Maddy is Nine Months Old!

Maddy turned 9 months old on August 1st! It's hard to believe! She is babbling a mile a minute and starting to "cruise" along the furniture and coffee table. She has even stood by herself for a few seconds on several occasions! Maddy has four teeth, too. She's already broken the 20lb weight requirement, so we just need to wait for her to get closer to one year and we'll be ready to turn her car seat around!

Here are some pictures of our recent session at Penney's photo studio. I've got other pictures between the last post and now, but we're having technical difficulties at home, so I'll just go back and get those when we're up and running again!

Bad Ballerina Mommy

Izzy had her first lesson at Columbus Dance Arts Academy tonight with Miss Meredith. She LOVED it - and she did great! I was really impressed with the instructor's ability to get 5 little 3 year olds to point their toes and skip, gallop, and jump with her! And what kid doesn't love to get a sticker for their efforts??
Well - I was a bad "stage" mommy and didn't remember my camera! So, I will certainly remember it next week when we can "recreate" the first time again!
PS - A big thanks to Gran for taking my place in the Fall registration line so that I could go watch Izzy's first class... who would have thought it would take an hour and a half to get in for Fall class registration - and that's just for current students! Geesh!

Izzy and Stitch

This is what I found in my room one afternoon last week...

Bumps and Bruises

Many of you may remember how prone Izzy was to bumps on her noggin while she was learning to crawl and walk. Turns out little sister is going to be more of the same! In one day, she hit her head while sitting down next to our sliding glass doors (butt went back, head went forward into the corner of the slider) and she had an encounter with her activity table that left her with a nice scrape on her nose! :-( Both are almost gone already, so no worries - she's fine!

An education...

I know this is the first of many times that Izzy will "educate" Maddy on the way things work around here. It was cute, though... yesterday I was in the kitchen cleaning strawberries for dinner and Izzy asked if she could show Maddy some of the toys we have out there. We moved the Leap Frog barn toy back down to the bottom of the refrigerator and Izzy put the lock on the cupboard where the cereal and cat food are stored.THEN... Izzy proceeded to introduce Maddy to the "joy" that is our tupperware cabinet! Ha! So many times, this picture included only a tot-sized Izzy in a sea of rubbermaid. Now, we have big-kid Izzy pulling it all out of the cabinet making comments like, "oh, here, Mad. This is a really good one!" So funny!

Little Firecrackers

Well, our 4th of July turned out to be rainy and cooler than anticipated, but we managed to have a great time anyway. Rather than getting wet at the Dublin fireworks show, we got together with our neighbors for some back-yard shenanigans.
The girls got all decked out in red white and blue...We had a down-home American dinner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and spent the evening in the backyard with Pop-its, smoke bombs and sparklers. I love how the only picture I have shows the kids sitting so nicely and watching... in reality, they spent most of the evening running around like lunatics, shouting, "it's gonna blow!" The boys (Nicholas and Noah) belong to our neighbors, Brian and Tara Rhea.
Happy Independence Day to all!

Crawling Caught on Camera!

Okay - So, this will be my first attempt to publish video to the blog! We'll see how it goes. This will be a video of Maddy taking one of her first "good crawls" on Sunday, 6/21. I have a better one from tonight, but it does not feature big sister saying "no!" and grabbing the "bait" toy away from Maddy once she gets it. Yes, I'm guilty - I set out bait for my child to get her to crawl across the room.

Here comes the video...



It's going to be interesting, because Izzy definitely does not know what to do now that Maddy can get to just about anything on her own!