Bridget's Birthday

With Bridget's birthday on a Sunday this year, she got to celebrate all weekend. On Saturday, we went bowling with Aunt Megan, Aunt Jessica, Uncle Matt, and cousin Colin.

We also had a little pizza and pop while we bowled.

On her actual birthday, we celebrated with a chocolate princess cake (her choice). I must admit I was very rushed on time, so it's not as beautifully made as I would have liked, but she thought it was great so I guess that's all that really matters.
We even made her wait all day to open her presents. She got a doll house complete with the family and furniture, a Barbie corvette, a doll size pack-n-play, a book, and a new jacket. That panda mask she's wearing in the picture was actually a birthday card. Notice in the pictures she's wearing shorts and a t-shirt. It was by no means warm that day, but she dressed herself after we got home from church and that's what she wanted to wear.
As kind of a sad side note, I had planned to take her to a local restaurant/tea room that does princess tea parties where the kids can dress up and eat and drink all sorts of yummy stuff. So Monday, after her checkup at the pediatrician we headed there only to find that it was closed. After some investigating, I learned that it had closed about a week earlier due to some financial and health reasons of the owner. We were both so bummed.

A couple of days after her birthday, Grandma and Grandpa came for a very, very quick visit. She loved the Rapunzel doll they gave her.

Happy birthday to the sweetest 4-year-old! We love you, Bridget, and are so lucky to have you in our family.

Her 4-year-old stats:

Height: 43.5 inches (98th percentile)

Weight: 45.8 lbs. (96th percentile)

Nate's Birthday

That's right. Nate turned the big 35 and was so excited about it. (Okay, not really. But I always enjoy celebrating a birthday - even when it's not my own).

With his birthday falling on a Sunday this year, we got to celebrate for a couple of days. On Saturday night we headed to one of his favorite restaurants (Pepperbelly's) for dinner. Megan, Brant, & Kirstin even joined us. We were having so much fun, we forgot to take any pictures.

On Sunday, my Aunt Jennine had us over for dinner and we brought the birthday cake and homemade ice cream for dessert.

Happy Birthday, Nate!

This may sound weird but Nate didn't get to open any actual presents on his birthday. We decided to get the new Kindle Fire as a birthday present to both of us since we ended up returning the TV I got for my birthday and the monthly date nights only seem to have happened once. Since the Kindle Fire doesn't come out until mid November, we'll both have to wait just a little longer for a "birthday" present.

7 Months

This past month has been full of several new things - trying lots of new foods, learning to get to a sitting position by herself, learning to crawl, getting her first tooth, and dressing up for her 1st Halloween.

For the first few days she was crawling she didn't crawl very far and wasn't particularly fast, but that sure changed within about 5 days. Now she's pretty speedy, goes from room to room, and gets into everything.
One of the funny things about Felicity is that once she reaches a milestone, she immediately wants to learn to do what's next. Within about a day of her crawling, she started pulling up to things (i.e. the fireplace, the couch, or anything else that's just the right height). Most of the time she just gets to her knees, but she's been successful at getting all the way to standing by herself a couple of times.

Feeding has been quite a different experience from what I remember with Bridget. Felicity doesn't open her mouth very wide and doesn't seem as eager to eat most of the time. She also likes to blow raspberries a lot which makes for a messy and sometimes frustrating experience. Her favorite food so far seems to be sweet potatoes, and she doesn't care much for green beans or bananas. Weird, I know. What baby doesn't like bananas?

She's definitely a busy girl these days which keeps all of us busy too. She's still growing like a weed and wearing mostly size 12 month clothes. I'm still working on getting her to take a bottle, but the progress is very slow. Hopefully that will be a big accomplishment for me to report on next month.

The Best and Worst Part of Autumn

With 4 large trees in our yard, every fall we do A LOT of raking. I know some people prefer to wait until all of their leaves have fallen to rake them up, but not me. I don't mind raking too much (at least the first few weeks of fall), and I hate the mess they make in the yard as well as having them get tracked into my house creating an even larger mess so we (mainly me) do a lot of raking. It's my goal every week to make sure our garbage dumpsters are packed completely full. The other day I was outside mowing up as many as I could and Bridget wanted to help so I let her use the rake. When I went to empty the mower bag, this is what I discovered:

She'd raked up a nice pile of leaves for herself to play in.

I love this girl and the good helper she is! Too bad we still have 3 of the 4 trees left to clean up after.