the more the merrier!

what a blessing friends are... we've had several visitors swing by lately to meet caroline and play with ethan. i just thought i'd share the happiness they brought our way!


jeannie & the kids stopped by one afternoon to say hey. they said they couldn't stay and that they'd stop by soon...jeannie just "had to peek at caroline real quick"..and they ended up staying all afternoon. :) it was so much fun to visit with all of them. i could sit and talk to jeannie all day (shocker to all who know us both!), and i love seeing how her children have grown.

jeannie could win a gold medal for adoring babies...

if only i could get this excited about diaper changes on a daily basis! :)

a quiet lunch with lori turned into a busy but wonderful visit with her, sheri, daniel & rachael, & their sweet kids... we really don't get together enough. with the exception of sheri, i learned that they are all fellow 24 addicts, and i sent sheri home with our copy of season 1! (are you hooked yet, sheri???) caroline got a good dose of lovin' that day, and ethan enjoyed having a friend over to play. (i had to interrupt ethan's playing to change his diaper, and the whole time i was changing him, he said, "friends? play!" i'd never heard him say "friends" before.) daniel & rachael's little girl felt right at home, i think... within 10 minutes of being at my house, she'd already made a cozy nest inside ethan's toy basket. :)

ta da!

ethan showing off the ABC book that gram made

lori, sheri, & rachael got their baby fix for the day

hope you enjoyed this visit with my friends as much as i did. :)

b&w baby...

i really can't get tired of b&w pictures of my kiddos....

hangin' out at home

just a peek into our everyday life... caroline loves the aquarium gym (thank goodness!!!), and she's really working on rolling over. ethan eats, sleeps, and breathes basketball and cars right now. i could get rid of all of our toys with the exception of his bball goal and a tin box of cars, and i don't think he'd care one bit!

i love this picture!
i think it's the first one w/ both of them happy!

ethan was trying to make caroline hold the toy...
he kept saying, "get! get!"

"well, if you're not gonna chew on it... i will!"

sweet hugs...

caroline is grabbing things now

shoot! shoot! shoot! awww
check out the video if you haven't already...

this is pretend play for ya...
pretending the toolbox is a basketball goal,
and pretending the basketball goal is a road :)

"football, football!"
(we're workin on it...)

sunday best

here's our little man ready for usher duty. :) right this way to the thumb sucking section... ha. ethan loved wearing this coat and tie to church last sunday. with his haircut, he sure did look like a little man. we went to olive garden after church, and somehow, he made it out with a whole breadstick. it was quite hilarious to see him tromping out of the restaurant waving his breadstick. tammy said it would be a perfect olive garden commercial (in which they should announce that soup & salad is NOT a lunch price on the weekends!!). by the time we made a quick stop at lowe's and then drove home, the breadstick was the equivalent of a very teethed teething biscuit!!! yuck!!!! i wanted to take more pictures before ethan's nap, and i knew my only option for a smile was to leave the breadstick in hand...so there ya go.

"ethan, take your thumb
out of your mouth for mommy, please..."

well, he technically obeyed. :)

breadstick for president

cutie patootie, as nana would say!

fuzzy wuzzy...

i really put off ethan's haircut this time around... he was lookin' pretty shaggy!! he actually sat wonderfully still while aunt kristie worked her magic. besides the occasional mouth full of hairy o's, he didn't object! i figured out that the key is to take him outside and get allllll his energy out before the haircut. :) click on the haircut picture and see JUST HOW MUCH HAIR is covering his clothes. he looks a bit like jacob tricking isaac into thinking he is esau...

picture pages, picture pages

my mom does the cutest digital scrapbook pages with photoshop elements, and it just hit me that i could post them on here! (hope that's ok, mom...) here's a few that she's done lately...

caroline is 3 months old!

with a grain of salt...

when i was pregnant, i enjoyed getting the babycenter updates of how my baby in the womb was developing, what piece of produce their size compared to that week, etc... but i must say that as a mother training my children to glorify God in this world on a daily basis, i have to take babycenter's parenting advice with a grain of salt. kristie and i were just talking about this very thing last night! and then first thing this morning, this article was sitting in my inbox.... here's an excerpt if you don't have time to read the whole thing:

Food play, including throwing food, is something every baby and toddler indulges in to some extent. It's part of learning how to feed oneself. "Babies get a lot of pleasure out of seeing something disappear when they drop it, only to reappear when you pick it up for them," says Lyuba Konopasek, assistant professor of pediatrics at the New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City. "This is actually an important developmental skill," she adds.

Your child is learning about object permanence -- the notion that even though an object is out of sight, it still exists. Food play is also about curiosity. A typical meal is a smorgasbord of textures, temperatures, and colors.

Knowing that such antics are educational might make food games tolerable for a few weeks longer than they otherwise would be, but you have every right to set some limits, especially as your child nears her second birthday...

well, call ethan developmentally deprived if you must, but throwing food and even dropping things from the table has never been allowed at our house. he learned to keep his hands down while eating as soon as we started feeding him anything. i don't say that to boast-- only to exclaim that a 7 month old CAN be taught limits (and probably much more easily than a 2 year old!!!!) i think it's quite a stretch to label something educational just because "babies get a lot of pleasure" out of it... i am FAR from having all this mommy stuff figured out-- not even nearly close-- but i can say with confidence that waiting until your child's second birthday to set some limits is just asking for it... asking for peas in your hair, applesauce flying who knows where, and a bad back from picking up that spoon "one more time"... and that's just at the dinner table!

ethan this time last year

shoot!

ethan still loves balls, or anything round, or anything with a resemblance of a circle on it. ball! ball! ball! yes, ethan is verifiably a boy. ethan's daddy is slightly biased towards soccer, so that has been the main focus of his athletic training thus far (seriously, brian has been teaching ethan to kick since about caroline's age!). well, he's beginning to broaden his horizons. over the past couple of weeks, ethan has begun calling EVERY ball "football", even the soccer ball... which is fine on other continents. :) and then this week, nana taught him how to "shoot" the basketball, and he's been shooting any ball into thin air for the past 3 days. time to get this boy a basketball goal... because a colander and caroline's bumbo seat just don't really work that well. (i did try. because we really don't need another toy.) papa & grandma joy gave the kids some valentine's money, so we trucked over to walmart to check out their basketball goal selection... and i am confident that my dad would have picked this one out himself. :) we rigged it up on his toolbench in the living room, and he knew just what to do. he's a little obsessive about the "shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot!" part (and YES, he's saying SHOOT)! enjoy this little video, and ignore my laundry on the couch!

musical beds

this weekend was a pretty special one for the baby book... ethan graduated to a big boy bed! (well, at least a big boy mattress on the floor till we can get the bed frame from my dad's storage unit.) we'd recently been talking about moving ethan out of his crib soon because caroline was beginning to outgrow the cradle, and i guess our little girl overheard our conversation and got quite excited about this upcoming move! when i went in her room saturday morning, this is what i found...


yep. she had wriggled and scooted so much that she knocked the pin loose that keeps the cradle from rocking! she was FAR from falling out, but the wonky cradle still made my heart skip a little beat! that was the last nap for her in there!!

right before ethan's afternoon nap, i realized that this would be his last nap in his crib. apparently, i'm supposed to be excited about these big boy milestones... hopefully i'll get better at this. but at this point, i just get nostalgic... and i go to my default mode, which is to break out the camera. :) ha. here's the last picture of ethan's room before moving the crib out... he's saying, "peace to da brothas in the crib". :)


i laugh because i thought i'd take a sweet picture of him waking up in his crib for the last time... we were out in the garage when he woke up, and although i had the kitchen door open to listen for him, i apparently didn't hear him wake up. i guess he was fed up with waiting on me to get him out. here's our "big boy" (ha) in his crib for the last time.... (rest assured, he's had a hair cut this week!!)


saturday was a busy day... picking out a rail and sheets for ethan's bed, trying to get the crib through his bedroom door, taking off the door to fit the crib through, taking apart the crib because it still wouldn't fit... it was just about bedtime by the time we got ethan's bed all set up and little miss princess' crib in her room. we talked up the big boy bed thing all day and let him play in his room and watch us set up his bed. he laid right down and went to sleep with no problems! the next morning he woke up uncharacteristically early, but he stayed in his bed until i came in! here's our big boy....

"yay for my big boy bed!"

since the first uneventful night, we've had some challenges that come with this transition, but overall, he's done wonderfully. caroline is enjoying her BIG crib where there is plenty of room for her scooting adventures. i need to take some pictures of her in her crib soon...

sweet dreams!

mommy, if i were in your shoes...

ethan, like most children i know, enjoys trodding around in big adult shoes. i thought i'd share these pictures vs. the ones of him in my church shoes. :)

more brotherly love...

here's some fun shots from last week. you can see how ethan loves on caroline... the first picture is his idea of a hug. we're working on it. :) then you can see how he crouches down to her level and says, "heeeeeeeeeeeeeey!" in his little high pitched baby-talk voice. i also included a recent shot from the tummy tub. she's getting so big so fast.

happy birthday grandma!

the kids and i surprised my grandma for her birthday last week by bringing her flowers at work. yes, my grandma still works full-time... because she so enjoys helping the students she tutors. (i could write a big fat book about how my grandma amazes me... but she's actually writing that book about her life.) :) i really hope i inherited her genes. she won't mind me telling you that she's 85. there aren't many ladies her age that still have her fashion sense, teach ladies' bible class, and have a flatscreen tv. :) and she is actually reading my blog on her laptop with wireless internet! go grandma! she is one of the smartest people i know, having taught latin for over 30 years, as well as working with codes as a WAVE in WWII. she has some great stories, and i still don't think i've heard them all. i really could go on and on... but i need to post more pictures for grandma to see. :) enjoy these pictures from our visit.

let's get this party started...
i'll crank up "wheels on the bus"!

happy bday grandma!

this was the first time grandma had seen caroline's eyes open!

ten really little toes...

like brother, like sister...

these sweet cuddly pictures melt my heart...i can't believe ethan's not this little anymore. yes, my babies really are this happy. the Lord has blessed us so. they were definitely carved out of the same mold, don't ya think?



here's proud big brother. he got upset when i stopped taking these pictures! he loves his sister, though he forgets that sometimes. :) no matter what he does to her, caroline just smiles and smiles whenever ethan is around (or on top of her!)

i've got more pictures to share, but it's bedtime... so just hang in there. :)