Willow - 17 months

Everyone always expects December to be busy. Mandy was lucky enough to have her two final exams on the same day. However, finding out she got all three A's for the Fall semester made up for most of the stress. Mandy and Willow got to visit Angi and her new daughter Zeva; Willow loved the baby and even hugged her good-bye. That is much better than poking the eyes out, which I've see kids do. Willow is really improving her vocabulary and copying a lot of what we say. After she mastered walking, her verbal skills just took off too. Some of her favorite words are cracker, dada, mama, Molly, more, flower, down, night night, hi, bye, duck, and shoe, but there are so many more now. Even with all the cool toys she has, right now her favorite toy is Molly. She follows Molly around saying her name. We've gotten to the point that we are more concerned with curbing Willow's behavior to protect Molly; the other day Willow stepped on Molly's tail, seemingly just to see what would happen. Of course, Molly is being a great older sister and is very patient and forgiving. Andy introduced Willow to snow for the first time; she enjoyed it enormously. We went up to Sturgeon Bay in the middle of December to visit Leo and Andrea, who were "patiently" awaiting their baby's arrival. We enjoyed our time up there. Before Christmas we had lunch with Mike and Julia to say good-bye. We are really going to miss them, though we kind of wish we were moving to the Washington area too. We had Jeffrey visit and spend the night with us. And then, we spent Christmas in Appleton with some of Andy's family at Grandma Marx's house. We were able to see Becky Blakeman and Jude and Alice on the 27th. It has been so long, and we were glad we didn't miss them this time. Willow had a hard time playing with rowdier kids, but she survived. We were able to get to Whitewater to visit Zach, although Laura was unfortunately not there as well. Calling Dad on New Year's Eve, we found out that Andrea was in labor and delivered her daughter on New Year's Eve. We decided to take a spur of the moment trip up to visit the new baby. On January 5th, New Glarus started school again, so Mandy started having more sub jobs. Willow attended her first playgroup in awhile, where she was extremely shy. The winter has been crazy, as many of you probably know. Our current residence has a much longer driveway and has been a lot of work to maintain. The snow, ice, fog, wind, and bitter cold temperatures have seemed rather extreme, but we are all surviving.