Sleepover

We took a quick trip to California this past weekend, but I should probably start with Easter, since I didn't ever post those pictures.  We still had to coach her a little, but she did pretty good this year finding her eggs.  She was really into it. We had about 30 items for her to find, but it wasn't enough, when we finished, she wanted to start all over.  My Dad indulged her and did hide stuff again for her to find.

Maggie even found one!

Molly and Maggie with Granny

On Friday we took a last minute trip to California to visit some family.  We also had a chance to take Molly to Legoland for her first time.  She was really into it, and had a great time making Jonny go on all the rides.

 

This was my favorite ride.  3-5 year olds driving cars. For me, the 3 year olds make this ride awesome, but for the 5 year olds, they're completely ruining it by crashing all of the time.  They told her to turn her wheel, which she did...left, right, left right (in quick succession). I think she thought it was like her plasma car.  The looks of confusion on her and this other kid's face crack me up.

 I'm guessing that this is the worst job at Legoland: redirecting all the junior "drivers".

This is how she ended her race.  The truth is, she never even completed a lap.  Maybe next time.

Somebody creeping on Molly and I on our boat ride.

Found the creep!

There's also a nifty aquarium there.  Molly in a bubble.

While on the trip, Molly was fascinated with idea of sleeping at the hotel.  She called it the sleepover and asked if we were going to live there now.  She made Jonny sleep in her bed with her and he said that she wouldn't sleep unless her feet were somewhere on him.  Even though Maggie didn't let me get too much rest, I'm kind of glad I didn't have to share with little miss bed hog.
Maggie wasn't too happy about being in her car seat.  I'm not sure how she knew this trip was going to be different from our regular trips around town, but as soon as I would set her in her seat, she would scream.  Kind of a bummer since I was sort of hoping we could leave town as often as possible this summer.  Hopefully we can work something out.

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.