Beautiful babies

The view from my awesome birthday present!

Can you see the difference? Blake got me a super-duper, big ass camera for my birthday. I mean the kid's still as cute as ever, but the quality is TONS better than my little point-and-shoot. We stole the whole set up idea from Erin, and if you've looked at the pictures of her little guy on her blog you'll understand why. I still have a low-light lens on the way that will make the indoor shots even better!

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Here's one for comparison:

Keep an eye out for much better photos from here on out!

The icing on the cake

Camden got an award at Mother's Day Out today. He FINALLY went into his class without crying! All I had to do was bribe him with the cinnamon gum that I had in my mouth. How easy and gross is that? I believe that fits into the "whatever works" category of child rearing. Landry didn't cry either, which happens periodically, but was extra sweet because it coincided with Camden's tear-free day.

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See? It really was a great day!

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p.s. - I'm pretty sure they were making fun of me because I was so excited about getting out of the building without hearing one of my kids crying, but hey! I'll take it!!

Before the birthday dinner

What a wonderful birthday! Thanks to facebook, I think I received about 80 birthday wishes, which has to be a record in my 34 years. Blake and I went to Bella Fresca for dinner, which was yum-yum-yummy! I somehow managed to fit bread, sesame tempura shrimp, salad, turbot (fish) and hot chocolate flambois in my squished belly.

I never imagined spending my 34th birthday with two 1 year olds at home and another baby on the way, but I truly can't imagine my life being any better than it is at this exact moment. Thank you, Blake, for taking care of me the way you do! And thank you to the rest of my family and friends for making another birthday special. I love you guys!

Melts my heart! and makes me giggle!

I love how he ends it with "Wandry" and looks over at his sister. He has no idea whose birthday it is - he's just singing!

Just because she's beautiful

Birthday brunch

Today we went to Caroline's birthday party at the Schoonover's. They made a yummy brunch and I ate entirely too much. I guess I figure if my kids don't eat I get three portions! We had a great time playing outside in the sunshine. Happy birthday Sweet Caroline!

Caroline thinks we have some sort of "happy birthday" affliction after two days of partying and singing!

The two mamas. Someone should have told us to suck in.


Camden lifted Alex's brand new tricycle.

He still thinks he's in charge of swinging Landry, even though he gets knocked down repeatedly.

Landry swinging with the birthday girl.

A Gymboree Day!

We celebrated Alex's birthday today at Gymboree. He turned 2 on February 16th. Happy birthday, Alex!!! Thanks for letting us play with you today!

This is about as close as it gets to a smile when Alex sees a camera!

We've known for some time that Camden loves Gymboree, but it turns out that his little sister is just as big of a fan!

It took Camden about 2 seconds to get into full Gymboree mode.

Landry liked the singing!

Camden STILL loves the parachute!

A few notes

A couple of things worth mentioning:

• Camden is counting to ten (I think I've mentioned that before), but when he does it all on his own it goes "2, 3, 7 (sebben), 8, 9, 10!" He requires assistance to get all of the numbers.

• He also tries to spell his name, but for some reason he always starts with the letter T. He'll repeat each letter after one of us, but when he goes out on his own he says T.

• His big thing these days is that he's a "good helper". It doesn't matter what you're doing, he's going to try to help and say "good helper?" He even thinks he's a good helper when he's doing the complete opposite of what we're telling him to do.

• Landry recently started doing the signs for "all done" and "more". We're working on "eat". I think she knows what it means, but hasn't tried to do it herself yet.

• She is trying to say a few words, like "dog", "bite", "bath", "tah-tah" (thank you), and probably a couple of others. Her words have no ending consonants yet.

• She has both of her bottom 2 year molars. I knew one of them was coming in a few weeks ago, but yesterday I did a little investigating and found that the entire surface of both bottom teeth were exposed.

Another toddler?

Libby was very good at getting Landry to take more than a few steps today. I think she topped out at 8 or 9 this afternoon. This is all I've managed to catch on video so far.

Fun times!

My part of the family came over this afternoon to eat and visit with Libby. We had all of the cousins together except little Claire. Maybe one day soon we'll all be together again.

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The kids took Dee on a walk after lunch:

Aidan was too tall to make the little truck go.

He was determined to try, though.

5 out of 7 of Pop and Dee's grand kids.

Landry getting a pull from Tanner.


Camden could make this little scooter thing go (ala Fred Flintstone), but Dee thought he was entirely too slow, so he got pushed.

There were several switch-offs.

Ready or not, here I come!

Happy birthday, Peeps!

Peyton turned 16 on Thursday! It's hard to believe, right? We celebrated today at Superior where she was serenaded by the wait staff. She was a little embarrassed, but it was fun. Landry really enjoyed the blue and green icing on the birthday cake!

We love you Peyton! You are such a beautiful and sweet young woman.

Suckers!

Camden's a pretty efficient sucker eater, but Landry is way messy. I wish these pictures showed how absolutely sticky she was during this endeavor!

22 weeks pregnant

Partial face shot.

Full penis shot.

We had our follow-up appointment with Dr. Groome, the maternal and fetal medicine specialist today. This child has something against showing his face, but has no problem WHATSOEVER putting his man bits in the right spot for viewing. Sorry these pictures aren't the greatest. It's because I cheated and took a picture of them instead of using the scanner.

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Everything looked good, except the baby's kidneys were slightly dilated. While this could just be because he needed to pee and hadn't, it has also been linked to chromosomal disorders like Down Syndrome. Dr. Groome said that he's never seen a case of Downs where the only finding was dilated kidneys. But because it's his job, he went through the possibilities and offered us an amniocentisis to rule out a chromosomal disease. In about a half a second we decided that we wouldn't take him up on his offer. Number 1: knowing wouldn't change anything; Number 2: the risks sounded absolutely horrible (they include miscarriage); and, Number 3: there isn't any solid reason to let ourselves worry about it too much. So I think I'll be a little uncomfortable about things for a few days, then hopefully will start believing it when I say there's nothing to worry about. That's the plan, anyway. We see the specialist again in 6 more weeks to check out his baby kidneys again.

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So, while I would love to be all cheery and say with 100% confidence that everything's great, I'll have to go with 90% for now.

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Oh, and he weighs a whopping 1 pound, 1 ounce right now!

Two of the sweetest smiles

What sweet babies! (Today, at least.)

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I thought it might be time for a little update on what the kids are doing/saying before I forget it all.

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Landry is really into eating anything she can get her hands on these days. Blake says she'll eat anything that doesn't eat her first. She still won't do fruit unless it's apple sauce or dried tropical fruit. Maybe one day she'll decide unprocessed fruit isn't the devil. She's eating most things without being cut into teeny tiny pieces, which is very nice. Meat still has to be pretty small since she only has a few choppers, but otherwise she bites and chews very well. She's such a big girl already!

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She enjoys mimicking Camden when she has the right consonants to do it. The phrase of the week has been "Mama!!!!" in a very, VERY loud tone of voice. Did I mention it's loud? Especially in the car? She doesn't seem very interested in saying much else (other than dah-dah and bye-bye), but has been making more and more sounds lately that we hope will eventually turn into words. She loves to blow kisses and wave when we say bye-bye. She's good at anticipating the goodbyes and starts blowing kisses, waving and saying "bye-bye" as soon as she senses that it's coming.

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She's up to about 4 steps, but other than that doesn't seem to have the urge to go any further upright. Today she took three steps with the same foot, so she pivoted around almost 180 degrees before she bit the dust. I would have sworn she would have been walking by now, as would both of her grandmothers!

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Last night Camden and I were sitting on the couch before bedtime. Blake was in his recliner and sneezed a couple of times. Camden leaned up so he could see past me and said "bwess you daddy, bwess you". It was seriously one of the cutest and sweetest things I've ever heard. I'm glad I was sitting here to hear it.

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He's saying just about everything we say, and lots of things he hears on TV. The latest being "Oh my God!", which he got from watching Annie. We're trying to morph it back into "oh my goodness", since that's what we say and what he said before. Did you know they say GD on Annie? I was very surprised. Hopefully he doesn't pick that one up!

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He still loves music and loves to sing. We ended up buying Annie because we were sick to death of The Sound of Music. Now he has two obsessions as opposed to one. (He didn't like Mary Poppins AT ALL.) I guess we'll sing Doe a Deer, the goodnight song and Tomorrow until we're blue in the face and like it! It sure is cute when he chimes in during the songs, or better yet, starts singing them on his own.

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He has made some friends at Mother's Day Out. He comes home talking about Mary Ashtyn "mare atton" and Cody every day. He even wakes up from naps saying "owna pway with mare atton". He still cries when I drop him off, but he usually dries up before I'm out of the building and reportedly has a really good time and behaves very well.

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I don't think he really understands much about the baby, but he's taken to saying he wants to see the baby and raising my shirt (yay!) and rubbing the baby or sometimes giving the baby kisses. He's gotten to where he tries to shove Landry in my direction when he wants her to go away, and I feel quite sure he'll use that with the baby (who remains nameless) once he gets here as well.

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Okay. I think that's enough documentation for now. Hopefully I've done a decent job for now. I'll need this for the baby books when I ever get around to filling them out!

Hugs and kisses

Thanks for catching these on camera, Danielle!

The play date of the century

We had the most full three hour play date today that we've ever had before. Anne Marie had us over, along with Danielle and Joshua, and Jana, Jude and Julie. We turned the play room into a disaster, played outside on the play set and all had a yummy dinner. And everyone behaved nicely, to boot! It was a very enjoyable and extremely tiring play date. Thanks for the hospitality, Schoons!

Camden thought he needed to be in charge of swinging Landry.

And she didn't mind at all.

Camden and Alex checking each other out in mid-air.

Camden and Julie getting quite a shove from Jana.

Me and my sweet girl.

King of the mountain.

Camden's surprise ride down the slide. Notice Julie right behind him? She got a little tired of waiting for him to get the guts to let go. I think Jana put it best when she said "I'm glad that ended well." He loved it!

Jana overseeing the climbing.

My tired little girl.

Jude's action shot.

(And I have no pictures of Caroline because she was a perfect angel and napped through most of the play date.)