Thursday, January 28, 2016

Hair today, gone tomorrow

for months gianna has been begging to cut her hair.  and i really struggled with that.  so, i called my mom.  and she said DON'T DO IT!  haha...well, maybe she didn't yell it, but the message was...that would be a shame to cut that beautiful hair.  so we didn't.  and we visited at Christmas and let everyone get one last look at those long locks, because once mommom said "it's okay if you cut your hair", she was back to begging.  i figured, it will grow again, right?  

and if i was going to do it, it was going to mean something, so i started to research hair donation.  and i found out that locks for love actually charges for the wigs they make! say what?  

but pantene beautiful lengths does not charge.  and they take as little as 8 inches of hair.  so, knowing that, i figured we could cut her hair and learn a valuable lesson all in one.  

girlfriend was very happy with herself.  i mean, look how cute she is! 
should we call this the flamingo pose?

we waited for the ponytail to dry completely and then we packaged it up in a pretty pink envelope and talked about how some lucky little girl or woman would get to wear it on her head and she would feel beautiful again.  it's a hard concept for gianna to grasp, as she doesn't understand how someone else gets to wear her hair again, but she can't. 

so, she popped that pink envelope in the mail chute and away it went.  we are hoping that whomever gets the gift of her hair feels as beautiful outside as they are inside.  and we will patiently wait for gianna's hair to grow again.  someday she will understand that she gave a very cool gift to someone she doesn't even know!


Monday, January 11, 2016

Christmas 2015

i'm going to be honest here...i'm a sucky blogger.  i don't do it often enough.  and i have lots of excuses for why.  maybe that will change in the future, but not right now.  i'm busy, i'm tired and so i'm back to "cheater blogging".  my app doesn't work anymore and so instead of taking a million hours (maybe i'm exaggerating a tad) to load these 32 pictures individually, i loaded the collages that i put together for our family album.  it took me significantly less time.  but, all the pictures are here.  hopefully, you'll forgive me! (also, i'm pretty sure if you click on the picture, you can see a larger version)

as our usual Christmas trip goes, we started out at mimi's house in newark.  it was a decent trip up, taking us only 10.5 hours.  however, we did leave at 3:30am, so we were all a little beat.  we get to see poppop, kelli and alex, along with cousins from delaware and south carolina. 
 
 then, the magic of Christmas morning!  our kiddos must have been extra good this year.  they received some really wonderful gifts. 

on the afternoon of Christmas day, we head down to Nana's house and have a lot of fun with our extended family there too. 

finally, we end up at mommom and poppop's house to hang out with the Miller gang.  uncle josh, aunt colleen, uncle jay, cj, lilah and ady are so fun to hang out with and we always have a blast. 

thank you to ALL of our family who take us in (93 suitcases and all) and feed us and fill up our love tank until the next time we get to see you!  

Monday, January 4, 2016

The Shows Must Go On

as it always does, the Christmas season brings lots of opportunity to show off our talents.  gianna's dance school held a small holiday recital and i'm happy to report that she did much better this time around than at the last one.  there were lots of smiles and even though she hadn't been to class in almost a month, she remembered most of the moves. 

and then it was time for her school program.  again, she was much happier this year than last and was very into all the hand motions.  i really enjoyed watching her this year!



 




last, but certainly not least, roman's school puts on such a great show each year.  this year, 2nd grade were angels and the most exciting part was that we didn't have to make the costume!  hallelujah!
my favorite part was when he caught my eye and smiled.  it really made me all warm inside and i teared up watching him.  he was so proud of their performance and you could really tell that they worked hard on it the last few months.