Coloring time with Phoebe

As a dollar spot gift from Target, Phoebe received her first pack of crayons. There are 12 colors and have Spiderman on them, I tried to find more girly crayons, but Spidyman it had to be. She now loves coloring, or scribbling on her papers all the time. We are trying to teach her the concept of not coloring with the blunt side of the crayon, but she will have none of that. I guess each artist has their own mode and style of working.

New Years & Date Night

Okay, so I got a little ahead of myself in blog posts so I will go back and cover a few events in the turn of the new year.

New Years:

For us New Years has always been a bit uneventful and rarely do we stay up to greet the new year and this year was no exception. We started off the eve by going to Medico's home to break in their new chocolate fountain. After we completely gorged ourselves, we went to play games for the rest of the night...okay not really the rest of the night, just until we welcomed in our version of New Years at about 9:40 pm. We made sure to take a picture with the clock so you can check out how lame we are. To celebrate bringing in 9:40pm we popped open a bottle of Martenelli's finest and enjoyed the 2008 vintage. When we were done we drove home and were all in bed by 10:30...now that's my style of partying.

Date Night:

January's Date night was hosted by the Folwer's and we learned to play Bunko. I had never played this game before, but everyone assured me how fun it was and the were right! I loved the game and would probably would love to own it myself if you didn't have to have 12 people to play it. As is normal for us, Phoebe joined us for the Date Night extravaganza. She played in Zoee's room and found some beautiful necklaces and a lush purple boa to adorn her self in . She then came out to show the whole group how beautiful she was. I was a little surprised she could dress herself up herself; she is getting to be such a big girl.

January Reflections

This is dedicated to the Fergy Family Adventures 103 readers that never leave any comments (What is up with that?!?!)

My two best friends Joy & Brooke on my 18th B-day... yes, I had a perm back then.

Here it is January again which always makes me reflect on previous Januaries. January means that it is a new year again, a fresh start, and most importantly my birthday (JANUARY 26th). The following are a couple of my most favorite January memories:

1. The birthday on my mission that I paid $22 for a hamburger, that was the cheapest item on the menu (that is Switzerland for ya) and we had an Serbian man tell us that America was the greatest place on earth, "Just look at your Bill Clinton, he's sexy man with all those women." Ah that a foreigner's point of view made us laugh for days. That year my companion also baked me a cake in a glass mixing bowl (it was all she could find in the church kitchen), which turned out to be a disaster. She lined the bowl with parchment paper that caught on fire (at the church), because she forgot we used Celsius and not Fahrenheit and turned the oven to about 300 C even after cooking at about 600 F and a fire, the bottom of the bowl was still all runny batter.

2. The January I was released from my mission and was asked to give a talk in three separate wards. The two later talks were the normal homecoming talks, but first talk I was asked to give wasn't even in my own ward, but the Bp was an old friend of mine and it was in a singles ward that met in the same building so I agreed. The topic he assigned me: The Evilness of Sin Justification. Yep, that was some talk and subject to tackle. I decided to go the shockingly bold route, which if you really know me isn't that far of a stretch for me. That talk produced two outcomes, One: The Bp of that ward told me he had 4 different people come to his office right after sacrament mtg and confess previous sins. Two, I lived in infamy throughout all the Singles wards in that building until I finally left two years later; there were several requests for revivals of the infamous Chasity section of the talk.

Okay, enough of the reflecting it's time to look towards the bright and shiny new year. This year we started like the rest of the world with our resolutions. This year however we chose to tweak our style of resolution. For one we always make too lofty of goals that never have a prayer of being accomplished and two a year is too long to work on a goal, so this year we lowered the bar and we have made our resolutions only monthly/quarterly ones which are as follows.

1. We will have family prayers in the morning and night, this is in addition to our normal meal and bed prayers.
2. We will read the scriptures or other church literature as a couple at least once a week. We will also renew our subscription to the Ensign (we haven't had it for the past year)...good news, I did this one yesterday!
3. We will have a Nursery lesson FHE for Phoebe once a month and then work on really teaching that principle to her through out the rest of the month.
4. I will read all the books for my ward book club this year (a book a month-six weeks)
5. I will make a renewed effort to visit the other two sisters on my VT list (there are 3 total), one is Lexy so obviously she is checked off every month since I see/talk her at least 4x a week.
6. Cory will finish his painting as well and begin and finish another painting this year.
7. We will revisit our family/personal goals monthly in a FHE lesson.

I know our resolutions may sound a bit like weak sauce to many of you, but if I am being honest they are the most basic things we need improve on first before we can begin to make loftier goals. What can I say the first step to solving any problem is to admit that you have one.

Well to the many of you reading this have a Happy New Year & the best January ever!

A Wonderful Fergy Family Christmas

Christmas in the Fergy household was clamer this year than years past. It started at 6 am when I awoke and began cooking breakfast and dinner and then at 7:30 both of my other lazy heads finally started to stire. I quickly set the mood for gift opening and ran to get the cutest and smallest of my ugly bugs. We then quickly began the whole present deal, which I thought would be fast since we couldn't keep Phoebs out of the gifts on Christmas Eve, she even opened one of my gifts, however, she was tired and didn't want to do anything but sit there and suck her thumb, so we opened all of her gifts for her. After gifts we all got dressed in our new Christmas clothes and sat and watched a movie...well I didn't watch the movie I cooke, but the rest of the family did. We ate dinner promtly at 2 pm and then headed over to Grandma Fergy's to give them their Christmas gift, season tickets to Desert Star. Over all we have a very wonderful Christmas and we were glad to finally have a white Christmas even if it wasn't until 7pm.

Christmas Eve Traditions

Every year on Christmas Eve we do a couple things, one go to the Fergy Family Dinner where we eat and then act out the nativity and two open the new PJs that the PJ elf made for us. (On a side note, this year the PJ elf also made us these cute stockings from scratch and she is stinkin' proud of them!) Below is a glance of the above mentioned Fergy family Traditions.

The Nativity Play:

I played Joseph, Cory played the Star, and Phoebe played Mary, that is until she got bored with the whole Christ's birth thing and threw Jesus out of the cradle and hopped in it herself. You only see Jesus in the cradle with her because we picked him up off his head from the floor and put him back in the cradle.

The PJ elf's special Fergy family PJs 2008:

It took Phoebe about 2 minutes before she soiled her shirt.

Christmas Dress

This year we dithered and churned over the question of the Christmas dress. In the beginning of December, we decided that the dresses were too expensive and that she did not need a dress that she could only wear one month. Towards the end of December, however, I felt differently so on he last Saturday before Christmas we drug the whole family to the mall, which I am pretty sure Cory still curses me over. We went to several shops that didn't even have anymore Christmas dresses still in stock. We found only two stores that carried what was becoming the elusive Christmas dress, Macy's and Gymboree. Macy's dresses were all $25.00+ and we didn't even love any of them, except one that was $45.00, way too much! This led us to finally end up at a store I NEVER shop in because I know it is too spendy, Gymboree. This shopping experience was, contrary to my presumptions, not only pleasing but affordable. We ended up with several dresses we loved and decided on a cute two piece jumper and turtle neck that she can wear thru may with no major residual sign of Christmasiness to it; total price with tax $23.50, yeah for us!

Crazy Hair

I never cease to be amazed at what a little static cling can do to human hair. This human electric machine turns over and over on the sofa until it looks like a lighting bolt just struck her and heaven help the poor soul she touches next, ZAP!!!

Pigtails

The pigtail hairdo is something that has been out of Phoebe's capacity for the last year. I tired once when she was 9 mos old, but she just shook her head so that I couldn't hold on and screamed at the top of her lungs. After seeing all the other cute little girls from church, however, I decided to try the infamous pigtail do again. This time I asked everyone how they got their wee one to sit still long enough and not scream; the overall answer, turn on the sink and let them play, so that is exactly what I did and miraculously it worked miracles. The first couple times Phoebe didn't really like me putting her hair up, but now she doesn't even notice me messing with her hair until I clip the bow at the end. I think she is stinkin' cute with her hair up!

For some reason now that she is use to bows on her head, Phoebe thinks that everything should go on her head. We have caught her several times trying to put socks on her head and we even snapped a picture with her pants on her head. Crazy girl.

Lily's 1st Birthday

On December 10th, our little Lily Medico (Phoebs cousin) had her 1st Birthday, but we did not party until last night. Lily was dressed in her new birthday dress, which total coincidence, was almost exactly alike the dress Phoebs was wearing. We love dressing the cousins the same since they are so close in age, but it is even better when they show up looking the same. Above is a picture of our cuties. Below is a few pictures of the wild time that was had by all, except Phoebe she refused to eat, not even ice cream or cake...she is not my daughter.

Snow Day

Yesterday was the first time that Phoebs went out in the snow to play and by looking at the pics I would say it was pretty successful. She only started to cry when mean mom made her lay in the snow and make a snow angel. She mainly wanted to just hit the snow and push it around in different areas. When we pulled her out of the snow to sit next to the tree in our entry way for a picture, all she wanted to do was crawl back to the snow and play. Crawling, however, turned out to be a bit more difficult, due to her immense puffiness and then add to that her glove came off, the snow turned out to be just plain cold!