Sofia

She is such a crazy girl.  She has a fun sense of humor and an awesome sense of style.  I hate to label her but she does tend to be mischievous in her quiet, sneaky way - she's usually the culprit behind the crime. Her favorite pastime is throwing things out the window/balcony. Namely: hard boiled eggs (because she wanted to) any fruit in our fruit basket (for the birds to eat) magnets from the fridge (so Hannah couldn't have them), paper (airplanes of course), etc...

There is rarely a dull moment with her around.

She also likes to keep us up at night.  She goes in spurts, but lately has been waking up a couple of times a night with bad dreams, needing a drink, etc.....and she's usually up by 5:30 AM.

She loves to play with her big sister.  And loves to fight with her even more. She is so sweet with her little brother.  Every morning she waits for him to wake up so she can play with him.

This Little Guy

He is now almost 9 months and has been very busy.  

- He got 2 teeth a few weeks ago and is working on 2 more coming through.  I don't particularly care for being bitten, but at least it explains the extra fussiness.

- He started crawling over a month ago (much to my chagrin) and quickly mastered the task.  I love to see him grow and develop, but it is just such a dirty phase - and the bathroom and kitchen floor disturb me now matter how much they are cleaned. 

- He had his first haircut a few weeks ago.  Maybe it was only a little bit of hair hanging over the ears, but it's definitely more than either of our girls had at this age.  Why is it that guys seem to get the features girls want?

- He has gone down to only waking up twice a night, but sleeps awfully whenever we go anywhere.  That should teach us never to go anywhere, but hasn't yet.

His favorite activity is unloading the shoe rack.  When Hannah was a baby and would do things like this it drove me crazy....now I'm just glad he's entertained for a few minutes!

He generally gets pretty bundled up for the park.  He is pretty good at supervising, but has recently graduated to swinging.  With 2 big sisters, he gets pushed a little higher than I'm comfortable with, but he seems to enjoy it.  A thrill seeker, maybe?

Whenever I pull out the camera, he comes crawling to me before I can get a decent picture of him. 

Dance Show

We have had several dance shows as of late.  Usually one of the girls provides music while the other dances for us.

In this case Sofia was standing and singing.  Once she got tired, she reverted to banging on the drums.  Here Hannah is in mid twirl/spin/cartwheel.

Oh, the things you can do when you are bored!

Babies

The girls recently went through a 'baby' phase.  Every day they would take turns going to the hospital (their cardboard box) with a baby in their tummy.  The other one would be the nurse until the Dr (lucky me) came to help deliver the baby.

After 'delivering' the baby they were sure to measure, weigh, clean it off, then wrap it up and take good care of it.

This happened 10 - 15 times a day!!

Cyprus

We finally made it to Cyprus and had a short, but good trip.  Walking off of the plane was amazing...it was warm!!!!  There were a lot of places here in Turkey we could have visited (and still want to see), but in the end going somewhere warm won!  We were looking to thaw out and we were successful!!  It was worth the trip.

Our 1st major surprise came when we got to our rental car.  Things were a little backwards...because they drive on the left side!  We had no idea.  Obviously we hadn't done that much research.  We had several Thailand flashbacks and James did just fine driving, but it was still so funny to us.

Girne Castle

We visited the Girne (Kyrenia in English) castle.  Supposedly the castle in the movie Snow White was copied from this one.  It has been a few years since I've seen the movie, so I don't know if that's the case, but that's what we were told.  We had fun exploring all the nooks and crannies of the castle.  I love that it wasn't all roped off.

Except this view from the top of the castle makes me a little nervous because it's not blocked off...I was holding onto both of the girls pretty tightly to make sure no one jumped off.

Amazing view!!

There were some people working on a garden in the middle of the courtyard.  Hannah and Sofia were fascinated and wanted to help pull weeds.  The workers were kind enough to oblige...so they helped pull weeds, a few flowers, and found lots of snail shells.

We took so many photos of the castle and had lots of fun playing in it, but our internet is slow enough....I figured it would take us days to upload any more photos.

We had our Valentine's Dinner at a nice restaurant.  It doesn't really look it in the picture, but it was a pretty classy place.  The food was amazing, but the entire time I was terrified the girls were going to break something.

Turtle Beach

Our favorite part of the trip was the beach.  It was to cold to swim, but we spent several hours just playing in the sand and dipping our toes in the Mediterranean.    

The girls had a blast...at least Sofia did until she fell in the water and got soaked.  After that she stayed a little further up on shore and helped build a giant sand castle.

Hannah truly is our California girl.  She loves the sand and is not afraid to get wet.  She was in heaven.

TJ did a pretty good job manning the sand castle.  He actually didn't eat any sand until he found a rock...then he kept trying to eat the rock...along with all the sand.

We had to attempt a family photo!  And of course our footprints in the sand!!  

She's 3

Sofia had a birthday a few weeks ago and she turned 3.  We celebrated the day with pancakes for breakfast per her request.  

We had the regular daily happenings including: dancing with Mini, some bowling, chilling with the little brother, building forts, and of course going 'swimming.'

That evening we opened presents.  She has such exciting facial expressions, it makes things fun.

  

Who knew opening up some socks, house shoes, and a homemade book from your big sister could be so fun?!!  I love the fact that she was so pleased with her gifts that cost a whopping 8 TL ($4).  We ended the evening with some homemade funfetti cake and some scary looking purple frosting.  She was happy!

I couldn't resist this photo of Hannah reading the book to Sofia that she made for her.

A Little Delay

The University was on break and we decided to go on a little vacation the week before the new semester started.  We were looking for warmth without having to travel too far.  So we decided on Cyprus.

We had to leave at 5 AM to catch our flight.  It's a small airport (4 gates) so luckily you don't have to get their too early.  Unfortunately, when we got to the airport our flight had been cancelled and because it's a small airport, there aren't that many flights going out....and the next flight they could get us on was the next day.  We really wanted to spend the day on the beach enjoying warmth....not going back to our apartment with no food and nothing to do.  After talking with the airlines they were willing to put us up in a hotel because of the missed flight.  And.....it wasn't a hotel in the city, it was a resort style hotel up the mountain right next to the ski slopes.

If we weren't going to make it to the warm beaches, this was the best we could do.

The hotel had a kiddy pool that was bearable (not warm, but not freezing) and a much larger, much colder regular pool.  

We didn't have most of our snow clothes, but we were able to rent a sled and spend a little time going up and down a nearby hill.  The girls had fun.  We all had fun.

If we had to delay our vacation a day, this was a good way to do it.