mustard Museum.

Yesterday, I put Julianna down after changing her diaper and told her to run around while I selected some clothes. I was washing my hands when she came running down the hall yelling "elephant dress, elephant dress". How could I refuse such a cute request, especially since she went in her closet and selected it herself.

I discovered during nap time today that the Australian Open tennis tournament is into its fourth day. How did this happen? I used to be so up on the tennis schedule.

Maybe it was because my cabinets needed redecorating today?

Or maybe because pizza elmo needed a new diaper?

Or maybe it was the counting lesson--one lollipop?


Probably though, it was just all the fun we are having in my little corner of toddler heaven.

Here are the good ones from Daddy's camera:
Putting our babies to bed.
Showing off cousin Jessica's dress from London.


Giving "toy" a walk down the hall. Caterpillar is too hard. Notice he is in diapers.


This one I wish had turned out . Doesn't she look so grown up, almost like she is out the door with a briefcase and java.
And here is what I normally get.
Enough whining.

My favorite blogger posted at Christmas that she took nearly 700 pictures of her twins. I'm having blogger envy. I was doing better at taking pictures, but once again I'm stuck with Daddy's camera. I never realized how fast mine was until I had to use his. I think tomorrow I'll post the outcome of today's camera use.

Julianna has a few new year's resolutions. First up, reading instructions.

Next, collecting her own power tools.


















Seriously, Julianna has moved to a toddler bed. She tried to climb in the crib on Monday and fell. She did not hurt herself, mostly scared her and mommy. She has done very well so far. She has not climbed out once down for the night, but I'm sure it is coming. Her only real complaint about the bed is that our cat Baby likes to sleep in it too.

Make sure you read the post before this one, for an explanation for the new colors and name.

You might have noticed that the blog name and the template have changed. Our family is growing beyond Julianna and we want the blog to reflect that. If you have not heard yet, we are in the processing of adopting a son. He will be four on Saturday, and like before, our agency will not allow us to post his photo until we have final approval from China. We are many months away from travel as we had just turned in our application when the agency contacted us. It is a funny story. They called and emailed with a message that they had some questions about our application. We thought maybe we had checked some box wrong or they needed some clarification about our work status, but no, the question was would we consider this child. Now the paper chase has begun in earnest and we are looking toward Beijing.