Baby Breath

Maggie is a decent eater, so long as you give her what she wants to eat.  Molly used to plow through avocados which was awesome since they're easy to transport.  Maggie is a little pickier though.  She's really great with finger foods so I figured I could just cut it up and let her go to town, but mostly she just liked to smear it around.  She does like guacamole though, but I always feel like they're too salty (not for me, but for her).  So I made her a little baby guac with just the avocado and a tiny bit of chopped garlic and she devoured it.  It might have helped that Molly was feeding her.  Jonny was making fun of her the rest of the day though because she had baby garlic breath.  

You're doing it wrong.

Better.

Right after dinner, we always go straight to the bath.  Maggie really into it and walks to the bathroom by herself while saying "BA! BA! BA!"  and trying to tear off her shirt.  I helped her out.

Made it! 

They always fight for the good seat in the bath by the faucet.  Yay for Maggie!

2nd Day of School

The1st day of school is totally overrated.  Mostly because I was a flake and didn't take pictures of Molly's 1st day of school.  So here are some pictures of Molly before her 2nd day of (pre)school.  She wasn't exactly cooperative for me and wasn't going to stand, obediently smiling for me.  She's also sporting one of her "princess" crowns that I'm always having to make.  Fortunately she's done really great the past two days.  She won't tell me too much about her days so far, but she hasn't cried and she says she likes it.  Her teacher says that she's doing good and seems to play well and follow directions.  I know two days isn't a huge history, but I'm relieved we're off to a good start.

Here are some little sis pictures

Almost 1 year old! That can't be right...

In other big news, Papa bought a sailboat!  It's pretty nifty.  I'm sure someday Molly and Maggie will get to head out with him on it, but for now they enjoyed their time parking lot sailing.

Molly's schedule is starting to fill up.  In addition to school, I also have her signed up for gymnastics, which she starts tomorrow.  I was thinking we might skip dance for awhile, but now I'm thinking that as long as she enjoys everything she's doing, we'll just stick with it, and I know she loves dance class.  What's 1 more hour a week that she's NOT watching TV. Yep, I'm that mom.

She's a walker

Molly likes to narrate for me what Maggie is capable of doing. "She's a sitter", "She's a crawler" and now, "She's a walker!"

She's also proving to be quite a climber as well.

 

If I leave the living room, I might find her here or on top of the big ottoman.  Or screaming on the floor because she's fallen off of one of those places. 

Molly likes to help me in the kitchen, as you can see here, she's extremely helpful.

Today I gave her some random kitchen ingredients and let her go to town.  Here she has water, cream, cornstarch, lemon pepper, ground ginger, baby cereal and cocoa powder.  She didn't try her concoction although the cocoa powder was too tempting to resist.  She was disappointed.

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.