This past week, we kept finding footprints in the snow trekking back and forth across our backyard. We don't have a fence up, so we expect we will wind up with trespassers every now and then, but the snow on the ground has recorded an increasing amount of traffic!

At the same time, our cats - especially Tigger - has displayed some unusually anxious behavior sitting by our back door.


Luckily, we have since discovered who our little trespasser is and we can expect to find him somewhere in our yard several times a day.


I do not suspect he will do any harm in our yard and we welcome his visits!

It has been a few years since we have been able to celebrate the year-end holidays without needing to travel. Paul and I are very thankful to be back in Colorado with both sets of parents.

This year, we spent the night in Colorado Springs with Paul's parents and brother's family on Christmas Eve so that Abby and her cousin, Annette, could open presents together Christmas morning. Although the girls had a lot of fun decorating cookies and playing together, sadly, the Newell Christmas tradition of someone getting sick and generously sharing with the rest of the family continued.

Nonetheless, the family time was special and is what celebrating the holidays is all about, right?

One thing I tried this year was crafting some of the gifts myself - making clay figurines and sweet munchies. I started small and made only stocking stuffers, but I had so much fun doing it I may consider continuing this effort for the years to come....if time and patience permit.

As expected, Abby received a TON of stuff, leaving Paul and me to wonder where we can possibly store everything. Our living room currently looks like the Walmart toy aisles - toys strewn all over the floor with no visible ground to maneuver!

Enjoy a few of our Christmas photos below. I hear Abby whimpering over the monitor and I should go check on her. She has been wheezing, coughing, and running a high temperature and we're keeping a close eye on her, especially at night. Her symptoms started Christmas day - a virus she most likely contracted from Annette - and although she has stopped wheezing, her breathing is still shallow, requiring her to take Albuterol with a nebulizer twice a day. Last night, the fevers started and it turns out she has developed a sinus infection as well.

When Abby was 10 months old, she tested positive to being allergic to eggs and wheat.

Well, wheat turned out to be a non-issue, thankfully, but eggs were a problem. Abby broke out with fairly severe rashes when ingesting products that contained even small amounts of egg, so no cake, no waffles, no pastas of certain kinds and we became food-label-reading dependent.

When we first moved to Colorado, Abby and I stayed with my parents for about 9 months. During this time, my mom discovered that Abby could tolerate organic eggs, but not regular ones.

My mom used a method called pendulum dowsing to discover this. A part of pendulum dowsing is "a therapy used to locate the underlying cause of bodily or emotional imbalance that leads to ailments and physical reactions such as allergies or disease." The more the method is practiced, the more accurate it is. My mom had been practicing dowsing for several years and have successfully helped members of our family with various ailments. She has a friend who's baby had a hopeless number of allergies and doctors were at a loss for what to do. My mom managed to identify all of his triggers and the child is now able to manage his allergies and lead a normal life. The key is that she is able to identify very specific triggers rather than the generic categories which the traditional allergy blood tests or skin-prick tests reveal.

So, we bought some organic eggs. Abby tried a few bites of egg whites and had no reaction. A few days later, we tried the whole egg. Again, no reaction! The experimenting continued and we carefully monitored Abby every time she ate eggs, but she never had a reaction at home.

Yet, Abby was still unable to handle regular eggs. Sometime during that winter, Abby was accidentally given regular egg noodles at daycare and she broke out in such a bad rash her teachers had to call me.

We talked to her pediatricians who couldn't understand why she could eat organic eggs but not regular ones. We did some online research and read that egg allergies can be outgrown and many kids do. So, we became determined to keep exposing Abby to organic eggs in hopes that her body will learn to eventually tolerate all types of eggs.

By the time we moved out of my parents house (Abby was almost 2 years old at this point), Abby could eat two whole organic eggs (probably more if we would let her) without any reaction AND was able to eat regular eggs straight up! What this meant was that she can handle regular eggs found in other products without a problem.

She now eats egg noodles regularly and is the biggest fan of pancakes. We still buy organic eggs and dairy at our house, but we have not had an egg-related allergy incident for almost a year and we let her eat eggs whenever we do.

38 acres of lights, plus animal exhibits, made for a fun family visit to the Denver zoo during its Zoo Lights holiday event. We went tonight with the Fisher family (aka Abby's good friend Gwen's family) and their neighbors.

It was a tad chilly in Denver, hovering just around freezing by the time we arrived around 6PM, but hot chocolate and warm hats and gloves were all that were required to stay comfortable.

The kids had a great time. Besides all the really cool light exhibits, Abby's favorite was seeing the elephants. However, the hippo and rhinoceros freaked her out.

Paul, Abby, and I just returned from a 5-day vacation to DC to visit many of our friends back in Maryland/Virginia. No matter how much time we had planned, it certainly did not seem like it was enough and there were still others we never got a chance to visit. Still, it was a great trip and we had a wonderful time.

Since we moved to Colorado in October 2008 (February 2009 for Paul) several new babies have arrived into the world - or in the case of the Legler family, returned back to DC - so we had many young, new faces to meet!

Abby, as usual, was a fantastic traveler and really enjoyed visiting new people and revisiting places such as our houses in Germantown and Clarksburg, while hearing us tell her what she does not remember from her first year and a half there.

A special treat for me was meeting Holly Kim and her family. They drove from Virginia Beach to meet us for brunch in Georgetown on Sunday. Holly and I have been corresponding over email for about a year now and have become "old friends," but have never met! She has a 13 year old son, Tristan, whom Abby now idolizes, and a charismatic 1.5 year old daughter, Leilani. Holly and I started corresponding when Abby was gifted a pair of beautifully crafted hairclips last Christmas, made by Holly and her mom, and I was so impressed by them that I felt compelled to write and express my sentiments. Mutual interests were discovered and we became regular correspondents.

The following link will take you to our photo album for the DC visit.
http://public.fotki.com/newells/2009/dc-visit/?cmd=fs_slideshow

On December 9th, Abby's daycare performed their Holiday Program at Heritage High School. From young toddlers roughly a year and a half years old to the Kindergarten classes, the kids put on a really delightful show and all of them were cute as buttons!

Abby's early pre-school class (ages 2.5 to 3 years) performed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It is hard to tell in the video (we really, really need to get a quality camcorder at some point - certainly before Abby enters college!) but Abby stayed focused and actually sang the song during all three repeats. She is the one wearing a brown shirt and khaki pants, standing 3rd from the left. Abby's good friend, Gwen, is 2nd from the right, wearing a sleaveless dress.

If the picture slideshow does not appear below, you can also view photos via this link: http://public.fotki.com/newells/2009/primrose-holiday-program/

EPS2 Sings Rudolph from Cecilia Newell on Vimeo.

This is a cute little song that Abby has learned in daycare. Each week, the toddlers focus on a particular shape and every few weeks they start over to reinforce the learning. Now, most of these kids have known their shapes for well over a year, but they still get a kick out of recognizing them everywhere they go.

This particular song is Abby's favorite. When she sees objects shaped as a square, circle, triangle, or rectangle she'll burst out singing the corresponding verse from this song. It's only Tuesday, but already the things that have triggered the singing of this song are: smiley faces, cheerios, pancakes, and the letter "O".... so, obviously the focus shape of this week is the circle! Last week, when studying the rectangle, seeing napkins, envelopes, and her blankie spurred the song.

How Can You Tell (tune "Frere Jacques" aka "Brother John")

This is a square, this is a square, How can you tell? How can you tell?
It has four sides, All the same size.
It's a Square, It's a Square.

This is a circle, this is a circle. How can you tell? How can you tell?
It goes round and round, No end can be found.
It's a circle, It's a circle.

This is a triangle, this is a triangle. How can you tell? How can you tell?
It only has three sides, That join to make three points.
It's a Triangle, It's a triangle.

This is a rectangle, this is a rectangle. How can you tell? How can you tell?
It has two short sides And it has two long sides.
It's a rectangle, It's a rectangle.