Lame catch up post

We've been under the weather, sharing colds and sore throats. And Rob had a touch of pink eye last week but thankfully he somehow kept that to himself!

This big girl is eating real food at almost every meal. I give her baby food just to deplete our stash, but she prefers feeding herself and gags and chokes a lot less. I'll be glad when she's not overstuffing her mouth with pieces of food, but I know that stage will probably last a while since Robbie and Ellie still do it on occasion!

She's enjoyed sweet potato, baked beans, grapes, melon, bread and jelly, pasta, green beans, carrots, peas, peaches, pears, chunky applesauce, and multi grain cheerios.

And speaking of eating, I can't decide if it's a phase or if she will just be my messy child, but Ellie can make the biggest messes with any meal I give to her. It's endearing until I have to clean her (and the table and the floor) up afterwards. After ravioli and sauce for dinner the other night, there was nothing left to do but put her in the sink and let her play for a while as I made Rob's dinner. You can see we were out of paper towel, so that wasn't an option for clean-up! She thought the sink bath was awesome, and I couldn't believe she fit. We will be doing this again.

Robbie is learning how to play with Maddie - meaning, we teach him that it's fun to build towers for her with the idea that we WANT her to knock them over! He's such a good big brother. He goes right along with us, building adorable little cities and then patiently waiting for baby-godzilla to cruise by and destroy what we've built.

My mom comes by on Fridays to help me with laundry (or anything!), and this past Friday my dad came too. The kids were beside themselves! They brought animal cookies for their afternoon snack, played, and my mom did all my folding and ironing while I nursed a cup of her vegetable soup for my sore throat. Then it started snowing, so I got to shovel the driveway for Rob before he got home. Doesn't family make everything better?

Sweet Maddie gives us kisses now. The open-mouth baby kind! Robbie is of course the recipient since she's in love with him.

One of the women Rob works with (but not in his office) sends the kids the sweetest gifts in the mail. She sent the kids these aprons and matching spatulas as well as everything to make pancakes as a housewarming gift.

It was big hit and Ellie thinks she's my permanent assistant in the kitchen anytime I'm cooking.

(She likes to combine looks and has her police woman hat on.)

I let her help me make muffins and she was in her glory.

Robbie wanted in on the action! Ellie sweetly offered him a turn mixing and be still my heart, I caught this little moment.

Getting creative with a babe who didn't want to wait as I got ready one morning but only wanted to be held.

(Don't worry, I my hand was just out of the shot making sure she wouldn't fall.)

I love this little profile.

Enjoying the last of the boxes in our bedroom before I finished them off.

Maddie is getting brave and pulling herself up. Which means she is also getting herself into some funny sticky situations. I see the look that says "Help, mom!" a lot now. I love it.

I also realize that at this point, I have probably waited too long to take pictures and do a post about Maddie as a 10 month old. Sad!

If you were a fly on our wall...

...you would have seen Ellie peering curiously into our master bathroom tub the other day, and then carefully spitting into it. Yes, spitting. I caught her in the act and said "Ellie! What are you doing?! We don't spit!" She replied calmly, "Mom, it's just a little spit. It's just a little spit, riiiiight?" Me: "No Ellie, we do not spit at all." (Nice try, sweetheart.)

...you would have observed Robbie staring at the daisy flower window clings in the kitchen, and then announcing "Those yellow things in the middle of the flowers are the eyeball."

...you would have been there when Robbie said to Maddie over breakfast one morning "Welcome to our land, Cakers!" and then turned to me and tenderly said "I missed her, mom. When she was in your tummy, I missed her in our family."

...you would have needed to hold back laughter with me at the table when Robbie was disobeying me and I said to him "Robbie, you need to obey". "Why, mom?" "Because God wants us to obey all the time, everyday!" And without missing a beat he said in all seriousness to me, "But I don't have the Holy Spirit today, mom."

...you would see a few rare and precious moments in which Maddie had woken up in the night and was pleased to be rocked back to sleep, sweetly snuggled up chest-to-chest with me. My favorite thing in the world.

If you were a fly on our wall, you would probably wonder why I am still not 100% unpacked yet from the move, you'd see Maddie practicing standing all by herself, and you'd have watched Robbie steal Reese's Pieces one morning before I was awake and hide them in his closet to be found by me later that day. You would have overheard precious conversations between Rob and I and Robbie about the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and all the ways and times that we can pray to God. You would see Ellie with too much food in her hair too much of the time, and crusty snot smeared across sweet little cheeks since we are all sharing a cold. You would probably be ashamed of how much TV I allow my children right now, since that is what keeps them calm enough for me to focus on unpacking for any amount of time. You might be glad for my family that I have taken up cooking dinner again, but you would probably be disappointed in the menu. Mostly, you would be glad to see that all is well in our household, that we are settling in and that this new place has come to feel like home sooner than we thought it would, and that we are content and happy together.

Since then...

The blog has been quiet since we moved but we've been busy! 3 little kids who have needs all day long make it hard to unpack boxes and get settled in, but we're getting there. Slowly but surely.

This is a hodge-podge post. Be forewarned.

Breaking in the family room the first morning...

We were so thankful the snow waited to fall until we were done moving! However, it meant that Rob had 2 driveways to shovel. By the afternoon, he had overdone it - not nearly enough sleep and too much physical labor with the move / shoveling and his back went out. I felt awful for him - at one point he literally could not get up off the bedroom floor.

The kids had fun rediscovering their toys as we unpacked. I'm not sure what Ellie was going for here, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it works.

Oh dear goodness this kid cracks me up.

The third child of course - snacking off the floor. I had to put this one in here because I love her pointed little toes.

I've been offering her little dices of ok-to-eat foods. She seems to like it - it's entertaining for her and I think she's kind of over baby food. It doesn't seem to fill her up or satisfy her. Right now her favorites seem to be melon, cheerios, and pasta. Not a huge fan of hot dogs:

Speaking of the little lady, we dedicated her on Sunday at church two weeks ago. We were barely able to make it, with Rob's back being so bad, but he toughed it out and we stood up to publicly affirm that we will raise Madeline to know the Lord and hopefully teach her how to love Him with her whole heart and life.

I hope it's understandable that I didn't take any pictures!? 48 hours after moving and 24 hours after Rob's back injury, the last thing on my mind was finding my good camera. We are all just happy that we made it that morning in one piece and dressed! (*I dressed Maddie in our seats at church, actually. But it was intentional - I didn't want her pretty little dress to get wrinkled in her car seat. ha!) I also knew that we would receive a DVD of the dedication from our church, and my mom was taking pictures too.

In my distracted state (remember - unpacking), Robbie keeps stealing my phone and has figured out how to turn it on, get into it (that swiping motion), and use the camera app to take pictures. Seriously - I have never shown them how, nor do they play games on it. It's strictly off limits. Aren't kids so smart? I was secretly glad that he snapped this picture of Ellie's cute pigtails as they were running around the family room the other day.

This past Sunday morning we stayed home from church because Maddie had been sick with a cold on Saturday. I think it is her first significant illness EVER! We have been so grateful for her health.

Little snuggle bunny with a fever...

Still beautiful even when she's feeling horrible.

The kids didn't want to be split up and wouldn't let Rob or I take them unless we were all going. So we stuck around here and got a lot done. By the afternoon we were getting stir crazy so I took the kids for a walk around the neighborhood to meet some of our new neighbors.

Not sure what is happening here...

Then the superbowl started, and we realized that it is incredibly frustrating to try to watch the game on TV with the kids awake. We are a Giants household, and so I did what any good wife would do for her Giants-loving husband. I put the baby to bed and took the older kids to Target to get them out of the house! Haha.

I got them chicken nuggets and nestled them into a shopping cart and we got a few groceries and generally meandered up and down the aisles. It was actually pretty creepy - the whole town was quiet, and Target was empty.

Since then we've been plowing through laundry...

...and happily adjusting to a new rhythm in a new home.

Every day is bookended by these two playing in Robbie's bedroom, always with Robbie in the center of his track, and Ellie close by with "Sevie-Lala" as she calls it in her hand.

The story of 'Sevie-Lala': It used to just be a 'lala' before she could say 'lovey'. Then she would call it 'lovey-lala'. And then, because she would beg for more loveys in her crib after I had given her all of them at once, including back ups that she had rejected in favor of the cat-headed one, I would tell her "Ellie you have SEVEN LOVEYS in your crib! You don't need any more." She's a bit of a gatherer when it comes to soft blankets and animals. So now she calls her favorite one 'sevie-lala', in reference to 'seven lalas'. If you don't follow, that's fine. I wrote it more for my own documentation of her at this age!

Also entertaining about Elle-belle as a 2 year old: her continued love affair with accessories, namely hats.

And her insistence to use the potty by yelling "POTTY!" just like Robbie does throughout the day, only she has no idea what she's supposed to do once she's arrived bare-bum in the seat. All she knows is that Robbie yells potty, sits down, and then gets a whole lot of attention and praise afterwards, so she wants in on it. :)

We had a little incident involving the older 2 in the bathtub while I was putting Maddie in her pj's. Robbie may have emptied a huge bottle of bubble bath that was sitting nearby and was not of the tear-free variety, and before I saw it happen Ellie was wiping her face like mad trying to get the bubbles out of her eyes. Which of course made it worse and made her want to wipe her eyes more. Vicious cycle! We got her all rinsed off as she screamed, and by morning she was good as new. Which made me feel better, because I was sure those eyes would be red and swollen for much longer!

We continue our snuggle-in-mom-and-dads-bed-after-baths routine.

But have added a mom-lays-with-everyone-for-a-few-minutes-in-their-beds-at-bedtime that isn't long for the world because it makes it impossible for Rob and I to eat dinner anytime before 8pm!

Oh, and Ellie has found (where, I actually have no idea!) what she thinks are 'band-aids' and keeps coming downstairs to bandage us up. It gets my funny bone every time.

I took my first bath in years and I'm so glad I had forgotten what I was missing because ohmygoodnessbathsaremyfavoritething. Now that we have a legitimate tub that is deeper than 12 inches, I'm trying to squeeze one of these in whenever I can! I can't believe how relaxing it is before bedtime. Which brings me to: why are my kids rambunctious in the tub when they could be calmly soaking!? Baths and naps are wasted on little people. When you want them, need them, and are old enough to appreciate them, they elude you. ;)

Back to blogging as usual...