Bathtime!

Baby C - 9 Months

Baby C celebrated by learning to wave AND crawl on her exact 9 month birthday!  Today she crawled over to the laptop and was quite pleased with herself when she reached it.  Haha  M & I were cheering, but E was saying, "Oh no!" because she shares a room with C now, so that meant all the tiny toys E adores have to be tidied up all the time.  I am ruthless - I have let Baby C crumple up papers E left out but wanted to keep.

Here are some fun facts about Baby C:

• She loves pretty much any food you put in front of her.
• She likes baths (this would be the opposite of E & M who screamed bloody murder in baths).
• She takes 2 naps a day.  8-10am, 1-2:30pm. Ish.
• She goes to bed around 6pm and wakes around 6:30am.  If I am lucky.  Though a couple weeks ago she was sleeping regularly til 7am.  I'd like that back.  Don't suggest - I already tried keeping her up late, she woke up at 6:15am.  That trick doesn't work on my babies for some reason.
• She thinks E & M are the coolest people ever.
• She likes to be held by her momma.  I think she would be perfectly content for me to tote her around all day.
• She loves peekaboo.  I think that is a universal truth of babies.
• She has a funny grunty laugh sometimes - almost like she is laughing against her will.
• Her siblings love to get right in her face and say something loud.  Sometimes she thinks this is funny and sometimes they knock her over because they are small children with undeveloped gross motor skills.  I believe I say, "Get out of C's face," 6,322 times a day.
• She grins all the time.  She even grins at the children when they are crying and it makes them crazy.  This in turn makes me laugh, laugh, laugh.
• She self-soothes with thumb sucking but only for like 2 seconds at a time.  When she's really upset her routine is: she'll cry, suck her thumb for 2 seconds, pull her thumb out, start to cry a few moments later, repeat.  We can't figure out why she doesn't just leave it in.  But anyway, she likes to have a binky around, but I think she just thinks it's funny.  She likes to play with it in bed.
• She is the wiggliest baby ever.  She wiggles nonstop.  Even while nursing.  Constantly moving.  Thus a major nickname for her is Wiggle Worm.

Sorry for the high-pitched screaming in the video.  E thought that was funny.

M's 4th Birthday

M requested an airplane cake.  I did my best.  He did not care how it looked - he loved it!  So did all the kids at his party.  This was his first friend party.  Four of his friends from church came to celebrate.

Here are three of M's friends.  One was too busy crying in the other room waiting for his mom to come back.  Haha  

They ran around and played for a while in the backyard.  Then we had cake & ice cream.  Then more playing.  Then presents & goody bags and everyone went home happy.  (The crying boy was fine once his mom returned to hang out.) The party was just an hour and there were no organized games.  M is the oldest of his friends so I just didn't think the little ones would be up to it.  They were perfectly content to run around.

The theme was chosen by M - airplane cake, volcano & dinosaur centerpiece & plates, and colorful decorations.  My children can never stick to one thing for a theme - they love to have a bit of this and that.

There is some video too, of the actual birthday song, and blowing out the candles and that.  I'll post it when I get around to uploading it.  Which may be never.

My Girls

My two girls posed for me in Baby C's room yesterday.  Baby C is nearly 8 months old and thisclose to crawling (nooooo!).  Miss E is counting the days til her 6th birthday.  It's not til June, she's just very excited.  :D

E wanted to show off the fact that she has lost TWO teeth!

Recent Happenings

 Cuddles with Daddy

 Our little sweetie smiled beautifully on Valentine's Day in a quick photo snapped by Mr N.

Can you believe she will be seven months old in a few days???  I sure can't.  Baby C is developing her torso strength and can sit up unassisted for up to half a minute if she doesn't try to grab something.  Then she topples over.  She wasn't much of one for baby food.  The only thing I could get her to really eat was green beans.  Not that I tried much.  She pretty much skipped right to real food.  She enjoys cheese and bananas and especially loves bread.  Mr N gave her some strawberry smoothie the other day - wowee did she go for that!

 M caught his first frog and was SO happy!  

He is wearing his favorite shirt, which says "1 lucky dude."  He wears this regardless of the season.  It just happens to work at this time of year.

E & M have recently been learning a great deal about science.  E really likes dinosaurs and natural disasters so they both love to watch whatever shows they can find about those things on Netflix.  M also loves planets and space.  He loves to have me search Google Images for astronauts, the moon, spaceships, and various planets.  I took the kids to the non-fiction section of the kids' section of the library for the first time ever, and they were seriously acting like it was Christmas and they got everything they had ever dreamt of.  I showed them some Eyewitness books and they went crazy! We came home with a giant pile.  It was so fun.  They especially loved Dinosaur, Human Body, Ocean, Moon, Volcano & Earthquake, Weather, and Water.

 The kids like to help me cook.  E got a craft apron from Aunt Jeanie for Christmas.  M wears one of my aprons.  

"Bean trays" were a big hit here this week and kept the kids entertained for hours.  They created elaborate stories to accompany their play.  I saw this on the web somewhere.  Thanks, Internet!

E's Cat Song

I like to take a catnap in bed.
I like to have my door open,
But I don't have a door
So that's lucky for me.

I only have cat choices
My only choice is to pick.

I don't like rabbits.
I don't like dogs;
We fight all the time.
I don't like bees
They sting me.

All I do is be a cat.

Dining Room - Glorious After

 This is the garbage produced.

 Inspired to clean by the beautiful floor!

Dining Room - During

 Day One

Our friends EdgyK and her husband Stenny helped us.  Without their help we would have gone nutz and it would have taken a LOT longer.

 I am being useful here, it just doesn't look like it.  Haha  I was dictating measurements while EdgyK marked the laminate.  (Blogger loaded these pics all jumbled up.)  Here you can see we were nearly done with the kitchen.  The kitchen took a long time because of all those corners we had to measure around.

M discovered the advantages of a wood floor.

Here is the picture of how far we got the first day.  We finished the kitchen.  We had friends coming over that evening, and EdgyK had a family party to attend, so we stopped around 5pm.

M and E used the boxes as coffins.  My kids are so morbid.  They did a mummy exhibit and drew bodies inside the coffins.

When everything got ripped up, we discovered there was a half-inch difference between the dining room and the kitchen.  Mr N had to run to the store and get some boards to even things up.  This set us back about two hours.

 Here is E being a mummy.  Apparently mummy = zombie without a hunger for brains.

Day Two

Day 2 dawned bright and early.  It was New Years Eve and Stenny & EdgyK showed up at 8am to floor the dining room.  That's earrrrrrly in case you were wondering.

 After the kids got bored with the mummy exhibit of Day 1, they turned the boxes of Day 2 into a tepee.

 Okay so admittedly I did not work as hard as Mr N, EdgyK, or Stenny.  I was on baby duty a lot.  It's its own form of hard work!  Day 2 while the baby was napping it was me, EdgyK and Mr N on floor duty while Stenny was our cutter.

 

Mr N picked up a set of laminate installation tools on a whim during his trip to Home Depot on Day 1 and they turned out to be VERY useful.  The dining room was much faster to floor due to its large rectangular shape.  We finished laying laminate around 1pm and Stenny stayed and helped Mr N nail all the baseboards back on.  They were done around 2pm.

Dining Room - Before

 Between Christmas and New Years, Mr N had the entire week off.  At the top of a very short "Honey Do" list was ripping out the carpet of the dining room and cheap laminate of the kitchen and replacing it with the highest quality wood laminate we could afford.  Look at that nasty carpet!  Naturally we didn't bother vacuuming before snapping this pic.

I snapped this picture in case Mr N didn't feel like smiling at the end of the project.

Here's a picture of the laminate in the kitchen.  Mr N had already pulled the fridge out.  Sorry the lights in the kitchen are pretty yellow.  There was nothing major wrong with the laminate; there were several small holes and dings in it and there was discoloration in the entire center where we walk around.

Sibling Love!

Christmas 2011

 We decorated a gingerbread house on Christmas Eve.

 We went on a marathon walk (nearly 2 miles) and watched that old stop-motion animation movie of how Kris Kringle became Santa Claus and had pizza for dinner.  It is a tradition from Mr N's family to watch a movie and eat pizza on Christmas Eve night. 

 The children got to open one present Christmas Eve - their new pajamas.  We were worried they would take forever to fall asleep, but they both conked out right away.  Apparently the long walk coupled with weeks of anticipation was too much for our little ones.

 Here is the living room after Santa visited!

 Our Christmas tree.

 The children posing with their stockings.

 The baby ponders the joys of Christmas.

We didn't take many pictures of Christmas morning, it's mostly video.  I'll upload that...sometime.  We had a lovely Christmas and hope you did too!