The Great Outdoors

Actually, I'm going to start with the indoors.  About a month ago, we had some 6 month/3year pictures taken by Bill Butler. I thought it was interesting how much Maggie reminded me of Molly at the same age.  Or maybe it was just the white background/same white dress/6 month old baby combo. 

Here we are outside.  Since for now, the weather is still pretty nice, we like to hang out in the yard and even eat our dinners outside.  This will be coming to an end soon enough, so may as well take advantage while we can.

Maggie is a skilled crawler now.  I told Molly that we should enter her in a baby race and she came up with this long story about how really we should get her a little car so she can go really fast and also we're going to need to build a racetrack.

She also does a lot of this business.  Trying to walk away.

Hanging out in front of Papa and Gran's

Molly's really into the idea of camping, so we're probably going to have to take her on a "real" camping trip eventually, but for now she's pretty happy with s'mores cooked over the smokey joe.

She's not to be trusted with the marshmallow bag.

I've been trying to capture that "Popeye" face that Molly also did around this age.  This one reminds me the most of Molly's face

 

 But I think this one might take the Popeye cake,

 

Creepy Crawler

So she hasn't even mastered crawling yet, so can someone explain how she got here all by herself?

Hasn't mastered crawling, but in the past few days she's made some serious progress. Although she still uses the GI Jane technique, (thanks for the proper term Rachael :-), she's also been working out the coordination to crawling on all fours. It's probably only a matter of days before she masters it. What am I going to with all the 3+ toys we've accumulated in the past year? So many tiny parts.

Here are a some pictures I took out in the yard the other day.

Molly can be so sweet to Maggie sometimes.  She loves to try and make her laugh, which is the best. Sometimes she'll even just look at her and sort of sigh and say "I love her mama".  Of course you get a toy involved and then it's all over.

Right after this picture was taken, Molly says "She's too heavy!  Get her off of me!"

Goodnights

We've had some good nights the past few days. Good for a few reasons. One: I've finally become brave enough to let Molly wear "big girl panties" at night instead of a pull up, and it's actually going well (two dry nights so far!) and 2:  Maggie's only gotten up once to eat for 2 nights in a row and went right back to sleep without too much trouble.  Let's hope we can keep this up!  (Of course I know I shouldn't get too excited)
There's also This:  

And this:

She's been pulling a lot of that lately, so I had to lower the crib down so she didn't dive out.  When I say "I" I mean "we" as in Maggie Molly and I.  Normally Jonny would do something like that (I'm not into being liberated in that way) but the timing never worked out and she was always using the crib when he was available to do it.  So I just had to do it.  I wouldn't recommend it.  It wasn't that it was confusing or difficult, it's just that trying to complete a task like that with the soundtrack of screams and whines that is pretty much the soundtrack of my life these days can be maddening.  But, I did it and it seems to be working just fine.

Uncle Chris and Aunt Stephanie sent Molly a totally awesome dragon costume for her birthday.  She loves it, and Maggie seems to think it's okay too.

RAWWW!

My mom always gives me a hard time when I talk about Maggie being a mean baby.  I think she may be coming around to my way of thinking.  She's so grabby and wiggly  when you hold her that's she's almost impossible to contain, it can become exhausting.

Mom even threatened to bite her.  Have to watch out for that Gran.

I think I'm going to officially call her a crawler.  She's been using a combination of pushing up and falling forward and just dragging herself along on her belly, but she can pretty much go where she wants to go.  She can also go from her belly to sitting, so I'm pretty much screwed now.

The search for a new carrier continues.  I tried an Ergobaby performance and hated it, so I bought 3 others to try out.  Hopefully something will work out since she's pretty sure I always need to hold her.

Adventure!

Molly likes to talk about adventures and really, doing anything with a 3 year old and a 7 month old is an adventure, but from her point of view our life isn't really all that adventurous. This past weekend we took her on a little adventure (very little).  Jonny had remembered that there were some petroglyphs nearby and so we went to look for them.  Jonny was operating from knowledge obtained on a 3rd grade field trip so I was skeptical of his ability to actually remember and find where they were.  I'm such a pain in the ass that way.  It turns out though that in 3rd grade, Jonny was REALLY interested in petroglyphs and so he retained  that information.  He even told me what some of them meant or at least what his 3rd grade teacher told them they meant.

She's off!

Maggie came along, but mostly slept.  She's blowing raspberries here...she LOVES to do that!

She's really into smelling flowers.  Not sure these were particularly fragrant.

Here we are at the "top" of the "mountain".  She's very enthusiastic.  I guess I shouldn't knock the K'tan too much since it has served me well and in this very picture, Maggie is totally passed out in it, but looking at her here all dangly, makes me glad that I just bought a different, more structured carrier.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Found them!

 

In case you were dying to know what they were looking at.  There were actually several spots around there that had some, but these were the easiest to get to.

Jonny is now responsible to find us a new adventure to go on next weekend.  It should be pretty easy since anything that is running around outside (preferably not near your own home) qualifies as an adventure when you're 3.

0-3

Sunday was the big day, and I'll just head right into it.  It all started at around 10 when the guy from the jumpy place showed up. I'm not sure why,but Molly kept calling the guy "Allen" I'm pretty sure that wasn't his name and I'm pretty sure that he never even told us his name.  Anyhow, a big thanks to Allen at Little Mosterz Jumpers. Molly and Jonny were supposed to go out and pick up some helium balloons for the party, but once the Strawberry Shortcake jumpy was up, balloons were apparently unnecessary. 

Maggie enjoyed bouncing around too.

Catching some air.

She was so excited about the musical/talking cards that her grannies gave her that she had to bring them into the jumper to dance with them.  It was pretty funny

  Every little kid always goes straight for the frosting.

She kept talking about how she was so excited that all her friends were coming over. 

Kate and Maggie, too cute! 

Best bud Grayson!

 That's my girl!

I'm going to call it, no more than 3 weeks until this one in crawling.

My mom got Molly a really cool "princess tower" for the playroom.  Maggie was playing peekaboo with

me.

I might have to start a separate blog where I post pictures of the places Molly falls asleep.  Still haven't figured out the nap situation.  Today she napped for an hour (I had to wake her) and she didn't go to bed until 10.  In a perfect world she would take a nap and still go to bed from 8-9.  When has Molly's sleep ever been perfect though?

I went to put Maggie down for a nap and left her watching shows on the ipad (mother of the year over here).  Anyhow, this is where she was when I came back.

We have an infestation of mosquitoes and fairies.  The mosquito problem is mainly in Molly's room at night.  She's been waking up in the morning with really bad bites. One bite was right between her eyes and she swelled up so that she looked like one of those creatures from Avatar.  A week or so later she got another bite on her eye and her eye swelled up so that she looked like Chunk from Goonies. I thought maybe it was spiders (heebie jeebie) but after I got bit I decided it was probably a mosquito.  In the end I think the fairy infestation is going to be more difficult to deal with.

Maggie's getting good at using a cup.  I wish she would get better at sleeping.  I can't complain too much about naps.  They're not consistent yet, but she's been pretty good about taking 2 naps a day for at least an hour each.  The first 2 nights in the crib went poorly, but then she had 2 really great night where she only woke up once to eat.  Then that ended and she's back to what she was doing in the Amby which was waking up twice a night. It does suck having to walk across the house when she gets up, but it's also nice to have our room back.

Jonny has a new fishing buddy.  They've gone out three times now.  Maggie and I even went with them once.  So far, no fish...

but some awesome dance moves!

So, Molly's 3 and Maggie is 7 months in a week.  It's funny how you're simultaneously excited for them to grow up ("please start sleeping through the night!/learn how to share") and sad that they're getting so big!  I can't even remember how we got from "oh" to "Mommy you smell like yuck!"...well maybe if you two would let Mommy take a shower without screaming...