We had a group birthday party last weekend with everyone in playgroup including moms and dads. Everyone has a birthday between December and March except one and since her birthday is in August, her half birthday falls perfectly into this time period. It was a group who seemed to like to party. By the time everyone left, LiLi could barely function and I believe fell asleep before I had actually laid her down in her crib. Of course, that did not stop her from getting up at 6 the next morning in quite a good mood but very tired. LiLi demonstrates her true enjoyment of cake below. She seems to have a sweet tooth that is rapidly developing. A great result of the party was that LiLi has now begun to play with her toys more after watching everyone else play with them. One of her friends did laps around the house with the shopping cart and it has inspired LiLi to do so although she keeps putting things in it that fall out.

LiLi has some obsessions as I have mentioned before and one of them is snowmen. She loves the song “Frosty the Snowman” and her Nana has a book of the song and a little snowman bell that she can hold when the story is read to her. She calls them Thumper which comes from “Thumety, Thump, Thump look at Frosty go….” Anyhow, as you can imagine, she now has quite a few snowmen and she loves to point them out to you and give them hugs. Actually, she insisted on giving a snow globe with snowmen in it a hug yesterday. Sometimes when she see them she gets so excited that she almost cries and needs her lamby for comfort.
Last week it snowed. We came home on Monday night and I let LiLi out of the car and was getting the bags out while she stared across the street. Then I heard her same “Thumper” in this awed voice and then in an excited voice and then ask for her lamby because she was so excited, she was near tears. Sure enough, across the street someone had built a snowman. She was so thrilled that she wanted to go over and give it a hug. To make things even better, she could see him out the window of the house while she ate. Poppie came over for dinner that night and she kept pointing “Thumper” out to him. The next morning, she did not know whether to look at the bird feeder or the snowman(as the bird feeder did not have food in it, the snowman was a better bet).
On Tuesday morning, we walked across the street to look at “Thumper.” I am guessing that he was built by college students since his eyes and mouth were made from beer caps. She had her Nana take her over that night, too. Well, Wednesday morning, we again strolled over to the snowman and now he had very large male genitalia so we could not get too close. Then his facial expression changed later in the week to an “Oh” versus the original smile. Unfortunately, to all of our disappointments, he has now melted. The advantage of having a child whose favorite song is Frosty is that you can just tell her that he will be back again someday.

Unrelated picture except that we have to build snowmen with the playdoh

I am not a big football fan. I did not particularly like it as a child and did not begin to watch games until college when I lived in a quad and one of my roommates watched the college games on Saturdays and the other one watched the NFL on Sundays. I enjoy it now, but baseball is by far my favorite sport.
However, I have another friend whose brothers taught her the football signals when she was little and they are quite fun to learn(at least what few I know). Therefore, we have been teaching LiLi some football signals and it is really quite fun to get her to do them. Lately, she only does them when she feels like it. This disappoints her Poppie who loves to have her do the signals and keeps asking her for them. However, the other day, I was able to get her to do some signals and in celebration of football season and the patriots, here they are.

Holding

Offsides

Invalid fair catch

Invalid fair catch continued

Touchdown

Touchdown again