Since we can’t drive anywhere because of the snow, we walked over to the Streets of Tanasbourne shops the other day just to get out of the house for a while.  Lo and behold, Santa was there too!

This photo was taken quite a while ago (note the bare ground), but it’s so cute that I had to include it.

This was taken from Tim’s work office window:

And this is what our road looks like at night currently:

Finally, just a cool picture of the Hillsboro sky:

It’s been snowing again all day today.  We have quite the winter wonderland outside now!  This photo was taken off of our balcony:  

Meanwhile we have a very active toddler inside the house.  These next few shots were all taken within about ten minutes.

Here Lex is “crawling” to get to the saline bottle on the floor:

Passing up the saline to get to the nail clippers:

Dropping toys into the tub:

Pulling down the shampoo:

Playing with the door stop:

Finding the outlets that haven’t been covered yet:

Chewing on mommy’s mirror:

Showing daddy the laundry baskets:

And finally, ending with a concert on his new toy piano.  (We broke down and gave him his Christmas present from us early.)

This video shows Lex’s inchworm crawling technique:

[qt:/videos/crawling.mov /videos/crawling.jpg 480 378]

And in this one he learns that he can get Kiwi to howl by talking to her:

We’re certainly having some extreme winter weather here lately.  Lex and I have been housebound for days because of the bitter cold and all the snow and ice.  Mommy is starting to go a little stir-crazy!  I’m all for a white Christmas, but this is ridiculous…

Anyways, the indoor monotony doesn’t seem to be affecting Lex.  He’s happy as always: 

Here he’s playing the “counting cup game” with daddy.  He takes off the cups one by one and Tim counts down.

I think Lex is very close to being mobile.  He is now doing this sort of inch-worm army crawl move when he really wants to get at something.  Usually it’s something that he shouldn’t have, like a medicine or ointment bottle.  But he gets really excited and motivated to move when it’s something off-limits to him.  And when we don’t let him have something, he now scolds us by shouting “nay nay nay!”  It’s actually very cute.

It’s been snowing all day today.  We’ve had a great time watching it from the huge windows in our front room.  Today is the kind of day where you feel very blessed to be in a warm house with a cozy fire.  

We did finally venture out into the cold.  We just took a brief walk around the block so we could experience the snow.  Lex seemed to get a kick out of it.   

Nothing like a good slice of mango after a brisk walk!