An Audrey update

Someone please tell me that my baby girl is not really 11 months old!!

Audrey's hair has been growing so much that we can actually get a little piggy in there. Well, that is until she notices and starts yanking it out.

She has a thing for Nolan's Batman cave as well, but she has learned that the best time to play with it is after he's gone to bed!

We've been purposely taking pictures and movies of her crawling, because we're quite sure she won't be doing it for long. She started out backwards, and it took her a few weeks to figure out her forward gear, but it wasn't long until she was full steam ahead!

Audrey's mobility has increased SO FAST! She's been crawling since January, and started cruzin along the couch and things about the same time. She quickly moved on from just holding our fingers and walking around the house to taking multiple steps on her own and as of a few days ago-March 24th or so she just takes off on her own. She's confident enough with her walking that she'll go from one side of our living room, to the door of the dining room with a big grin and a giggle on her lips the whole time. She loves it. We love her.

I spend a lot of time doing this around the house with Drey. Yeah, I've got lots of other things that I could be doing, but I know that this phase won't last too much longer, and I'm going to enjoy it while it's here.

I was, however, surprised to see this the other day. Kenny is a very safety concious guy when it comes to our kids, but her balance IS really good-she's even been trying to do it on ONE foot lately!! Crazy little girl is a cheerleader in training I guess!

Audrey and Nolan share a bedroom and I think that has really helped them grow closer. I have found them numerous times sharing little giggles and hearing Nolan invite her to come play with him on his race car bed. I'm sure she'll always look up to her big brother...no matter how many times he snatches away a toy from her slobbery mouth!

A Nolan update

Here's a little bit about what our Nolan boy has been up to lately...

He's growing and learning stuff so quickly we are having a hard time keeping up with ALL of his questions. I never new there could be SO many questions about what EACH sign says as we're driving down the street. For example, "what do those arrows say? why does it say don't go that way? why are those people walking on those two lines?" You get the picture...actually I'm not sure that you can get the picture until you're trapped in the car with him! :)

He attends preschool at the YMCA on Mondays & Wednesdays, and he LOVES it. He insisted that if he had to wear green to school on St. Patrick's Day, then so did Audrey and I since his teachers would see us drop him off.

He has been noticing the letters in his name on signs or any store front and saying, "Hey Mom-there's N for Nolan, etc." but on March 15th he surprised us by writing his name out on this little whiteboard. We had NO idea that he could do that yet!! Now he does it all the time, with what ever he can, finger in the air, finger in the sand, finger in the yogurt he spilled on the table. He's quite proud of his new skill, and now he's working on the rest of our names.

It's been easier convincing him that he needs to get in the tub now that we've discovered homemade tub paints. Hallelujah! If you're wondering about the baby tub that he's in, yep we still use that for both kids, our tub doesn't hold the water in very well and he has never liked taking baths in our tub (we don't have a clue why).

If you're ever looking for him and it's awfully quite in the house, this is usually where he can be found. He loves to play his PBSkids.org and Nickjr.com games SO much-literally he can go for hours if we let him. Since this captures his attention for so long, and he seems to learn quite a bit from them, I decided to move our old PC (he refers to it as his "new puter") in to his room, so when Audrey is napping and I have to do some work with my at-home scheduling assistant job, he can usually be found doing this. Judge me all you want, we have to do what works for us!

Nolan still plays in Rubbermaid tubs whenever they are available, but he does include Audrey in the fun now!

He's also trying to teach her how to play super heros, and is quite patient when he finds yet another toy of his in her mouth.

The best part about Nolan is that he tells us numerous times a day that he loves each one of us. I counted one day and got up to 23 times that he said, "Mom, I love you". That doesn't even count how many times he tells Kenny or Audrey. He is also the first to say "I missed you!!" when we pick up from preschool or Kenny comes home from work. He's our reminder that no matter what the days bring, those three little words make it all worth while.

OK I give up...

I've been hanging on to the idea that I would post all of our Christmas endeavors on our blog so that the friends and family that we visited would have a record of all of the fun pictures that we snapped while out playing with them in December. But since blogging is not something that I have a ton of time to catch up on right now, we purchased a journaling program that can serve as a journal for our family and it will post to our blog if I'd like it to. So instead of me worrying so much about getting it up on the blog so I can print out a blog book of our year in review, I can worry about updating the blog with more up to date information and recording more of the fun things that happen like when Nolan says or does something funny or when Audrey starts taking more than 8 steps at a time on her own...important stuff like that!

So here's to recording the here and now...I know most of you do that already but I'm pretty excited about it!

So here's a most recent picture of everyone...and then we'll go from there! :)

Audrey showing off her new big girl booster chair.

Kenny & Nolan at the frozen Geneva Lake

Me, sporting my Happy Birthday to me-new 'do!

Still testing the new software...

Our little bathing beauty

The "bunking beds" that Nolan enjoyed during our trip to the Dells in January...more about that later I guess.