A Daddy and His Girls

As I've mentioned/shown before, Matt likes to take pictures of himself with the girls. Well recently he took some pics with Claire, and they doubled up with a similar picture he had taken with Melanie when she was a baby.

Matt and Melanie
6-12-2007

2 months old

Matt and Claire
7-14-2009
5 months old

Aren't they so cute?

Claire's First Solid Food and Sitting Up

We let Claire try her first solid food on the July 12th

These obviously aren't it,
I just thought they were funny.
She's quite the grabby little thing!

I was feeling too tired (lazy) to pump any milk for the rice cereal, so we just mixed in warm water.
Claire was not impressed.

So we tried again a few days later with breast milk instead, and she loved it!

If you don't get another spoonful to her quickly enough she starts to gnaw on the highchair :D
I just bought some fruits and veggies yesterday, so we'll see how well received those will be!

You can't really tell from this picture, but she's been sitting without support for a couple weeks now.

She hasn't quite mastered getting herself into the sitting position yet.
It's quite frustrating for her.
So close though!

Good thing she has Melanie there to help her through the tough times!

Why I've been an absentee blogger as of late...

As many of you know, we are closing on a new house this Thursday, so I've been spending all my spare time packing anything and everything I can do without for a few weeks time in an effort to make our house look and tidy and big as possible.

I don't think I've ever cleaned so much in my entire life! I've mopped, dusted, vacuumed, washed, rearranged, boxed up, scoured, scrubbed, de-cluttered and just about any other cleaning type word you can think of. I even scrubbed my lazy susan with toothbrush! And let me just say, I'm pooped!

And it's not over since I have to keep the house ready for a showing at a moments notice, and Melanie is bound and determined to not make that an easy task for me. But we will survive, possibly even become better for the experience. Here are a few shots of when I worked on the kitchen last week.

The "stuff" I cleared out of the kitchen drawers that I felt I could do without for a few weeks...

... and all the "stuff" I still "needed"!
We'll see how much of it I actually use in the coming weeks :)

I was amazed at how many spices I had been able to fit onto one shelf!
I packed some of the ones I don't use as often away in a box to make the cabinets look bigger, only to have to open the box the next day to find one I needed :P

My lovely assistant.
She especially liked playing with the mortar and pestle.

This box is entirely reusable plastic containers!
I don't think I'll be buying any more of these for a while!
(in my defense, I bought a lot of them to have on hand for when I make meals for friends that have had babies, with the idea that then they won't have to get any serving stuff back to me. Yet they give it back anyway, thus my over abundance of plastic storage containers!)

The storage containers I kept

So empty...

My gadget cabinet is looking rather bare compared to how packed it usually is!

And a couple boxes of all the non-essentials.

And finally, my china that I didn't even finish unwrapping from our wedding!
It's been living in the front hall closet for four years.
Maybe it will actually get to see the light of day in our new house. Or if it's really lucky, we might even eat off of it!

After all this cleaning, I've put Matt on notice that once we're moved into the new house I may be going on a cleaning strike for a while. After I've let everyone come over and tour our fabulous new home, that is. So don't ask to come over during the month of September/October. I won't pick up for you.

A Tutu on the Toilet

This was too cute not to share:

Sittin' pretty on the potty

Judy and the Boys Come to Visit

So this post is mostly for Michelle, or anyone else that hasn't seen Judy and her kiddos recently.

Judy brought the boys out last week and the kids played for a while here while Judy and I tried to have some mommy chat time, which if any of you have ever tried to hold a real conversation with 5 kids under the age of 6 running around you know how challenging that can be! Nonetheless, the boys seemed to have fun exploring all the toys in Melanie's play room and seeing Claire - they were quite smitten with her!

After playing at our house for a while we headed over to my parents house for a swim. I'm really glad we got to see each other, but Judy and I both agree that we're going to have to try and coordinate a time to get together when our husbands can watch the kids and we can go to lunch and have some real girl time! I can't wait!

The slideshow in the next post has most of the pictures from their visit, but the ones below I felt needed to be posted on their own so you could see better just how big the boys have gotten - they're huge! I can't believe how much they've grown since Christmas! Anyway, without further ado, here are the pictures!

The Brown boys
Logan, Shane and Gabriel

This hat was quite the hit!

Both of the older boys wanted their pictures taken with it

Logan was really enjoying the pink stroller
I'm sure Kelly would be thrilled!

Gabe in timeout
(big surprise)

And an attempt at a picture of Judy with the boys

While these didn't turn out how we hoped, they sure are funny!

Thanks for coming over Judy - I had a blast!

4th of July at Spring Creek

Below are the pictures from the 4th of July. I couldn't decide which ones to share, so making a slideshow was much easier and faster than uploading all of them individually. Enjoy!

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Exploding Cupcakes

Matt's parents host a 4th of July gathering out at Spring Creek for family and friends, so Katie and I decorated some cupcakes to contribute to the dessert table. Unfortunately, those cupcakes were not meant to survive the drive out east unmarred.

As we were driving out of town another car tried to switch lanes into the lane we were driving in without checking to see if our lane was clear, so Matt had to brake quickly and swerve onto the shoulder to avoid getting hit. This send the cupcakes that were sitting on my lap sliding forward into the dash board, thus ruining all the hard work Katie and I had put in to frosting them. I was majorly ticked! I wanted Matt to drive up next to that inattentive driver so I could hurl a cupcake at his car I was so mad!

Luckily for that driver we didn't act on my impulse (which would have made a pretty impressive splat seeing as the cupcakes had a raspberry filling). We did, however, decide to stick M-80 firecrackers in the cupcakes and blow them up! What a satisfying experience! I'm pretty sure a new 4th of July tradition has been born - minus all the time we spent decorating them of course.

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Claire's 4th of July Outfit

So I've just finished Claire's outfit for the 4th of July (at 2:30 am on the 4th of July!) I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Hopefully I'll like how it looks on her in the morning after I get some sleep. Until then, goodnight (morning!) and have a wonderful 4th of July!