Labor Day Shenanigans

When I came down from feeding Jonathan or something, this is how I found my two oldest boys occupied - setting a trap for Cinnamon!  It didn't end up working, but it was sure fun to see their efforts.  :)

My three boys reading a book together - be still my heart!

How do you occupy 4 antsy kids while you're getting a party set up?  Angry Birds, of course!  :P  As the only one in our group who DOESN'T own an iphone, I find it kind of funny that all these kids can navigate these things better than I can.  :)

It's becoming a tradition to have a Labor Day swim party at Brian's house, and this year, Luke did SO WELL!  He wanted to be in the water almost the whole time, and gradually developed more and more independence and confidence in the water.  So proud of my growing boy!

UPDATE: And the next day, I finally got a video of Jonathan sitting up from laying on the ground.

September Silliness

Whenever we go to Babies 'R' Us, Luke always wants to sit on this Elmo car.  Well, this time, he asked if Jonathan could try it!  So, here's a picture with Jonathan's first time trying the Elmo car.  :)

UPDATE: Here's a video of Jonathan throwing me a ball.  Pretty fun!

Trying on Luke's old shepherd costume.  So cute!

Luke fits in the box our new toy organizer came in.  :)

Wrapping Up August

Pulled up to his knees on the back of this chair!

UPDATE: Here's a video of Jonathan army crawling the day before this - super cute!

Riding in the car outside for the first time!  His feet don't touch the ground yet, and I totally wouldn't leave him in here alone yet, but it makes for a cute picture - and he had a blast in there!

Cute little baseball baby trying to not sit on the grass.  :P

Playing soccer with Daddy!  Yeah, we've been kicking around this Lakers basketball, since we only had one actual soccer ball, but it worked for our purposes.  :)  We now have a second soccer ball because I collected cereal box points to get one for free that has the Cars 2 logo on it - probably the sweetest thing I've gotten from a cereal box - free shipping, too!  We also got a free Cars 2 toy from collecting points off of toilet paper and diapers - they sent us a coupon and we got to pick out the character we wanted in the store.  Pretty nifty!

Baby feet!

Backyard Pool

This summer was kind of mild, all things considered, so even though we had this blow-up swimming pool the entire time, we finally got around to trying it out the last weekend in August.  (Other very hot weekends were when we were in Oregon or celebrating Luke's birthday, so there were other things to take up the time).  The first day we had the pool up, Luke was tentative at first and spent most of the time just walking in it.  (And yes, we set the pool up in the shade - have you seen the lightness of our skin?)  :P

But, eventually, he warmed up to the idea and started getting his whole body under the water to try "swimming" around - more just glorified crawling, but progress!

Warming up!

We kept the pool up to enjoy again the following afternoon, knowing that it would be warmer, and therefore much easier to enjoy.  :)  Luke was like a little fish this time - even putting his face under the water sometimes!

And, we brought out Jonathan this time!  He was really not too crazy about the whole thing, but we couldn't pass up the chance to give him another exposure to water outside the bathtub (which he loves, by the way).

Sitting hilariously on the grass, trying not to be touched by it.  :P

Helping Daddy let the water out!

Brothers and Friends

I believe this is probably the first time I found Jonathan sitting up by himself in his crib (end of August).  Note the first picture: Luke wanted to hold his hand through the crib bars - so sweet!

We hung out with Joanna and her kids later that day and they older ones played a form of ring-around-the-rosy and had a blast together!

Jonathan had fun smiling and standing at the couch!

11 Months Old!

Standing practice!

Jonathan is hilarious when he's sitting on the grass in shorts - he tries as hard as he can to avoid that scratchy, pokey green stuff!

Great fun being brothers!

Strained smile while I'm helping him stand - I'm thinking the grass stole most of his smiles!

Happy to be included.

Not a lot of smiles during this 11 month session, but super blue eyes!

"Hey, let me see that!"

Wrestling Luke to the ground - both boys get such a kick out of this!

Adventures

Towards the end of August, we finally made a trip to Nathan's work so the boys could see where Daddy works.  It had been so long since Luke had been that he really had no remembrance of it.  So, we went to see his desk and his co-workers...

...and went to lunch together at McDonald's, where they had a play place to play in, too.  :)

Jonathan's blurry here, but he was army crawling into the kitchen for the first time I think and Luke got down and joined him - so fun!

Getting stuck underneath the couch - but pretty happy about it.  :P

This was Jonathan's favorite "excuse" for awhile.  He knew that he wasn't allowed to pull at the fibers underneath the couch, but he seemed to figure if he "accidentally" threw a toy under there, it would be okay to go "investigate".  And hey, how about a little couch fuzz while we're at it.  :P  Their sin nature is so abundantly clear, even at this young age!

New Horizons

One of the last grocery shopping trips before school started, I decided to try Jonathan in the car cart along with Luke!  I got the idea from a first-time-mom friend on Facebook who has a baby Jonathan's age who just started riding the car cart.  Luke and Jonathan both were super excited about the idea at first.  However, when I had to veto letting Luke hold grocery items because Jonathan wanted to chew on them, Luke decided he'd rather have Jonathan up in the top of the cart again.  :P  I let Jonathan finish out this trip in the car, but the next two shopping trips before school, had him ride up top with me.  One of Luke's favorite things about shopping with me is getting to carry lots of the groceries in the car with him, then helping put them on the counter at the end.  Since Jonathan doesn't care yet, I figured I'd let Luke have his moment in the sun.  Now, I just get a regular cart again since I go shopping while Luke is in preschool.  :)

And, here's Jonathan practicing standing on the lion.  He's not stable enough to walk with it yet, but thinks it's pretty cool!

Princesse de Broglie

So, this is very recent, but I wanted to share it with you before I forgot about it, since my cross-stitch pictures are filed separately from my family pictures.  I splurged and bought a fancy Golden Kite pattern for my birthday!  These patterns are quite large (a major understatement!), have lots of blended colors and have been gone over manually to make sure the finished product looks "real" and not computer-generated.  This painting has long caught my eye because of the rich blue of her dress and just the "lady in a fancy dress" aspect - I'm a sucker for old fashioned dresses!  I saw in a GK newsletter that this pattern was being discontinued, and therefore was on sale, making it a somewhat reasonable price.  I had extra money in my PayPal account from selling things on Etsy, so I went ahead and gave myself a birthday present a few days early.  :)  Of course, a pattern of this magnitude can't just sit in my stitching box for a few years before I get around to starting it.  So, here we go!

I will be bringing you updates as I complete sections of this pattern.  It's not a gift for anyone, so I'm at liberty to share it here publicly.  If you don't care about this, you can just skip these posts, but if you do, enjoy the progress along with me!  So far, I started in the upper left corner to make sure I was placed properly on the fabric (and discovered the pre-packaged aida cloth I bought was cut horribly off-grain - hopefully it won't mess things up too much).  When the color I chose seemed to be dragging on too slowly for my taste, I switched to a different color that was more sporadic, then quickly skipped over to start work on her head - much more interesting than background!

Here's a closer shot of her head (and you can always click on these pictures to make them even bigger).  Unless I make major progress on the background, I'll probably just show new work-in-progress pictures of the main lady.  And, so far this is just showing mainly one color on her hair, but I was too excited to wait to take a picture.  In the future, I'll do several colors of a section before reporting back - that way you can start to see the shading and whatnot.  Enjoy!

4 Year Old Stats

A month and a half after his birthday, we finally got in to have Luke's 4 year old check-up.  He was 40.5" tall and 35 lbs.  Of course, I forgot to record what the doctor said his percentiles were, but when I looked it up online just now, it says he's about 40th in weight and 50th in height - right about average!  That's pretty much what I would expect when combining the tallest in a short family (Nathan) with the shortest in a tall family (me).  :)

Our two cuties together!

Putting on a "concert" for me.

I love how well they play together sometimes.  They really enjoy each other's company if they can work out a way to play so that they're each having fun.  :)

Luke wanted to take my picture.  :)

If you'll notice, I'm stitching - here's the finished card in my Etsy shop!

All the boy cousins playing together at family dinner.  Notice how Jonathan's charming the camera?  :)

Jonathan enjoying the squishy "sun" toy that my mom got Luke awhile ago.  :)