Beach babies

I do have pictures from the 4^th of July, but I’m not exactly sure where they are right now.  They weren’t anything special, so I don’t feel too bad about skipping over it especially since I have a billion vacation pictures to post.  We spent the past week driving all over CA or at least that’s what it felt like.  Jonny had meetings in San Luis Obispo, so we all tagged along.  On the way up, we hit up Sea World just to break the trip up a little.  Then Molly Maggie and I just sort of hung out while Daddy was off with his co-workers plotting how to take over the world (hahaha).  Then when he was done, we all headed up to the Monterey area and went to the aquarium (very cool). Along the way we hit up a few different beaches which Molly loved.

These first pictures are from a beach somewhere in the Monterey area.

 

 Coming back from Monterey, we had this genius idea that we would take the 1 back to San Luis Obispo.  We knew that it would add extra time, but we thought it would be fun and that the girls would be sleeping anyhow.  Of course they didn't really sleep much and then there was the car sickness.  Thankfully no one tossed their cookies, but we did have to stop and get air a lot more than we had figured.

Poor thing.

 The only positive from that leg of the trip was this one beach.  I don't know exactly where it was, but I think it was call Sand Dollar?  Anyhow, it was really pretty and a nice distraction for car sick little ones.

 There were a few surfers there and Molly is convinced that she can surf too.  I told her she should master swimming first, but she's not buying it.  Here she is showing us her moves.

Moving on, we eventually ended up back in the Carlsbad area for my cousins baby shower.  There we met up with my parent and had an actual, real beach day with swimsuits and everything.  Not just falling in the water and ruining a perfectly good pair of pants...again!

 

Little Chickasaw

Maggie did some digging with her face.

We had dinner at Ruby's and Molly got this bitchin' princess hat made for her.  In true Molly fashion, she was saying, "Look at this hat that I made!"

Then on the way back, we hit up Sea World 1 more time and this time, she took this great picture with a creepy walrus admiral.

Cookies were a recurring theme throughout our vacation. At one point, Molly must have sensed that I had heard enough pleas for cookies and switched things up on me.  She instead said "Mom, I think I want something that kind of crunchy and has chocolate chips!"  when I asked her what that could possibly be?  she said "Well I guess you'll have to use you're imagination"  Little punk!
In other news, Maggie took her first steps two weeks ago and although she's not quite there, she's starting to try and walk a lot more the past 2 days.
I haven't written anything about words she's using, mostly because I'm not really sure what they are.  With Molly there was a clear first word, but with Maggie it's a little foggier.  I'm sure that she's saying Dada for Jonny and something that sounds like "Thank-you" when we hand things back and forth.  Occasionally I think she says something for "diaper" and today I swear she was saying "toes" and touching Molly's feet. She's kind of all over the place with language so it's hard to tell if it's a word or just some random babble.  I'm convinced babies know more than we give them credit for, so I'm pretty sure she's chatting up a storm!

Molly and Maggie's house

I'm a little behind and have too many pictures, but I guess I'll just go chronologically. We had the Morris clan over for dinner a week ago.  The kids had a good time running around outside in the heat. 

Grayson showed us some new sliding techniques

The cruised around. (I LOVE this picture)

We of course had plenty of watermelon.

WE attempted to get them all together for a picture.

I'm guessing Ramsey has a coordinating picture of Molly.

Molly took this one too.  Daddy, doing some cool tricks.

While they were over, the 3rd member of Bri-Tri ;-) was never far from our thoughts. We kept track of her progress online. You kind of feel lazy just sitting around when you know your friend is out there somewhere running 100 miles.   I don't think I need to tell anyone how completely awesome she is.

This past weekend, our friend Allysia was visiting and we all got together with all of our kids.  These kids are really starting to add up.

Now here it is:  Molly and Maggie's place.  I'm thinking of moving them out.  We've talked about getting a playhouse.  We considered building one of our own, but this Sam's Cub special was just too easy to pass up.  Jonny managed to overcome poor technical writing and some questionable engineering to make it happen.

She loves it.  It's too funny.  It has a doorbell and she makes us close the door and ring it so that she can properly answer the door.  It also has a little play phone, so she takes lots of calls.

She took her breakfast at her bench this morning.

She kept wanting to make funny faces instead of nice ones.

Looking a little too pleased with herself if you ask me.

Here's princess Molly.  Such a little priss.

In other news: My kids don't sleep.  I suppose that's not really news.  At least not to me.  Molly was fantastic from 2-3.  She'd go to sleep and sleep 11 hours without bothering anyone.  Then a little after her birthday, she slowly started increasing the number of days where she would come into our room. Now for the past month she's been up almost every single night.  There isn't any clear reason for it, other than she wakes up and wants to see us. It's getting old.  Especially when you pair it with Maggie who still consistently wakes up twice a night except last week where 3 was apparently the magic number.  Maggie is also becoming really difficult to get down for her naps.  I thought that she might want to drop a nap, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  Now instead of nursing to sleep, she just beats up on me (hair pulling/biting with her 2 teeth/head butting/screaming) for an hour.  Thankfully the 2-3 times a night that she gets up, she does not do this.  This morning Molly had come to our bed around 4 and fell asleep on my head.  I'm not exactly sure what time, but I think it was probably around 6:30, I started hearing Maggie stir, so I turned the monitor volume down so it didn't wake up Molly.  I fully intended to get out of bed right then and go get her, but I was so tired that I fell back asleep.  I'm guessing around 40 minutes later I jolted awake remembering what I was supposed to be doing.  I felt terrible.  She was so sad.  I'm not sure she's forgiven me yet.  I miss sleeping so much.  I hope someday I can do it again.  I kind of think I'm a better person with it.

Frog Days of Summer

Molly had her 1st recital last Saturday.  Any reservations I might have had about dance class being "too much" were quickly erased when we saw her on the stage.  Too cute is the only way to describe it.  It was interesting to watch how much harder she tried when in front of an audience. She now asks me about the stage and when we're going there again and before class yesterday, she told me she loved dance class and that she wanted to stay there forever.  Since she's such a big fan, I signed her up for the summer class.

For the performance, they were little frogs and danced with Kermit and Miss Piggy to "Who let the frogs out".  Terrible I know.  I don't care, it was freaking adorable.

  Maggie was a trooper during the show and actually really got into it.  She even quietly fell asleep at one point, which is kind of unheard of for her.

Maggie is still going blueberry crazy.  I'm going to have to change her name to Violet Beauregarde.

Swim class was good and bad.  Good for Maggie, bad for Molly.  She screamed her way through the 1st week.  I spent my time avoiding eye contact with her and trying not to upset her more than she already was.  I think it's a combination of being intimidated by the older kids and being up-set at me for being in the pool with Maggie.  I made her tough out 6 days, but in the end I let her drop out.
After one particularly horrible day at class, she came home and passed out. 

Happier times...before swim class.

I asked her one day to think of things that she liked about swim class.  She came up with this: "going home"

I bought candy land yesterday and we've been playing all day.  She actually obeys some of the rules.  Mostly she likes making up stories about the gingerbread boys.  When one game piece gets ahead of the other game piece she gets sad and wants them to be together again.  Next time I'll have to get chutes and ladders.

Summer Fun

It's getting hotter as always and we keep doing summery things, I suppose we should just embrace the heat.  My mom bought Molly and Maggie a fun little kiddie sprinkler to play in.  Maggie's not sure she likes it, but without fail, she always crawls into the middle.

Of course we have a lot of watermelons to eat.  Giving Maggie her own slice was pretty funny

Thank goodness she likes it, I don't think Jonny could stand having a kid that didn't like watermelon.

Molly, showing her how it's done.

We told her she should do it "pie-eating contest" style

but she's a cheater.

We also started swim lessons this week.  Maggie is in the parent tot class with me, and Molly started in the preschool class.  The first day went pretty good,the 2nd day was a little rough.  I could see Molly just looking pitiful the whole time.  Maggie's class lets out a half hour before Molly's so I went in to get Maggie cleaned up and I guess while we were in the changing room, Molly had told her teacher that she needed to go to the bathroom.  They tried to find me, but we were in the bathroom, and they didn't know.  They asked her what I looked like and she said that I looked like she did (sweet, but not exactly accurate).  Eventually they took her to the bathroom, but they didn't know that their toilets are too tall for her to hop up onto.  At this point I found them, but just a second too late.  When I went in to help her, she just started crying and peeing all over the floor.  Whoops!  After that, we just called it a day and went home.  Thankfully, today went much better and she seemed to be much happier in class. 

Blueberries!

I used to feed Molly little frozen blueberries all the time.  I had forgotten until recently.  The only drawback is that their little hands get stained and look kind of bruised.  I never really intended to feed her like this, but I'm almost exclusively giving her finger foods.  I did do this with Molly too, but I also made a lot of purees.  I'm sure Molly was like this too, but I hate trying to spoon feed her since she's always knocking it out of my hand and trying to steal it from me.  I gave up pretty easily this time around and decided that if she wants to eat, she can take care of herself.  For the most part, she does.
Sort of random fun fact about Maggie:  She has a Mongolian mark.  I hadn't ever heard of it, but I noticed awhile back that she has a faint  bruised looking patch on her lower back and butt.  I know they say you shouldn't use google to diagnose, but in this case it worked out.   I typed in "bruise like marks on baby's back" and there it was.  Hers isn't as noticeable as some of the kids on google (I can't even take a visible picture of it) , but that's definitely what it is.  They say is goes away by age 3, and it isn't any big deal.

Molly went to work with my mom today and she was cracking me up because of how "grown-up" she was trying to be. After I told her that she was going to go, she became obsessed with getting ready by herself so she could go to work. She even made a few comments to me about how Gran really needed her help and how she'd better hurry-up for Gran. I'm not sure how helpful she was, but she did have a good day.

Maggie's getting ready to walk now. She's pretty good with the walker now, this video was from about a week ago, so she's even improved since then.
She's also getting good at picking out watermelons now that Jonny always has several laying around.

Nutella

Can you blame her?  That stuff is amazing. Unfortunately, the 2nd time she did it I did blame her.  I probably sent a mixed message by taking her picture the first time.  Just now she saw the picture and was all excited about how she was "all messy with chocolate!"  I asked her if she was ever going to do it again, and she said "no", but immediately started beaming and analyzing herself in all her chocolate glory. For now, the Nutella is locked up.  This is the problem I've been having now that Maggie requires more attention to go down for a nap.  Most of the time I can keep her occupied with a show or the iPad (I'm a terrible mother...I know) but sometimes she gets creative, and I come out and find something like this.

One last lick.

 

Jonny, always does this with Maggie and it cracks me up.  Make sure you turn up the volume so you can hear her. 


Quick Maggie update.   She's 9 months, 17 1/2 lbs and in case you're keeping track,(I am), she still wakes up at least twice a night.  I try to keep it in perspective, I know Molly figured it out eventually, but I hate being tired.  I'm not sure where my optimism is coming from since it's sort of  out of character, but every night I think to myself:  this will be the night she sleeps.  Maybe it's desperation more than optimism, but more than likely one of these times I'll be right. 

Wettest Day Ever

Molly declared mother's day the "wettest day ever"

Maggie agrees!

I can't remember exactly how everyone became so wet, but I have a hunch this had something to do with it.

She can dish it, but she can't always take it.

 

I know I've been slacking lately and haven't posted anything.  Maybe it's because I'm busy dealing with shenanigans like this:

 

A big thanks to Crayola for making their products truly washable.

I also might be a slacker because of easy access to HBOgo...it could go either way.

Fair warning, this video doesn't show too much and it also had a lovely portion where the garbage disposal is running.  I'm posting it because I love how Maggie "talks" while she crawls around.  This is particularly noticeable when she's crawling with a mission, such as getting to the dog water bowls before me.

Babies crack me up.