Although Maggie has been officially crawling for a few months now, she doesn’t actually do it much. She’s learned that with two parents, a rockstar Au Pair, and 2 older sisters, she just has to complain a little and someone comes to tend to her – so why crawl? While mostly annoying, this does have the advantage of allowing me to put her down in busy/interesting places and she’ll pretty much just stay put watching her surroundings for a while. She stayed on this exhibit at the local museum for a good 15 minutes, giving Mommy a much needed break!

We had a family photoshoot as a fundraiser for Kaya’s school and used on of the pictures for our Christmas cards – I was waiting to post the others so as not to ruin the mailbox surprise of our beautiful family at Christmas time – but here’s another of my favorites.

Happy February!

We a HUGE amount of snow for a typical winter here and the kids only went to school one day this week. It was measuring between 7 and 10 inches around the Chapel Hill area, which is unheard of for these parts. Luckily, the kids actually have snowpants and snowboots that fit, and we ventured out into the winter wonderland. Tommy even made it back from Boston before the storm hit. Poor Angelica has been stuck inside with 3 kids most of the week – but she was smiling when playing in the snow – this pic is definitely going on our Au Pair recruitment page next year.

Goal: To have the kids make me a chocolate cookies from scratch by themselves in the next 5 year. It will happen.

Our our trip to Philly, I was most excited to meet baby Grayson – the 6 month old baby boy of my college roommate Ashley. He was very cute and was very nice to share his toys. And it was lovely catching up with Ashley and see her place in Philadelphia. Smiles all around.

I had a dream of getting a picture of all 3 girls with Santa, but it wasn’t in the cards. Kaya happened upon a Santa while we were in Nashville and I got a nice picture, and then Kaya and Laney went again to see Santa with Baba (although Laney kept her distance out of frame), which meant that no one was interested in a Santa picture for mommy’s blog. I’m a little bummed that I don’t have a baby picture of Maggie with Santa – I think she might hold this against me when she grows up, but I did get a very nice one of us in front of a Christmas tree. Big jowls make for big smiles.

I made a grand total of one post in December, but I accidentally made a new page instead of a new post, so it didn’t show up on the home page. So please excuse January while I catch up on December.

We took a quick weekend trip a couple weeks ago to DC to give Angelica a chance to see the nation’s capital. The security around the White House was nuts – we couldn’t get anywhere near the national Christmas tree even, and there were hideous barricades set up everyone so pictures weren’t even any good. We snagged a couple in front of the Washington Monument though. And the girls were very excited to see so many “Captain America” flags.

November was super busy – it started off with a trip to Miami, followed shortly by 2 weeks on the inpatient oncology service for me, followed 1 day later with a trip to Nashville. My total number of days off that I was in town was 1 for the whole month! So blog posting was very behind. So I caught up this morning and backdated the posts so our monthly email will at least have some appropriately-dated highlights. I hope our loyal website followers will please excuse this internet faux pas.

Here’s a nice pink picture drawn for me by Laney and annotated by Kaya to bring in December.

We up and flew to Nashville this Thanksgiving and left our kitchens behind. It was maybe the best Thanksgiving ever. We took Angelica and Yoya and Dylan and the girls and all stayed in an Air BnB near the (fake) Parthenon. Days were filled with museum-ing, boot shopping and ice skating, and nights were filled with live country music and cheap beer. And we even went cave spelunking (sp?) (maybe more like stair climbing) on the last day at Mammoth Cave. I’m pretty sure everyone had a good time – I know I did. And we even had Thanksiving dinner at least 4 times from a big Thanksgiving day order from Whole Foods. This picture is taken at the Opryland hotel in a Christmas ornament (Note: Ornament is large, we have not shrunk).

My newest favorite Rose family tradition is Monday night Five Guys. The girls have gymnastics and I have clinic on Mondays, so it has proven impossible to make a home cooked healthy meal on Mondays. So we have started picking up Five Guys burgers and fries (and peanuts for Laney) and now I look forward to my bacon cheeseburger during every Monday clinic. And so does Kaya! The 5 Rose guys really like Five Guys.