Hello

Haven't posted in a LONG time!  I guess September has been a rough month for several reasons as many of you know, so I just haven't been in the mood.  Molly's really enjoying school, but we haven't been enjoying the constant colds that have been making their way through the house.  Last week it was ear infections all around, which pretty much sucked, but now everyone seems to be feeling better.  Guess we'll just have to wait and see what fun she's picked up from school this week.
Just going to post some pictures just to get them up.  These are from Maggie's birthday party, way back in August.

Getting messy.

Cleaning up.

Maggie having an awesome hair day.  Molly said "she looks like a unicorn!"

I figured if I was going to post, I should at least get some recent pictures, so I dusted off my camera and took some pictures of the girls yesterday.

This one is my favorite.

I suppose this one is cuter though.

Showing off her lashes

Rosy cheeked.  It's starting to cool off, but it's still kind of warm.

Just a random comment about Molly and school:  It's like she has a secret life there.  The teacher always says she's had a good day (and that she didn't eat lunch), but when I try to get some information from Molly, she's pretty vague.  I do know that she's overly concerned with the misbehavior of one little boy in her class.   She's always talking about how he doesn't listen.  Meredith has a theory that she's just created an alias for all her bad deeds, but I've checked the class list and he does exist, so unless he's her scapegoat, I think she's telling the truth.  There is also a little girl that she talks about a lot that seems to be her friend.  Too cute. Hopefully we can manage to stay healthy for an entire week so she can go and hang out with her friends.

Birthday Girl

So as of this past Saturday, Maggie is 1!  Man was that ever fast!  If you haven't already seen it, these are the pictures from her party invite.

Her party isn't until this weekend, but we had a special birthday dinner for her.  She loves black beans, particularly the ones from Chipotle. 

And, it's not your birthday unless you get cake.

Molly agrees.

Last week we went to Laguna with the Morris family for a few days.  It was nice to get out of Yuma for a little bit although I hear the weather wasn't as bad while we were gone.  Not that it's not nice to get away regardless, but during the summer when you leave, I think everyone hopes that they'll miss the really horrid days.

We went to the "baby beach" at the Harbor which was nice since you don't have to worry about some giant wave coming and knocking them over.  Also it's shark week, so that's of course we're thinking about that.

Maggie practicing her boogie board moves.

Molly was in love with the boogie boards, her and Grayson had a great time pulling each other around on them.

We also went fishing and Jonny caught Molly's 1st fish for her.  When he caught it, Molly's mind was somewhere else, and she didn't want to come down and pose for the picture.  As she was running away from me, I asked Jonny, "do you really want to push the issue?"  Well, you can see that yes, he did.

Thanks to the Morris family and of course the Hannons for letting us crash with them!

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!