We have had an action packed day around our house. First it was gymnastics this morning for Annika and I. Kris was off with Uncle Dusty running with reindeers (doing the Reindeer Run, that is). Annika still likes going to gymnastics. She'd rather bounce on the trampoline and play in the foam block pit the whole time and races through the other activities as quickly as possible however. It might be time to get her bounce house out again for a little while. We have a smaller one (8'x8') so we can set it up in the living room or in the basement.

After gymnastics we headed home to shower and get ready for our afternoon. We had Cousin Ashley's baby shower today. Annika was excited to go and play with the other kids and hopefully see Auntie Krystle and Auntie Shelly but neither of them could make it. Her little 2nd cousins Ann and Beth were there though. They are three years old and are very outgoing and touchy-feely. They love smothering Annika with hugs and kisses and pats to the head. Annika needs her personal space and lots of warm up time though. Plus, the shower was right during her usual nap time so this made for lots of tear-filled running to Mom during the party. After a while she warmed up though and was giving them hugs right back. Every once in a while she would still get overwhelmed and come running to me. She's just not used to kids like that. All the kids at her ECFE classes are her same age and they don't really play with each other yet. It's more like they play near each other but still mostly do their own thing. Of course, when we left she cried in the truck that she wanted to go back to the party so it couldn't have been that bad. When we got home though we headed upstairs for a nap and she fell asleep right away so she was definitely tuckered out.

This evening we went out for dinner and Annika was doing the funniest things. She was eating a french fry and asking us if it tasted like pizza or sandwich or strawberry or whatever else she could think of. Each time we'd say no, she'd shake her head real hard and laugh out "No!" Then as we were leaving, she said "Good-bye Miss Lady" to the server holding the door for us. And when we got to the truck, we noticed her Grover doll had fallen out and was on the ground. Daddy picked him up and gave him to Nika and she has to kiss Grover and make sure he was all right. Then as we were driving home she was demanding that I sing along with the Christmas music that was playing. Unfortunately, I didn't know the words or melody to the song very well so she was just yelling from the back seat "Mommy! Sing!" every so often. Oh and when we were getting ready to leave for dinner, I asked Annika to go find her shoes. She got distracted by the movie on TV and her toys and after a couple minutes, I asked Annika if she found her shoes yet. She walked over to me and said "I don't know where my shoes is!" I was impressed by her sentence even if she did get the last verb tense wrong. Kris and I had to stifle our giggles while I pointed out where they were to her. She just cracks us up all day long. Of course, that's when she's not whining. Oh, the whining. How do you get a child to not whine? We always make her stop whining and ask nicely (meaning saying please) for whatever she wants in a normal tone of voice but it still always comes out as a whine first. She even got a time out tonight (2 minutes sitting on the bottom stair - she even has a timer and she can't get up until the timer beeps) because she kept whining. After that she was good for about 30 seconds and then the whine came back. Argh!