Today's hockey game

Emma had her third game of the season today and did good! She even had puck contact a couple times! She is pretty funny out there but doing so well. One of the parents came up last night (picture night) and commented how much better she is skating in just a couple weeks. She is starting to feel more comfortable out there and putting a lot more energy into it.

She is not afraid to follow the action and get in the middle of it! I think she is doing much better as an offensive player than defensive because of this! The coach had to keep calling her back when she was in a defensive position and then changed her to offensive and left her there!

Speaking of the coaches, gotta love them. They do so well with all the players. They had her in the face-off position against one of the best players out of this bunch and I saw the coach "hold" the other kid back for a second to give Emma a chance to get in the action.

Pictures from today: (She is green jersey #5)

Emma and her "best friend" on the team (as Emma told me today) This is one of the other two girls with Emma in the Mites division (5-8 year olds). She has been playing for a couple years and she and Emma have hit it off!



Emma trying to get in the action!



The little guy on the ice is about 13 days older than Emma. He played last year. Emma skated by him and paused and gave him this look like "Are you going to get up?!"








One of the coaches and Emma chatting about something.

May I present... Lady Liberty!

Here is a snapshot from Sat's Truck-n-Treat. She was quite the hit since it was an original costume.

Before leaving Emma asked if people would know who she was, and I just laughed to myself. I told her that if any adult asked her who she was (and if they honestly did not know) than I would give her a dollar for each time. We only had one person ask and it was a child around 9 years (I think) and as soon as her friend mentioned it she said "Oh yeah!"

Working towards Halloween...

It hit me yesterday that this Sat is "Truck-n-Treat" for the city. They have volunteers bring in their big trucks and such and the kids get to climb over them and get candy. This means she needs her costume and it is no where near ready! I have been working on it, but the parts that are left are time consuming... Well, my part is not too bad but it is paper mache and paint and it take a long time for the paper mache to dry!

So yesterday I did the first layer of paper mache and the wire form and tissue paper. Did the second layer of paper mache this morning and it will have to be enough! Hopefully can get it painted tomorrow and all will be done.... Well, still have to take the fabric I found and make it work.


Here is what I worked on yesterday...




Although though I am rushing, I am not sure we are going to try the "Truck-n-Treat". It starts at 9 and we have to be at hockey at 10:20 to get ready for her practice. I might try to get there right at 9 so she can have fun for 45 mins or so.


Once this is all done, then I need to start preparing for her party. We were at Michael's and found the candy making aisle and we are going to make lollipops as part of her favors. Thankfully, I will have all next week to work on the favors and getting the rest of stuff in line since her costume should be done by tomorrow or Friday!

Another photo shoot... one one pic that I have edited that I really like this time. I lied, going to post three :)








Violin is going so well! Her teacher is impressed with how quick she is progressing. We are working our way up to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. There are 6 different variations to the notes of Twinkle Twinkle and Emma has worked through 2 of them and is on the third. Based on how she is doing she is working through one a week! They are choppy but she has the songs down and her teacher says the smoothness will come with time.

Hockey... Emma had her second game this week. They are not really keeping track of wins/loses but her team did win! They got their jerseys at that game as well. She is on the green team (they have not come up with a team name yet) and is #5! She had a better handle on things this week. Made a couple blocks and kept trying to get the puck. Took an elbow to her face mask which knocked her down and she came up grinning! She is the youngest (by 13 days) but not the smallest.

Back to work... lots to get done on her halloween costume and to get ready for her party.

photo shoot today...

A couple pics from today... (click for larger pictures) Going to try to do a few more mini shoots in the coming weeks I hope...

I am going to try...

I am going to try to start this up again! We will see if I can keep up with it.

Emma has been keeping me busy lately... between her park group gatherings, music lessons and hockey we are usually pretty busy at least once a day. She started playing the violin late August and is doing really well! At this stage, they are not reading the actual music but the names of the notes and she is memorizing it all! She is working on the 1st of 3 or 4 parts and once she has finished these, she will be able to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. This first part is 6 lines long (3 individual lines that each are played twice) and she has it memorized with a few cues on which line to play next (we just added 2 lines last week so she is doing good!).

Hockey just started. She is in the Mites at the local rink. She had her first two practices this weekend (for the most part it will be Sat and Sun) and her first game next Sunday. There are about 15 kids and so far she is the youngest and the smallest. She was very nervous the first day and did not want to do everything that the coach had them doing but by the second day was doing a lot better. It was pretty neat to see how much more they got into than she was doing in her lessons... the first day they had an obstacle set up for the players to jump (step) over, skate through cones and then slide under another obstacle.

With the park group, we meet once a week minimum. In the past month in addition to that day, we (anywhere from one other family to many) have meet up for hiking once a week, went to the Apple Festival, went to a peach orchard, and went to a tea party at one of the girl's houses. Upcoming this month so far, pottery painting (tomorrow) and a musuem visit.

I am trying to plan a theme of the week (or weeks) for Emma and I to study/have fun with. This week is apples... Started it off with a fun project. We just finished making homemade applesauce for dinner and I just took apple muffins out of the oven! It smells good in here!

http://www.freewebs.com/coulterfamily/

New web page... this one and the message board you are currently reading will be taken off line in the sometime Sunday or Monday. The new page, for now, does have photos and a message board.

Important notice...

If you are a regular visitor and I have not emailed you yet regarding the upcoming move of our website, please drop me a line so we do not lose you! Thanks... I will be sending out a mass email after we relocate in case you miss this. I would post the address here but chances are we might not know it until about the time we take this site down.

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More trip pictures added and more to come in following days...

Recent update first then I will try to start in on the trip...

Wednesday...gymnastics... they go hand in hand now. Boy, Emma was excited to go back! Overall, it went very well. She played around on the beam before class began and was doing great. Was not always paying attention so she took a few spills... I think some of the spills were on purpose as well! Once class started she did good. We had some trouble with the bar but I think part of it was her still being sick and not being on the bar in a while. It was her turn and she would not do an exercise she has done many times, even with me near. Her next turn, it was a different exercise and she was doing great until the end when she broke out crying. The teacher said it was probably due to her two week break (since we were on vacation), but in addition to that, they had not done the bar the two weeks before so it was more like a month break. Next was the beam and she was not paying attention during her first turn. It was just walking forward and balancing on the beam and she did it but not like she usually does. The next turn was hopping on it, which is no problem for her and she did that great!

onto the trip... going to make this on the short side so that I get it done...

Do not remember days for some of it and not sure what happened when... we spent a total of two and 1/2 days doing tourist things in and near DC. One of our first nights there, Rick (my uncle) and Carol (my aunt) took all three of us on a night driving tour of DC. Was interesting to see by night. I am not sure when the last time I had been to DC was but it has been at least 10 years. Our full day in DC was Sunday. I remember this because we did not have to pay for parking at the metro. We took the metro in and went to the Air and Space Museum on the mall. We walked around for a few hours and Emma was pretty impressed with all the planes and rockets. She kept looking up and saying "planes" and "rockets." We grabbed lunch there before we went on our way and that was expensive! We then walked around the mall. It was time for Emma's nap and she finally went down for awhile as well walked. We stopped at the Washington Mounument and I was going to check on tickets but then realized we could not take the stroller up and I was not going to wake Emma up. I took quite a few pictures and we moved on to the WWII monument. Emma woke up at some point and we continued on our way towards Lincoln, stopping by the Vietnam Vetrans Memorial. We walked over the the Korean War Vetrans Memorial and then looked at Jefferson across the Tidal Basin and then walked by the DC World War Memorial which was tucked away hidden off the path. From there it was back to metro and back to my aunt and uncle's house which was home for the week.

A day or so later we did a quick two hour tour of Arlington National Cemetary. We bought tickets for the tourmobile which ended up being a waste since we only used them up to the first stop which was the Kennedy grave site. From there we walked to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and waited for the changing of the guard. Intense ceremony. From there we walked over to the memorial for the Challenger and Columbia shuttles and then made our way back to the exit. Was hard to spend time there since we could not eat or drink inside and that is asking a lot of a 2 year old! We actually started the day with a stop at the park at the end of the runway at Reagan National Airport. That was amazing to be so close to seeing the planes take off. Emma was pretty excited once she got used to the noise! We finished the day with a drive up past Mt Vernon and then on home.

Coming soon... National Zoo and National Cathedral write-up

Other than a trip to Dave to Dulles (to see the other Air and Space Museum) on Friday, that was it for being tourists. Emma and Dave ended up pretty sick with head colds so we took it easy.

Emma loved visiting! Scoping out the house the first night she found the Christmas tree and the presents under it. Silly girl, points to them, smiles and says "Emma's!" Well... she was right for the most part! The amazing this is this was on Thursday evening and she left them alone until the following Sat afternoon (over a week!). She quickly learned the names of the cats... Snowy and Tiger... Snowy tolerated her pretty well but Tiger hid a lot. She still asks for them! My aunt found a stash of preschool wooden puzzles that Emma put to good use over the week.

I think that is a good place to stop. Will write more later about the purpose of the trip... my cousin's wedding!

No trip report yet. I spent the first part of the day sleeping. Emma woke at 5:30 am (ugh) but I was able to go back to sleep around 7ish for a few hours. I think that helped alot! During that time, Emma and Dave took down most of our Christmas decorations. All that is left is the tree!

Pretty uneventful day until this evening. We ended up with a run to the ER with his mom after she fell. Everything is ok. Her arm was really hurting so we decided to play it safe and get it looked at. The x-ray did not show any breaks so the doctor says to keep an eye on it. She says she tripped over the dog or Emma but I am not so sure of that.

Emma was pretty funny at the hospital though. I explained to her that the doctor was taking pictures of Grandma's arm to look at her bones. She looks at me and says "bones. puppy bones." No matter how hard I tried I could not convince her that they were not puppy's bones but grandma's bones!

She is stringing more and more words together... only two at a time right now but she is getting her point across.. no longer hands you a book and says "book" it is now "read book." There was quite a break through these past two weeks with lots of new people to meet and new pets and new experiences!

Speaking of pets, one of the crabs has made an apperance. Not sure if I mentioned it before but they have been hiding for about a month now but Onery is out and already changing shells like crazy. Can not tell if he molted or not though.

Emma is happy to be back in her own bed. Have had no complaints at bed time or nap time since she came home. She now loves sleeping with a blanket "blank-blank."

we are home...

Just wanted to let those of you who are visiting that we are back safe in Montana. All sick, but we are here. Updates coming in the next day or so, complete with the rest of the pictures.

NY pictures up...

http://coulter.shutterfly.com/action/

Quite a few of these were shot from the hip rather than holding up and framing the shot... Therefore the aim and focus may be of but I was playing with some new techniques (for me) and the idea seemed to fit with NYC.

trip update

Day 4 and we are driving south towards Washington DC. So far it as been nothing but 4 hours of rain and traffic. We got stuck for about an hour on the NJ Turnpike and maybe went 10 miles. That has been the worst of it so far. We have had a good trip so far.I already updated on Mon and Tues, well a brief description so I will start with Wednesday.

I am not sure what time we left the house but we reached the ferry easily and headed over to NYC. We had plans to meet up with one of Donna's friends so I checked in with her and made plans to meet around noon. Dave and I talked about it and decided we would head over to Times Square and then if there was time head down to World Trade Center and then back up for lunch. It was crazy insane at Times Square! Packed full of people and they were starting to set up for New Year's Eve. We decided to head to FAO instead since we only had an hour before lunch. It was there I realized our cell phone was an hour off and it was noon right then. We were late to meet Beth but it worked out. After lunch we headed to see St Patrick's Cathedral at 5th Ave and 51st Street.

We ended up having to stop at Gap to get Emma a new pair of pants since she soaked through the pair she was wearing. After that we hopped on the Subway and headed down to World Trade Center. It was eerie and strange to see where the two towers had stood. Buildings around it still have windows bordered up where debris hit. Dave told me there was a nice display set up in World Financial Center Building 2. We did not have a chance to go up because Emma had just fallen asleep and it was a choice of stairs or escalator (and no strollers allowed on escalators) so we ended up leaving. I really would have liked to spend some time there but it was not worth waking Emma up.We started enjoying walking around more after that. There were no crowds but the energy of NYC was still there. I started taking more pictures of the buildings at that point.

We started heading down to Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty. It was around 3:30 when we got there and Emma was just waking up. We were too late to catch a ferry ride there so we just walked around. The sky was pretty hazy so she was hard to see. I should mention that my camera battery died here after only 50 pictures. I had fully charged it that morning.We then walked towards the Brooklyn bridge and took a glimpse of it. It was starting to cool off and the wind was strong. Then headed down to Wall Street and caught the subway to Penn Station. I wanted to stop by B&H camera store to see what it was like. They are a major photography and video store online. I also wanted to pick up a spare battery for my camera so I don't have a repeat experience of it dying in DC.

We then walked our way towards Rockefeller Center to see the lights and that was even more insane. We tried to miss Times Square but managed to hit it and all its crowds. Rockefeller Center was nice but too many people. Emma saw a character dressed as Elmo and was excited. We rested for a while a block or two away and then made our way back towards the ferry.I did a quick charge on my battery at the car and went back to the little park by the ferry to get some night shots of Manhattan across the Hudson. They did not come out good due to the fact it was handheld but small they look ok.

We have now arrived in VA... took an extra 2 hours to get here due to traffic and weather but...we are here and that is what counts. Not sure what the plan is. We need to rest a little and let Emma just be a kid and then it is back to being a tourist. Towards the end of our visit, we have the wedding of my cousin Matt, the reason behind the trip!

Until later....

We are in NJ

We are here... Got in yesterday evening about an hour late since we had plane trouble... That was fun... not really... something about a sensor for the engine fire alarms not working correctly so we sat on the plane in Minn/St Paul for an hour. There was an 18 month old behind us and a 3-3.5 year old girl in front of us so Emma had plenty of kids to talk to.

Things are going good here in NJ. The girls (Emma, my friend Jaime and I) went shopping and had a girls day out. Emma was approached in Baby R Us to get her picture taken and we would get a free 8x10. Turns out the woman who asked worked for the portrait studio in the store and was in training. So we went and Emma wanted NOTHING to do with it. We worked with her and eventually I had her on my lap and she was going between crying and laughing at Jaime so eventually we got some good pictures. The free 8x10 was a great pic of me and Emma and I did buy some of her from another pose.

Something cute and then I gotta run for now since Dave wants to research for tomorrow.... We were in the plane up in the air somewhere and we were pointing out the clouds for Emma and she kept insisting that the clouds were bubble bath.

We are off traveling soon!

Oh my gosh I am so excited that it is finally time to go visiting family and friends! In less than 12 hours we will be on our way to NJ/NYC then a few days later driving down to VA/DC!

We are almost ready to go. For once packing was done pretty early in the evening and right now I am just wrapping up details on a special present. Then maybe we will get some sleep before the alarm goes off at 3 am (big UGH!!) but the flight is just after 6 am and we are about 45 mins from the airport. At least it has been unusually warm (high 40's-low 50's), so no chance of snow on the road. We had booked a hotel room in Bozeman for tonight just in case and I almost forgot to cancel!! I had to cancel by 6 pm and at 6:20 I started panicing when I realized I never canceled... Thankfully they did cancel it without penalty. It would not even been worth it to head over now since Emma has been down since just before 6 pm.

Emma is really worked up about this trip. She kept wanting to go on the plane tonight and became really upset when I kept reminding her she had to go to sleep first and in the morning we will go.

Ok, I better get back to my project so I can finish the last bit of packing. See some of you real soon!

new pics!

Here are the pics from today... Write up of our Christmas is below in another post.

http://coulter.shutterfly.com/action/

Well, today was our Christmas. Decided to celebrate a day early so we can relax tomorrow and take care of last minute things before we leave for our trip around 4 am on Monday.

I am glad we did because Emma had a meltdown around 1 pm after coming down from all the excitement! She had so much fun. After she woke up she ran out to see what Santa brought her and right away noticed her Little People train! She has a blast make it go and loading it up. Thinks she is so big by making it go with her foot instead of hand! She also got a Blue's Clues bubble tumbler with three wands and has already mastered blowing the bubbles. She got chalk. a puppy calendar (the pctues will go up on her closet doors), and a stuffed horse. Then she opened her stocking and was even more excited! There were crayons for the tub and Dora figurines! She got Swiper, Boots, Diego, Dora (2 of them) and acessories. Diego and Dora took many rides on the train this morning.

She was pretty ready to open presents but the rest of the family was not going to be here until 10 am (she woke up at 7 am). So she waited patiently until it was time. She had a blast passing out presents and helping open presents. From her MT grandma she got a stuffed dog that sings. She loved it until we turned it on and then she was not too sure of it! From Kathryn she got a stuffed bear and two books, one of them full of puzzles. She was really excited when she saw the bear... "boar....boar" and was signing bear real fast! From mom and dad she got a generic magna doodle, and 3 Disney movies. From Anne's aunt and uncle in California, she got a gift card for Target, 3 (off the top of my head, I think it was three) jammie outfits for Halloween (for future years), Halloween socks, a penguin stuffed animal and a warm blanket. From Dave's sister in TX she got Care Bear dish, bowl, cup, spoon/fork and straw cup!

So we are spending the rest of the day relaxing and hopefully I will get most of our packing done. Dave is working on getting video put together so we can burn some DVDs before we leave.

I will hopefully get some pictures from today up tonight or tomorrow.

I will take this chance to wish all of you and your families a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!! For those of you who do not celebrate Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.

A little winter stress relief.... http://n.ethz.ch/student/mkos/pinguin.swf click once to start the penguin's fall, click again to make the Yeti swing... How far can you hit the penguin. Dave's high is 323, Anne's 320.5 (323.5 (12/23))

Today was gymnastics again. Another great day. Nothing really to report on, they worked on a few new things, jumps and listening to the teacher.

Had to run to Bozeman to pick up sunglasses for Dave. They were not supposed to get in until the end of Dec but they came in early and Dave wants them for the trip. It was not as bad there today as it was on the weekend so that was nice!

This is probably one of those you had to be there situations but it was still cute. We went out to Applebees for dinner tonight after we finished shopping in Bozeman. As we walked up to the door, Emma saw the big apple that is part of their sign and said "Apple." So we told her the name of the place was Applebees. She looks up and says "apple...bees" with a long pause between and that was probably the words she said the most during dinner and would get the biggest grin each time. She had Dave and me cracking up over it since it was so cute. She was really talkative with the waitress during dinner as well which was strange since it can take her a while to warm up. She noticed football on the TV and signed and said "touchdown" but then lost interested when she saw all the balloons!

On the way there I heard her saying something in the back so I started to listen as she repeated over and over "hat...knees...toes..." as she would touch each part as she said it. She was doing head, shoulders, knees and toes Emma style.