Stockings!

Tonight is Christmas Eve in the Sagar household.  Yes, I know that it's December 17, but we are leaving town on the 22nd, so we needed to have our family celebration early. James has the weekend off (to play the Xbox games that he'll be getting as his gift), so we decided to do our "Christmas morning" celebration tomorrow...which makes tonight Christmas Eve! 

We had a very nice dinner tonight, and before Ella headed to bed, we opened our stockings.  Here are a few pictures...

Yes, that's a doggie stocking on the bottom right part of the pictures.  We got it for Max three years ago, and he knows that it's his!
 














 Max got his stocking first, since he was so excited to see James take it off the mantle...

Then James went next...and yes, he was as excited as the dog!  He got some magazines, an Xbox game called Vanquish, and of course some candy.

Ella watched James open his stocking, and then she got interested in her own.  I guess it occurred to her that there might be fun stuff inside!  She got down to business...

 Pulling out her first present...

She needed a little bit of help, since she still thinks you're supposed to eat the wrapping paper.

Then I got to open mine!  I got a beautiful garden magazine, candy, and some kitchen tools that I really wanted.  Fun!!

 Ella and Max playing with his new squeaky toy...

Tomorrow will be fun, too.  We'll read the Christmas story, open presents, and have a nice breakfast!

The Plague

Well, I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't posted anything this week.  We've had a bunch of sickness going around.  Ella and her nanny have both had a yucky virus, which means two things:

1)  I'm not getting any sleep at all, since Ella is up ALL NIGHT.

2)  I'm not getting any breaks from taking care of her since my nanny is sick.  So I'm having to work with a sick baby.

And now it means one more thing....James is sick, too.

And he has an interview on Monday. 

Not cool.

Tinkerbell

For the first time in more than twenty years, I bought a Halloween costume.  It wasn't the one I wanted to buy, but I'm so glad that I got it.  I wanted to dress our little one up as an elephant (Get it?  Ella-phant?), but her daddy wouldn't hear of it.  James insisted on a Disney princess costume.  In retrospect, I'm so glad he did.

Early in October, I headed to Target to look over the selection, and there was only one Disney princess costume that was anything close to Ella's size....Tinkerbell.  How fitting, right?  She's so teeny tiny - still only fifteen and a half pounds at 8 months old - so we dressed her up as a little fairy for Halloween.

And it was perfect.





















As soon as I put her costume on her, she lit up like a candle and turned into a really-truly fairy!

She even posed for the camera with her wings!

Since we don't live in the safest town in the world, we decided to forgo the normal  trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.  Instead, we took Tinkerbell over to the St. Louis Zoo for Boo at the Zoo, which is an annual tradition with all the kiddos in town.

They had the place all decorated, including a HUGE blowup spider over the front entrance!

The way it works is that the kids visit each animal cage, and they get candy at a booth set up at each cage.  Ella wasn't really interested in the candy, since she's never eaten any and wasn't going to eat any, but she loved the animals!  When we went to see the grizzly bears, she held on tight to James.

Small blame to her - those guys are BIG.

We also checked out the giraffes and the peacocks, which share a cage.

The zebra kept hiding behind a tree.

Ella wanted to chase the peacock.

It was a fun day.

Candy!!!

I posted this picture earlier tonight, to show how much Halloween candy we bought for the trick-or-treaters that were supposed to come to our door...

















My initial plan was to later post an after photo, showing how little candy we had left.  Unfortunately, we got a grand total of TWO kids who came to the door.  Isn't that pitiful?  We live on a major city street, across from a major city park, and nobody came to our house!!  That means that I've got to figure out what to do with all the sugary goodness that is sitting on my dining room table.  I think I'll take it to work with me this week and see if the professors want to eat it. 

Sigh.

Next year, I'll probably just leave the porch lights off.

This is what happens...

 ...when you leave your dog at home with a box of cake mix in the kitchen.




















You'll notice that there's almost no mix left in the bag.  Yuck. 

Monkey Baby

I really didn't teach her this.          





















It's just further proof that it's in the genes.  (Right, Meghan?)

Cookie!

We passed a new milestone today - Ella's first cookie!  We were at Babies R Us looking for baby gates to put on the staircases, and I found some Gerber Biter Cookies that were supposed to be for crawlers.              





















She LOVED them!  Both hands, straight into the mouth...

She always looks so surprised when she tastes something new.

It's so much fun to watch her experience new things.  Even though they usually make a huge mess.

Tutu Much!

I've seen a lot on the internet about tutus, so I thought I'd show the gorgeous one that my Aunt Crystal bought for Ella.  She got it over the summer, but until now, it's been too big to stay up on the baby's almost nonexistent hips.  However, I pulled it out this fall to see how it fits now.

It's perfect!!

Of course, the first thing Ella did was try to see how it tasted.















Then she pouffed it out and took it for a spin....er....crawl.

 What a thrilling new toy!

She felt so pretty in it that for once, I didn't have any trouble getting her to pose!

 Of course, like she does with all her new toys, eventually, she decided to show it to the other child in the family...Max! 

I don't think he got the point, though, because he got up and walked off.

Undaunted, she went back to primping for the camera...

Autumn Colors

Once upon a time, I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia for four whole years.  Every fall in Charlottesville, a miracle happens, and it becomes the most beautiful place in the world.  Like Japan in cherry blossom time, God works an amazing feat of nature, and the trees paint the world with colors that are more vivid than anything you could imagine.  In C'ville, this takes the form of yellow, orange, purple, and red leaves on the trees that make your eyes ache with their beauty.

I no longer live in Charlottesville.

Sigh.

Normally, I don't miss it, but during October, I dream about it.  And so, in order to fill up the mysterious void in my soul that simply won't go away until I've seen the trees change colors, I pull out my camera and go hunting.  Saint Louis is no C'ville, but it does have some treasures if you go looking for them. Here's what I found...

This one is in the park across the street.
 



















These twins are three blocks west of our house...

This guy peeps over the gate at the south entrance of Tower Grove Park...

This fella is on the far end of our block, across the street from Megan and Chad's house...

And this guy, a couple blocks south of us, is still in the beginning stages of his transformation.  I'll probably go check him out again next week.





















How are things lookin' where you live?

Pumpkin Patch

Ever since the weather started to cool off a little bit at the end of September, I have been on a mission.

A pumpkin mission.

I wanted to dress Ella up in her pumpkin dress (courtesy of my Mom) and take her to get some pumpkin patch pictures.  There was only one problem - where to find the patch?  In St. Louis, we have pumpkins galore, but since it's a city, there aren't a lot of pumpkins growing in the non-existent middle-of-the-city fields.  A week ago, we drove WAY out into the country to find a patch that I had located on the internet, but when we got there, it was disappointing.  Despite their grand online promises of pumpkins galore, they were actually more of a corn maze with a small pile of pumpkins on the side.

Boo.

Well, this past week I was delighted to find out that the Prouhet Farm, where we buy our fresh vegetables each weekend, had a pumpkin patch!  YAY!  Sunday afternoon, we headed out there for pictures.

The Prouhet Farm is awesome.  They'll even let you pick your own stuff if you want, which I love.  It's been there since the 1800's.

When we got there, I was excited to see all the pumpkins...

Here's a picture of James in the farmstand, where they sell the pre-picked stuff.

They also had some pretty mums for sale.

This fella was pulling the hayride cart.

The spinach was piled high on the counter in baskets...

And this guy was giving pony rides.  Too bad that Ella was too little, because she was fascinated by him!  Maybe next year.

She was also fascinated by this big red tractor.

This was her reaction when we didn't let her climb on the tractor...

...which of course cracked her up...

A picture of her pretty smocked pumpkin dress, which her GG bought for her!

Then we played with the pumpkins!

Ella was trying to figure out what these big orange things were.

 Then we went into the patch to find a good pumpkin for our house.  Ella liked this one.
 



















"Hey, Daddy!  Can I have this one for my room?"
 

She decided to hitch a ride in the cart with the pumpkins on the way back to the farmstand!

 So cute!

What a fun day!