Holiday Cleft Party and Santa Visit

Today Mia and I went to a Holiday Party for cleft families put on by Dell Children's Hospital and Austin Smiles. We got to see some of our friends, touch base with people we haven't seen in a while, make some new friends and even get Mia's picture taken with Santa. Good times! I was glad to see that she didn't cry or scream, though she wasn't SUPER thrilled about it.  I totally had a flash back to last year's Santa visit - see below.  :)

Uh, mom... help...

This scene was a total flashback to last year's Santa visit.  Who IS this bearded fellow?!?!  He seems oddly familiar...  Oh yes... I remember this bearded fellow from LAST year!

Here's the photo from last year - Man, she still has the same amount of hair on the side of her head!  lol

Mia and I with our friends Evelyn and Susan - both girls had bilateral cleft lip and palate repair

Mia with Mary the nurse coordinator and Dr. D who did the awesome work with Mia's NAM - we saw theme nearly every week the first four months of her life so they feel almost like part of the family.

Isn't she just the prettiest and sweetest thing!  I love the look on her face in this one. Mia and I were on our own for the party since Zeus is out of town this weekend to see the Cowboys get their butts kicked by the Cardinals. Bummer!

Mia's new thing is knocking on doors. Whenever we come home and I'm getting the keys out to unlock the front door, she always MUST reach out and knock on the door a few times.  She'll even say, "naw" for knock.  :)  She also has kind of a set "routine" that she likes to do in the morning when I get her up. I get her out of the crib and turn off her white-noise heartbeat noisemaker. On that same dresser are some of her bows, and she likes to pick a few up one at a time and put them in my hand as I tell her the colors. After that she turns towards the windows and likes to pull the string on the blinds to tilt them open before I lay her down to change her diaper. Do you think this means she's a little OCD, or maybe it's just MY ocd tendencies rubbing off on her?!?!  lol  She also has started this stage where in the middle of eating, she'll decide to randomly push all current food out of her mouth all chewed and mushy before going back to eating as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Silly girl! She did this with four or five apple slices on Friday as we were driving home from a friend's house. I'd bitten the peels off and she was happily munching on the apple slices and asking for more. Well, when we got home and I went around the car to get her out of her car seat she was covered from chin to toes with chewed up tiny pieces of apple. It almost looked as if the wood chips from a hamster cage had exploded on her for goodness sake!

As a closer for tonight, Mia's working on a new skill that I'm sure is going to make our lives MUCH more difficult in the near future...

And darn if we don't have those doorknobs throughout the entire house, including the front and back doors. Darn!