Summer is slipping through our fingers....

Steve informed me I needed to update our blog so he had something to look at while he was at work. Here you go, Dad.

We have not accomplished much of anything in recent weeks. We have gone swimming a couple evenings at our friends' house. Maddie is getting braver each time we go. Last weekend, she put her whole face in and went down the slide (a small one) by herself, with mom at the end to catch her. Steve has been busy working on things around the house. He blocked up a few of our windows to prevent the bats from completely taking over, and it seems like all of our toilets went berserk at the same time. It is hard to believe that there are only 3 weeks until school starts back up. Maddie will start daycare part-time next week. I took her in today to get things in order. They all commented on how tall she has gotten over the summer.

I've been managing, but I have morning sickness that occurs throughout the day and have been very tired. I also eat more than a teenage boy, so Steve has been making all kinds of runs to the store for extra snacks. It makes me frustrated to have my life so disrupted by a critter that is just over an inch long, but Steve reminds me that it is a lot of work to grow a person and the last one turned out to be pretty fabulous. I guess he is right. Thanks to Maddie paving the way, I've already got myself quite a little bump. The secret is out and we are accepting babysitting offers for the last week of April and most of May...that means you, Brian and Alice! Thanks to everyone for the well wishes.

Maddie has taken to climbing everything. She climbs the toy box to jump over the back of the couch. She climbs a storage container to get onto the chair. She climbs her little chair to get to the recliner. She had been doing an okay job of it until yesterday. Sarah was here, which had Maddie in show-off mode. She tap danced herself right off the toy box. The only thing injured was her pride.

She is obsessed with people mowing their yards. She especially likes when her dad mows the yard, but she'll watch anyone. Here she is informing me that the neighbor's son is out with the mower.

She talks all of the time. She says 'auck' for walk, 'dats da' (which covers a lot of areas), all gone, ball, 'shuz' for shoes, 'bo' for all of the dogs' names (even though she can point out the different dogs if we ask her to). She is also doing new things like picking up her toys, and wanting to eat at the table with a booster seat. Aunt Sarah taught her how to put her finger to her mouth and say 'shhh' to the dogs. They said she would move up to the next room at daycare, making her the youngest in the room. I'm interested...and a little afraid...of what she'll learn from the big kids.

Here she is helping mom eat pickles (no ice cream was involved). It took her a good 10 minutes to get down one pickle chip. She mostly licked them and made weird faces.

She may appear to be in pain, but really she is fake laughing. I'm not sure what she thought was worth the fake laugh, but it makes a funny picture.