Merry Christmas

I didn't get around to sending out Christmas cards this year, so I hope these pictures will do. Thanks to all of you who sent cards to us-- they are greatly appreciated!

We had a great Christmas day with all our family-- albeit a hectic one! We woke up Christmas morning and found that Santa had brought a new doll crib and changing table for Sophie. She was so excited, and ran immediately upstairs to get her dolls. We opened our gifts to each other, and then it was off to our first stop-- Dan and Anna's house.

We met up with all the Reckards for brunch, including Jen who came up from Orlando. After we ate, we opened presents again. Sophie had lots of fun playing with Emma and Kylie!



Our next stop was my parents' house. Sophie always loves going to see Nana and Papa, especially because of their doggies Colby and Jasmine! All you have to do is say doggies and she's in the car. She played with Colby and Jasmine for a while, and then it was time to open some more presents.


Sophie with Nana and Colby


Sophie tries unsuccessfully to ride Jasmine.

After that, it was off to my Grandma's house for dinner. Grandma always cooks a huge Christmas dinner, and this year was no exception. She had turkey, dressing, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, crowder peas, green rice, potato salad, green bean casserole, regular green beans, corn, deviled eggs, and rolls. No kidding! She really loves having the family over for Christmas and loves cooking.

After we opened presents at Grandma's, Grandma came out with two surprises: the first one, a refurbished bouncy horse that Paul used to play on when he was little. She even had a little cowboy hat that was perfect for Sophie to wear. Sophie got on the horse, held her hat in the air and yelled, "Yee haw!" (I have no idea where she got that from.)



The other surprise was a cake she had made just for Sophie. It was a frosted poundcake decorated with Christmas trees and a little train made out of candy. Here's the picture:


Sophie loves cake! (Well, technically, she loves the frosting.) She hovered over the cake for the rest of the night, sneaking little bits of frosting with her finger.

Finally it was time to go home. It was a long day, but I feel blessed that we were able to spend it with our families.

The Mind of Sophie

Since Sophie was old enough to pick things up and play with them, she's been lining them up. The first time I realized there was an order to it, she was about a year and a half old. She had connected a tower of large square Lego blocks in a color pattern-- red, red, blue, blue, yellow, yellow, green, green, black, red, blue, yellow, green, black. It freaked me out a little bit a first, but now we're all pretty used to it around here. Here are some examples of her organizational abilities:


Her dollhouse furniture in a row.


These are her play dishes all lined up. Notice how she has sorted them by color and size. Also, each pair of colored dishes has the same kind of plastic cookie or muffin on them. Also note the silverware at the end of the line, also arranged according to color.


This is her magnetic alphabet on the fridge. Originally I had it in alphabetical order going in horizontal rows, but she arranged them in color order in one long vertical row.
These are just a few examples. She lines up everything. I put the Nativity out on the coffee table where she could play with it (it's not breakable). The first thing she did was line up the animals according to size.

She is very much a creature of habit. Even when she was an infant, she craved a schedule. I think routines are comforting to her. We established a bedtime routine for her when she was a baby, and it hasn't really changed all that much over the years. The good thing about it is that (unless she's sick), bedtime is a peaceful process-- once the bedtime routine has started, she goes to bed without any struggle.

In other news, Sophie has discovered How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the cartoon one). I put it in on Sunday night while we were putting lights on the tree to occupy her, and we have watched it multiple times each day since. When the Grinch comes on she gasps and says, "Who's that? It's the GRINCH!"

Sophie Visits The Symphony

A few weeks ago, my company, Grey Seal Puppets, had the pleasure of being guest artists for one of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra's Lollipop concerts. The Lollipop concerts are geared towards young children, and are designed to help kids learn and appreciate classical music.

Sophie came with Aunt Megan to see the concert. She enjoyed the music, and correctly identified some of the instruments. After the concert was over, we stayed on stage to greet some of the young fans.


Me with Sophie after the concert.


The Symphony's resident conductor, Alan Yamamoto


Sir Purr, the Carolina Panther's mascot, also made an appearance at the show. Sophie was a little shy of him at first...


But she warmed up enough to pet him. She talked about the "big kitty" for the rest of the day!

The concept behind the show was that Seemore Goodstuff (a character Drew performs on our local PBS station) and his friends were investigating the orchestra. They wanted to find out how all the different instruments worked and why the guy in front was waving the funny stick. In the process, we introduced the different families of instruments. One of the final pieces the orchestra played was called "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" by Benjamin Britten. The piece includes a narration which explains which instrument is playing when and what their voice sounds like. Well, since I read music, I was nominated to read all the narration. I had to follow along in a copy of the orchestral score (the narration was written inside the actual score). The piece was 18 minutes long! But it went well.

Most of the pieces they played were familiar or contemporary; "Escape to Neverland" from the movie Hook, "Theme from Peter Gunn" and "The Pink Panther Theme" by Henry Mancini were the most familiar. They ended the concert with a Sousa march, which was a lot of fun. And just being on the stage while the Symphony was playing was pretty amazing in itself.

Trick or Treat!

Halloween night we took Sophie to our friends Paul and Lanae's house to go trick or treating. Paul and Lanae's youngest son Parker is a couple of years older than she is, so he was able to "show her the ropes" on trick or treating.

The first couple of houses, Sophie was kind of shy and didn't really want to go up to the porch. (Almost all of the folks in the neighborhood were out on their front porches ready to greet the kids.) But after that, she really caught on. She started running from house to house, yelling, "Parker, come ON!" It was really cute.

Shortly after we got started, we were joined by Bob and Lisa and their two girls, Emily and Abby. Emily was dressed as Jasmine from Aladdin, Abby was Abu the monkey, and Bob even got in on the act as Aladdin himself.

As we headed back to Paul and Lanae's house to have dinner, she started singing "I love trick or treat, I love, I love trick or treat!" (This is sung to the tune of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I kid you not. She learned it on Little Einsteins.) So I guess that means she had a good time!

You can see the rest of the photos on our Shutterfly album.

Next time: Sophie visits the Symphony!

In Case You're Wondering...

Here's what Sophie will be for Halloween this year:


We've had to hide the costume from her-- otherwise she'd have been wearing it every day! In fact, last weekend I was in the kitchen when she came in proudly wearing it. (I guess our hiding place wasn't good enough...) After Halloween is over, she's welcome to wear it as much as she wants!

Leah's World

Here's a little video Megan took at Elmo's appearance on Saturday. So cute!

Our Day with Elmo!

Saturday, Sophie, Aunt Megan, and I went to see Elmo! The puppeteer who performs Elmo, Kevin Clash, did a free appearance at ImaginOn as part of the Novello Festival of Reading. Our friends Bob and Lisa and their daughters Emily and Abby went too.

Tickets were free, as I mentioned, but you did have to reserve them in advance and seating was general admission, so we arrived fairly early to get in line. And we got good seats-- we were about 5 or 6 rows back in the center. Very nice!

After an introduction, Kevin Clash came on stage carrying a red duffel bag and said, "I'm only going to talk for a couple minutes, because these kids didn't come here to see me." And true enough, after a few short minutes he reached beneath the podium and brought out Elmo. And the crowd went wild!

One of the funniest parts was when Elmo (because Kevin faded into the background immediately once Elmo showed up) brought up three kids on stage to help him sing "Elmo's World." He asked each child to name two of the things they love, and then they sang the song with their name in it instead of Elmo's. This small girl named Leah-- she couldn't have been more than four-- announced that she loved "Breakfast, and Elephants." So we sang, "la LA la LA, la LA la LA, Leah's World... She likes breakfast, and elephants too... that's Leah's World!" So funny.

Afterwards, Kevin signed copies of his book My Life as a Furry Red Monster. Megan got him to leave a message on her voice mail-- so if you call her cel phone, you get a mildly confusing buzz of crowd noise followed by Elmo saying hello. It's pretty funny.

When we got up to get our book signed, Kevin asked for the Sophie's name and then started talking to her in Elmo's voice. She hid her face. I don't know if she was shy or embarrassed! But I think she had a good time, because she asked today if we could go see Elmo again. Awww.

(In case you've never seen him-- yep, that's Elmo! And Kevin's vocal ability is amazing-- he transitions in and out of Elmo's voice effortlessly. Not to mention he's a pretty fine puppeteer as well.)

Here are a couple more photos of Sophie. The black and white is her school picture which was taken in June. The other is another from our beach photos.

Not much else to report here... it's been very hot in Charlotte. The last couple weeks we've seen temperatures up to 100 degrees many days. Fortunately we've had some more "moderate" 96 degree days to balance them out. :P

Sophie had her three-year well visit a few weeks ago at the doctor. She is 33 lbs (50%) and 38" tall (75%). I guess the tall genes from both sides kicked in for her! Her vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds. (I think she knows almost as much Spanish as she does English!) She's such a big girl now.

Her ears are doing so much better since she had tubes put in back in January. She just had an ear infection, which we were able to treat with drops instead of oral antibiotics (or shots!). We're so glad that we got the tubes, we both feel that it was the best decision for her.

In Vania news, I attended the National Puppetry Festival in July. It's the first festival I've been to in six years! It was great to see a lot of old friends. I took a great workshop, which was four days of three hours each day doing puppet manipulation. I also saw some great shows. And, I got to visit with my friend Kerry and her kids, which was one of the highlights of the week for me.

That's all for now. Have a great labor day!

Agee Family Photo

This year on our vacation, we had a family portrait made on the beach. We were really pleased with the results! I wanted to share this one with all of you. (Hey, look Kim! I'm in the picture!) I'll try to scan in a few more if I can to post later.

Sophie's 3rd Birthday

Last weekend we celebrated Sophie's 3rd birthday! We had her party on Saturday (although her actual birthday was Sunday). Here's a link to the birthday photos: http://reckardfamily.shutterfly.com/action/?a=0QasWrds1bMXJA&notag=1.

We had her party at our neighborhood kid's pool. It's a fun pool with fountains and buckets that dump out water and such. The pool is only 2 feet deep at the deepest point, so it's great for small children. Since Sophie loves the water so much, and loves Finding Nemo, we decided to make it a Nemo theme.

We were worried that it might rain-- it was overcast that morning and had rained some overnight. But by 10 (when the party started), the skies were clearing and it was HOT!

The kids (and some of the adults) played in the water, and then Sophie opened presents. She got lots of fun presents, and has been playing with them ever since. After presents, we ate pizza and had cake. Then it was time to clean up and go home.

She had a lot of fun and has talked a lot about her "water birthday party."

Hilton Head Island, SC

As promised, here are some photos from our vacation to Hilton Head, SC. We were there the first week in June with Vania's family.

As you can tell from the pictures, Sophie really enjoys the beach! In fact, we had to hold her back so that she wouldn't run into the ocean over her head! Even in the shallow water, she'd get knocked over by waves and just laugh! She danced, sang, and did little puppet shows the whole time we were there. (More on the puppet shows later.)

Here are some more photos of Sophie playing in the water:



Also, here's a link to a video on YouTube that Megan made of Sophie. We were eating dinner at a restaurant (the guys all went home early, but me, Sophie, Megan and my Mom stayed). Mom and I obviously were not paying attention to Sophie's impromptu puppet show, since you can hear us prattling on in the background.

To see more pictures from Hilton Head, you can visit my Shutterfly album at http://reckardfamily.shutterfly.com/action/?a=0QasWrds1bMXFw&notag=1.

Our first post!

Hi Friends and Family,

We decide to create this blog because we have so many family members and friends spread across the country, that it's hard to keep up with all of you! We will post family pictures (expect most of them to be of Sophie Grace ) and news here. You can even comment on our entries to let us know you were here.

I will try to keep this up to date as much as I can. Chris and I finally bought a digital camera, so now we have no excuse!

My first order of business is to post some photos of our family vacation to Hilton Head from earlier this month. As usual, Sophie loved the beach! I will start posting those very soon.

We look forward to hearing from all of you! We love you!

Chris, Vania, and Sophie Grace